Introducing Yildiz, the star of Yedigun

We built a new female character named Yildiz (Star) for Yedigun, a sister company of PepsiCo. Yedigun has been organizing the annual song contest Yedigun Yildizlari (Yedigun Stars) for a couple of years now, and Yildiz helps prospective contestants with the rules and provides the tension-release they need before they shoot their video.

Yazboz: A great web of interrelated keywords

The first time i saw Yazboz, i remember thinking "one day, this database will be worth millions of dollars". The idea is simple: "Building the relational web of every word in the dictionary."

The task of coding the complex algorithms behind the technology, encouraging people to manually map the connections between nodes in common sense, and keeping the data clean and accurate is far from easy, though. So, even in relatively early stage of the project, Can Altineller and Ozgur Oktay, two bright people behind the project deserve a lot of credit. The only way to handle this labor-intense task could be through cleverly designing the flow, so that people would enjoy what they're doing, and they did so by positioning the project as a web-based game.

No matter which language you deal with, this database is a very important asset now, given that we're in the beggining of a whole new era, that will revolutionalize the way the web works, thanks to semantic technologies. By the way, Can has worked on various other interesting projects, so don't forget to check out his website.

So the news is; Can and Ozgur had announced that developers could use their API to use the Yazboz data in their projects. Botégo is the first company to use the API in a commercial manner. But since our product requires 100% accuracy in terms of content, this is kind of an exclusive partnership where we'll be using not only the content, but also the technology to keep it clean while it keeps expanding each day.

The concrete result of this partnership will be available to users on our next project we're building for an international soda company. I'm so excited for having the opportunity, and i would like to thank Yazboz team on behalf of ours.

"Bring me fifty fantastic transcripts!"

Our senior (referring not to his age but his experience) software engineer Çağatay builds some gadgets we use in order to develop new products (and also have fun) in his spare time. What you see on the screenshot is the result of a query for the word "fantastic" in our database, returning 50 results as requested. (Disclaimer: Some might find the content inappropriate as it includes the entries from Merve's transcripts.) You can do the same for the words as unusual as "scholastic", "pretentious" and "hybrid".

The tool functions as a platform for our R&D activities, and the content represents the asset we've built so far.

Playing with the words is what we basically do, and it is a lot of fun!