We have a winner!

The newest member of our software team, Semih Balkanci made us proud on the Imagine Cup, an organization by Microsoft. Considering the following quote from Bill Gates, one can tell that this is no ordinary "student software competition":

"I wish there had been an Imagine Cup when I was growing up. It gets people involved in seeing that software is changing the world"

Semih's team won the first round of the competition held in Turkey and they'll be representing our country in Paris.

Way to go Semih!

25.000.000

Number of questions Botégo has answered so far, has reached a whopping amount mentioned on the title. The figure itself represents a significant know-how, and there's more to this asset than the quantity. It offers a precious medium for data-mining, that we constantly use to develop the product.

A new client

It's been quite a series of posts, and yet to come... We're proud to announce that our clientele now also includes TEB, a partner of BNP BARIPAS, (sixth largest bank in the world, and the largest one in the Euro region). We'll be serving TEB with our knowledgebase tool, offering an efficient way to reach information.

Google Online Marketing Challenge

A team participating on the Google Online Marketing Challenge has chosen Botégo as their partner on the project. We approved numerous ads for the campaign they'll be running during the challenge.

They have interesting strategies such as using names of more than 50 call center executives as keywords. Here's how it looks... Brilliant idea!

A new product from Botégo: Automated e-mail responder

It took our team a couple of months to build a brand new product based on our existing technology. It's an innovative application of our proprietary algorithm. Our pattern matching technology basically detects the contents of an email message and responds accordingly. This product offers amazing possibilities for an organization handling high volumes of email traffic. Any customer support department can use the software to automatically handle the majority of the email traffic. We're looking forward to seeing how a major client uses this application in the near future.

"Free wednesday"

The weather is now so warm that, even our air conditioned office sometimes lacks the convenience we require. So we occasionally hit the street to find a better workplace. As i work on this post, the core team is enjoying their Mocha's and the fact that only a young internet company can offer such an opportunity.

Merve on National TV

Click here to watch the video

2008 summer internship applications are now closed

We were invited to Yildiz Tech for a two-hour presentation based solely on Merve, but i had the opportunity to discuss chatbots in general, offering the participants a broader perspective. It was nice to see a lot of bright individuals asking for internship opportunities at Botégo.

We're now a proud sponsor of Webrazzi, known as "the Techcrunch of Turkey"

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.

Botègo supports innovation

We're proud to sponsor an event supporting innovative e-business projects: e-fikrim.

Also in news: We co-sponsored İTÜ Sözlük's birthday event where lots of people got to test the product. And here is an interview on turk.internet.com, courtesy of Mrs. Fusun Nebil

Some more press appearance

Articles mentioning Merve on Digital Age, Sabah Cumartesi and Günaydın. And a low-quality video of the news story on Channel 24. As a result, a Google query for the term "Merve'yi tavla" now returns even more results.

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.

Helping Turk Telekom help their customers

Turk Telekom is the incumbent telecom operator in Turkey and has been majority-owned by Saudi Oger Telecom, which acquired a 55% stake from the Turkish government for USD 6.55 billion. As of 30 June 2006, the company had approximately 18.9 million fixed lines. Turk Telekom is also a leading provider of DSL services to both residential and business customers, and of leased lines to business customers. For the year ending on 31 December 2005, Turk Telekom had revenues of TRY 7,478 million. Considering these figures, one realizes Turk Telekom has a very large customer base. And now they're *our* customer.

Earlier today, a Botego application we developed for Turk Telekom was featured on their website with a banner which boldly stated "24/7 online customer support" and reported more than 7000 dialogs were recorded in the first couple of hours. We consider the first 10000 dialogs as the pilot dialogs, because they help us see how accurately we forecasted the content the application would need to cover. At this stage I can tell we're pretty successful at addressing the inquiries regarding matters such as DSL issues, tariffs and applications. In more than 500 dialogs, users were redirected to the TTNet call center, a separate entity who has been responsible for DSL operations for quite some time. (Most customers apparently are not aware of that, and they keep calling the Turk Telekom call center for DSL-related issues.) So we're proud to announce that we've already met the expectation of reducing call center costs on the very first day of our operation. As the name "Bot with an ego" implies, we will get better and better each day, so stay tuned for more success stories!