francispisani.net

Startup Chile

Some people, like  investor Amon Kohavi (@arnonk), might have reasons to critique Startup Chile. But the program, created by the Chilean government to encourage the creation of innovative companies, is worth checking out. Which I did in Santiago, on the way to Australia.

The offer is simple and seductive: $40,000 US given to global entrepreneurs to house their startup in Santiago for 6 months. In addition to the money, they receive a one-year work visa, help opening a bank account – normally very difficult for foreigners – as well as a phone and contract.

“The goal is to change the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Chile, and to open it to innovation,” says Horacio Melo (@hora8), the program’s director. “Our mental isolation stems from our geographic isolation. To break out of it, we decided to attract high-potential startups, so they start their project here.”

Candidates come from across the globe. Thirty percent are from the US, 15% are from Chile, 15% are from the rest of Latin America, and the remaining 40% form the long tail. If the candidates succeed in the selection process, they must meet 2 requirements: the founder must spend 6 months in Chile, and the startup must be something that’s easily (=cheaply) developed at the global scale. The goal is to host 300 startups per year. In 2011, the full program’s first year, Startup Chile received 1,600 applications from 70 countries – without spending a cent on marketing. The directors chose 320 startups from 35 countries. All activities are in English.

Besides the startup money, the selected companies receive additional help: weekly networking events, legal aid, and contact with investors. In total, a handful of them them have already raised just under $10 million.

The startups are required to stay six months, but can stay longer if they want. “But even if they leave, we’re happy,” Melo says. “We give them reasons to come back, creating a local network for them built around classes, meetings, conferences and events.”

I’ve already met one of the companies incubated by Startup Chile, in Lebanon. Jogabo lets people organize local football matches. Among the others that look like possible successes, Inbed.me, created by an Argentinian team in New York, lets users reserve a hotel room, while at the same time connecting them to other travelers in the same city or neighborhood. SaferTaximakes taking a taxi – an extreme sport in Latin America – less dangerous.

The biggest challenge seems – as Kohavi remarked (Article in French) – to be convincing local investors to invest in these promising, yet risky, startups. It’s no doubt a question of time, maybe a generational thing.

“We hope that, out of the group, there’ll be one that becomes a company worth a billion dollars,” Melo says.

 

Bathroom reading at the Australian incubator, Pollenizer

Where good ideas come from (article in French), and where they’re read.

Photo taken at Pollenizer, a dynamic Sydney incubator that I’ll talk about again.

 

Brazil: In Recife, Innovation and Design for Job Creation

Located in the historic center of one of the America’s oldest cities, Porto Digital is a technology park that has made the northeastern city of Recife Brazil’s third IT hub, behind São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The park is the result of efforts of a group of computer-science professors who were tired of watching their students leave the region. The park is taking on the challenges created by digital acceleration, and must respond to the difficult question of innovating “on a global scale.”

The professors, from the federal university of Pernambouc (the state Recife is the capital of), trained excellent engineers who, unfortunately, found it difficult to find local employment. Some created their own companies, which were quickly bought and relocated. The professors, tired of losing their students, created the Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems (C.E.S.A.R.) in 1996, to change the dynamic between academia and enterprise. In 2000, the governor, encouraged by the professors’ success, decided to create a center for software creation – Porto Digital — which received local, regional and federal funding.

Creative Industry

The biggest surprise in this was the decision to locate Portal Digital in the city’s historic center, then abandoned to the sun and sea.  Silvio Meira, one of the group’s initial members, and today president of C.E.S.A.R.’s executive council, wanted to to build it next to the university, which the military dictatorship had carefully situated far from the city’s center. But Claudio Marinho, at the time Pernambouc’s director of technology, fought to make Porto Digital part of the area’s urban renewal efforts.  He won when, after several months of discussion, Meira conceded that there weren’t any good restaurants near the university. The creative class needs its creature comforts.

Today, Porto Digital houses 200 companies, employing 6,500 people. Developers stay in Recife, and large companies like Accenture and Nokia are moving there. But moving from job creation to innovation calls for a number of qualitative steps.

Porto Digital is placing its hopes on the creative industry: gaming, digital art, cinema, advertising, and other medias. C.E.S.A.R. emphasizes R&D, with its labs – embedded systems and digital television, notably – and program centered on the innovation process.

Meira is devoting himself to the design approach, notably with business modeling. Not because it’s popular, but because people in Silicon Valley fool themselves by betting their future on design while outsourcing production. “This is brainware, and Brazilian brains are as good as any other,” he told me in 2011, when we first met. It’s less expensive than developing an automobile industry.

“We’re going to try to create companies that have impact at a global level, with algorithms that work at a global scale” he says today. “But things like Skype, Google and Facebook are beyond what the majority of the world’s educational institutions can attain.” Decades are needed to succeed.

