Turkish Spark- Using Cisco Telepresence

We held the TurkishSpark "across the world" event yesterday at Cisco offices in San Jose and Istanbul. Cisco Turkey General Manager Umit Cinali and I sponsored the event to encourage the interaction and show the value of TelePresence in driving innovation.

Led by co-founders of TurkishSpark,  Babur Ozden and Kerim Baran, and organized by TABC (Turkish American Business Connection) organization board member Can Demiray, the event covered two hours worth of business ideation and feedback to specific business proposals.  We spoke with six entrepreneurs from Istanbul while five entrepreneurs joined us in San Jose.

This was the first TP experience for most of the attendees, who described it as "This is like flying First Class vs. Economy. I am having a hard time imaging going back to Skype!"

TurkishSpark

We are in the middle of the first Turkish Spark session over Cisco Telepresence. We have five entrepreneurs in Istanbul and six in San Jose over a live TP link. Babur Ozden, Kerim Baran and I are reviewing the ideas and proving feedback.

This is the first TP session between Silicon Valley and Istanbul to review venture opportunities.

More to come on how these entrepreneurs fare with their ideas.

Role of the DataCenter in Delivering the Mobility Experience

I have been pondering the interlinkage between the evolution of the datacenter and the delivery of the mobility experience on our smartphones and tablets. Companies like Amazon and Apple, along with many mobility app providers are living through these two forces that are fueling each other's growth.

Here are the questions that I am exploring

1. What is the organic linkage and trending of mobility subs and applications vs. usage of datacenter capacity and virtualization?
2. Do they DataCenter solution teams understand the challenges driven by mobile apps, the constant roaming etc of the mobile experience? Do they incorporate these or are they mostly focused on providing the best infrastructure for appls and virtualization?
3. Are there good ways to solve problems that touch both ends, such as security, experience optimization, monitoring etc by a single provider? It is interesting to observe that many of the Data Center solution providers do not have significant presence on the mobile client, and vice-versa.

As more services move to the cloud and are delivered into a mobility environment, these questions are going to spawn more solutions, and of course startups...

Chime in to the discussion.... More to come as I explore the space.