Information is power

Millions of queries allow Google to offer this great feature where it spots certain typos.



I had mentioned that we have been collecting a decent amount of conversation data in two and a half years, and explained how we made use of this database.

I was hoping for a case where this database alone could convert into business. Last month a digital agency purchased a small subset of the database. They will be using it on a project where young internet users -who usually don't care about the grammar a lot- will be expected to submit some names in order to succeed on a digital game. So, the application will be typo-tolerant, thanks to Botégo.

I love the idea of monetary gain through experiential and informational knowledge.

"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!

The Facebook application

Now i realize it's been a long series of Merve posts, but it really has become a star application for us. As of today, Facebook community, -virtually the whole Internet community- has access to Merve via the fancy Merve Facebook app. Facebook doesn't allow us to build it in a way people can embed it to their profile pages, so it comes in an application frame.

http://apps.facebook.com/merveyitavla

I wish we had been one of the first Facebook application developers from Turkey, but it's still not too late to catch the train.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

We're holding regular meetings each Friday where we have intensive discussions with the motive of improving our technology and planning our next moves. This is how our whiteboard looks like following a typical meeting.

You can't think outside "our box"

This is a subset of various expressions standing for "Ne haber?" ("What's up?" in Turkish), including virtually every typo you can imagine.
Now that Botego handles more than 50 cumulative dialogs a minute, we've become quite an expert on how our people's minds operate, including how they fail to operate correctly. The total number of conversations has reached the millions, bringing the volume of logs to a whopping amount of gigabytes. Therefore, we no longer need to foresee such variations, as our valuable users have been voluntarily contributing to our database. All we need to do is analyse it with the proprietary software we recently developed. So, you can try out any typo you can imagine, and we'll immediately add it to our list, if we already haven't.

If one of our biggest assets for building innovative products is creativity, the other one is the expertise we've gained from operating those products.