What remains is design, what Meira sees as a four-part process. The first three are well-known: knowledge (education), entrepreneurship and investment. To these, Meira adds the notion of “understanding the complexity of problems  at a global scale and having the ability to resolve them.” The vision’s still a bit unclear, but no one can say that this door should stay closed. In Recife and elsewhere.

 

Brazil: Ledface Answers Your Subjective Questions

Where was Einstein born? You probably don’t know (I don’t), but no big deal: Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo and Bing, to name a few, can give you the answer almost instantaneously. But if you want to find the best book for exploring his theory … then things get hard.

Search engines and encyclopedias can answer any objective question one could possibly ask. But they falter when we ask subjective things – even if 55% of questions asked on Google are subjective, according to Horacio Poblete, co-founder of the Brazilian search engine, Ledface. These questions are a larger source of revenue, as more clicks are needed to find the answer than the one click needed for factual ones.

“It’s simple,” Poblete says. “Google and the others are failing when it comes to something as easy as giving an opinion.” Questions like this one, asked by Google employee from India: ” What’s the best time to plant crops in India if monsoon season arrived earlier than usual?”

Poblete lives in Campinas, west of  São Paulo. I interviewed him on Skype, from Rio.

Here’s what I learned about Ledface:

How it works

• Ask a subjective question. Ledface recognizes the nature of that question and uses your profile to select a group of people who can answer it. The question is asked to a first person, who has 600 characters in which to answer is. It’s then passed on to the next responder, and so on.
• In total, five people help co-create a unique response to the question. The entire process is anonymous.

The idea

• Ledface is a combination of artificial intelligence (choosing the best group of people to answer the question) and collective intelligence (for creating the best response). The later creates actionable information on what to do/not do, like if you asked a friend.
• The difference between Ledface and Yahoo Answers is how Ledface users co-create the answer. “Collective intelligence is better than the specialist.”
• Anonymity allows users to be themselves and to ask more intimate questions, questions that are not usually asked on social networks.

Outloook

• Launched in October 2011 by a team of four engineers and a marketing expert, Ledface currently has 4,000 users, with 20% growth over the preceding month. Poblete believes it needs to hit 100,000 users for answers to reach the desired quality.
• As with every time something like this launches, the site gets a lot of questions about IT and entrepreneurship. Others ask advice on their love lives. Seventy percent of questions have already been answered.
• The objective (and the market, if I understand) is to position itself as a n enterprise source for capturing collective intelligence. Ledface plans on becoming a virtual assistant in 2013. While hoping to generate revenue with that model, Ledface currently relies on contextual advertising. This should work well, since anonymity allows users to give more information about themselves – Ledface will know its users better than social networks do.

What I think

It’s an interesting idea, one that could really succeed in the health sector.  It needs to really grow its user base before it can reach its full potential. This is a real startup, carrying real risk that it won’t succeed.

Since it’s targeting a global market, the site is in English, not Portuguese.

It’s not certain if people will like having anonymous responses to intimate questions. But it’s obviously better than the inverse. “Users don’t want to know what’s behind the screen; they want a good answer, quickly,” Poblete says.

 

JOURNAL – Off again

It’s that time again. I’m writing this in Recife, the first city I’m visiting during my first “real” world tour. By this I mean that, after Mexico, North Africa and part of the Middle East, this time I headed west out of Paris, and am coming back from the east. During which I’ll lose a day – I forgot about the International Date Line.

From here I’m heading to Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Sydney, Djakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Cairo. I plan on returning to Paris May 2nd.

Outside of a few changes, I laid out this journey in my initial mapping of the trip. My second Achilles Tendon surgery forced me to make a few major modifications, though. Notably in the schedule.

Here’s the plan as it stands:

I plan on leaving again May 18th for Johannesburg, Kigali and Tel Aviv; returning June 2nd.

After that, from June 18th to July 18th, I’ll do a tour of Eastern and Northern Europe: Belgrade, Warsaw, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Tallinn, Helsinki and  Berlin.

My second around-the-world trip will be an inverse of the first, taking me east (and north) Ho Chi Minh City, Manilla, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and San Francisco between August 16th and September 30th.

I’m not leaving out the possibility of a few changes, but I hope to be able to stick to the plan this time.

People I meet – and some of you who write me – ask me all the time how I choose which cities to visit and how I prepare each step.

There’s nothing especially methodical in putting together the list. For example, the latest addition, Manilla, is there because it’s one of the most dynamic and innovative cities, in terms social networks. And it’s less known than Singapore, which is always mentioned when talking about information technology.

Tallin, on the other hand, could seem like a strange choice for people who don’t know that it houses the NATO’s European cyberwar preparation center, the HQ for Skype’s software development and that a friend promised me a contact – always an essential element.

