Yet another TV appearance

Courtesy of Melih Bayram Dede, the following interview was aired on TVNET, a national TV channel.


Technologic by Melih Bayram Dede from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

The Inet-tr Conference

We'll be presenting a paper at the Inet-tr Conference on "Virtual Assistants" in Ankara. (ODTÜ, 22nd of December, 4:30-6:30 PM)

Here's the schedule

Update: Here's the video shot during the presentation:


Inet-tr Konferansı 2008 from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

Our virtual office in the US

Now we have a "virtual" presence in the form of a PO Box and a local phone number in the United States. We're hoping to announce the opening of a "real" New York office in the near future. :)

Time to spread the word. (And the product!)

We want virtual assistants to be used widely out on the web. So it's kind of a mission for us to make them available for any entity, corporate, or personal. As a part of this effort, we pre-launched the "build your own virtual assistant" tool. We set the official launch date as January 1st, and we'll be collecting valuable feedback from the beta tester community until then. Our PR monster Merve will be promoting the tool during her job, introducing it to some 1500 unique daily visitors of our website.

Although this product offers limited features compared to the Botégo-managed version, it still delivers the core elements of a virtual assistant that you can use on a personal website, blog, or even the corporate web site of an SME. In addition to the usual question&answer feature, it also functions as a guide, automatically navigating the user to the relevant page on the website (depending on the topic the question is related to) making it a really powerful tool. And it's totally free!

I had mentioned on a previous post that we collect transcripts to analyze the data they contain, in order to increase our expertise in language processing. Upon the launch of this product, that content will be of a broader and more diverse nature, since new transcripts from different sources will be pouring in, in compliance with the user agreement. So this is basicly a win-win situation. We're eager to see some working samples around the web! If you're interested in becoming a beta tester, jump into our "close beta test room" on Friendfeed.

Hello world!

We're also targeting international markets now. Not that the Turkish market has saturated or anything, it's a move we've been planning since the very first day. Our priority has always been creating a decent client base though. Now that we've reached that goal, our next step is to further extend the vision. We've already built a limited demo for a client candidate based in the US. It's a concrete example demonstrating language-independency of our product.

"How to start a business while you study"

Last week was a week of events. Here's the video shot by Televidyon team during the conference moderated by Etohum founder, Burak Büyükdemir.

Another microsite and another seminar

As an I.T.U. alumni, i was proud to have the opportunity to attend an MIS class, addressing students on entrepreneurship. Courtesy of Professor Halefsan Sümen, i'll do it again, tomorrow.

We've been bringing up the issues with the web, with a series of microsites. Here's the final one: http://www.insansorar.com (in Turkish)

A cool video conferencing experience

We participated in a conference held in Sakarya Universitesi by a student club, via Mogulus video streaming network. It was a lot of fun! More than 150 participants watched our demo videos and my presentation online, and asked their questions in the chat room. We love not only creating, but also using internet-based technologies.

What's wrong with the site search?

Our new viral marketing microsite brings up the question "What's wrong with the site search?" and discusses how major corporations fail with offering a decent site search tool to their clients.

http://www.aramadasorunne.com (in Turkish)

Our virtual assistant is a much more powerful tool increasing customer satisfaction while decreasing costs.

Correction of a miscommunication: Better late, than none...

I had mentioned an unfortunate incident of miscommunication in the following entry, almost a year ago: http://botego.blogspot.com/2007/11/good-pr-bad-pr.html

Apparently, the folks at Project House have acted responsibly to recover the consequences of this incident, and we appreciate that.

In the following paragraph, Business Development Manager for Groupe SEB acknowledges our function in the BoTefal project honoring our brand with a positive comment. We're pretty relieved by the fact that this advertorial was paid-for by Project House. The title says it all: "Better late, than none"

Introducing Bilge, the virtual assistant

It's been a tiring week at the CeBIT Bilisim exhibition, but our efforts have paid off. Turkey's leading provider of DSL services (with almost 95% market share) showcased our product in a special section prepared solely for the virtual character named "Bilge" (A female name standing for the term "wise"). Hundreds of visitors tested the product extensively, and the results are very promissing.

Here are some sample videos (all in WMV format) demonstrating what Bilge has to offer to users asking for help with:

Locating wi-fi hotspots

User instructions for operating the family protection system

Locating the nearest sales point

Step-by-step visual instructions for setting up the modem

Step-by-step visual instructions for locating connectivity issues

Something pretty irrelevant to the concept

There are many pre-determined scenarios where Bilge handles an inquiry or guides the user with visual instructions, every step of the way. More to come, so stay tuned!

Botégo call center solution

Here's a presentation (in Turkish) that demonstrates the advantages our call center solution offers. the video is also available in WMV format at: http://www.botego.com/videos/callcentercozumu.wmv (7.09 MB)


Botégo çağrı merkezi çözümü from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

Visit us at Cebit Bilisim Eurasia

We'll be demonstrating our products and solutions at the Cebit Bilisim Eurasia between 7th-12nd of October. Come visit us at booth #6-159.

Dealing with call center queues

Here's a microsite where we demonstrate how our call center product serves as a knowledgebase and reduces the time needed for call center agents to access information.

http://www.bundanistiyoruz.com

Our lightbox in Taksim subway station

Ever noticed our ad in the tunnel while you're waiting? It also represents our co-operation with the career portal, cokisimizvar.com.

Employee stock options

Employee stock options was one of the hot topics discussed in the panel organized by Golden Horn Ventures this week. Did we mention that we also offer this type of compensation to share the value our employees help us create?

Sir, we can't stop them! They keep coming!

Thanks to Merve (along with Nemo Ramjet's videos), general statistics on how much time visitors spend on an average corporate web site doesn't apply to botego.com. According to data from our tracker, more than 30% of our visitors spend more than five minutes on the website. This also includes the 12.9% who spent more than 20 minutes! Did i mention that number of average daily unique visitors is now 1824? Not bad for a one-year-old SME, ha?