Cities in Western Europe, or those in the US besides San Francisco, aren’t on my itinerary because they’re so well known.

In the beginning, I intended on ending this trip in Johannesburg (after Mumbai), to do a tour of the southern BRIC countries. But that would have have been a long trip. Instead, I’m going to Kigali, because Rwanda is one of the countries that has most clearly bet on IT in its development strategy … and because a contact promised to help me.

Ever since I started the project, I’ve prepared the trips in a pretty relaxed manner.

• I bookmark iarticles on Diigo (the other Delicious). These usually come from my RSS feed, things I find browsing the web, or what I discover on the fabulous iPad and iPhone app, Zite, which bills itself as “a personalized magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”
• I’ve recently starting using Transfair, a German startup that I learned about at a weekend organized by MakeSense, in Berlin. I ask them for reports on the most interesting things at each of the places I’m visiting. These serve as a guide for setting up meetings or not missing the essential things when I’m there.

 

The beauty of it all is that once I’m on the ground I really depend more on people I meet and their contacts than on prior preparation. And on chance, too, for sure, which you need to do anything really original.

Maybe you have other questions about how this trip? Don’t hesitate to ask.

 

Netexplo’s Global Innovation Trends

A good lesson for someone traveling the world in search of innovation is that you can also learn about it by staying in one place for a few days. This happened to me at the Netexplo Forum, held March 15-16 at UNESCO’S Paris headquarters.

According to Thierry Happe, who co-founded the annual event with  Martine Bidegain, there are three “lignes de force” (defining features) marking innovation this year:

First, big data, “We are going to make more decisions with a real-time databases than we do based on experience and intuition,” Happe said. The second is SoLoMo, the term used to describe the fact that our online activities are becoming increasingly social, local and mobile. The third is activism 2.0, which, as last year’s Arab Spring showed, can no longer be ignored..

The conference was structured around a trend report authored by sociologist  Bernard Cathelat after Netexplo and its global network selected 400 startups (of these, 100 are selected to compete for 10 awards at the event.)

Tracking and profiling. Everything we do online leaves a trace, a trace used by governments and corporations to better understand us and our actions. Transparency becomes a service offering. We live in a “world of glass” where it’s easy to learn how much any doctor in the US receives from pharmaceutical companies. (“$ for docs”, the app that does this, was created by ProPublica.org, which has won two Pulitzers for data journalism.)

This can create a veritable  “identity crisis” that forces users to choose a personal or enterprise strategy that considers both how we’re tracked and demands for transparency. It’s an ambiguous area, since we’ll always ask for the transparency of others, while preserving their own private space. Social networks are becoming tools to manage our sway capital, our influence as potential revenue source.

The last point is match marketing, which, unlike mass marketing, uses existing data to create pinpoint relationships between users and brands.  FreeMonee.com uses credit-card data to offer users branded “gifts,” is the best example of this.

It’s essential to understand that we’re passing from a moment where the emphasis is placed on connection (social networks) to one where it is placed on big data, from the dispersion of power to its concentration. As long as users don’t demand more transparency, in order to restrict access to their data and to prevent its collection in linked databases open to a handful of actors – Google and Facebook, for example.

The advantage of tracking trends like this is that they’re simple; the disadvantage is that they seem inevitable. You can either be part of them or profit from them. We might be better off presenting them as tensions delimiting the areas where the actors should position themselves.

What I got from Cathelat’s speech  is the tension that simultaneously links with and opposes big data’s ability to know, collect and save everything, and the right for forgetting, for discretion, for individual and group secrets. As well as the tension between transparency as a social demand and opacity as exploitative system used by corporations and institutions.

Fortunately, there are a lot of innovators whose interests are primarily humanitarian. People like Selene Chew, a graduate student from Singapore, who was awarded the conference’s grand prize for Blindspot, a cane for the visually impaired that uses GPS to locate users, to detect objects and find nearby friends and contact them via smartphone. It’s amazing.

I learned a lot in my two days at Netexplo Forum. But the tensions on exhibit at the conference are not lived the same way, with the same balance of powers, everywhere. To see the differences, you need to be on the ground. Next step: Brazil.

 

Markets, Diasporas, and Social Networks: Lebanon

Despite their country’s  110,000 square kilometers  and 10 million inhabitants, Cubans used to joke 30 years ago that they had the largest country in the world: our population is in Miami, our army is in Angola, and our capital is in Moscow, they’d say. In some ways, Lebanon’s situation  (10,000 km2, 4.2 million inhabitants) resembles Cuba’s. The army is in Lebanon, but the population is spread across the globe, the market extends across the Arab world, the economic capitol seems to shift towards Dubai, and its students are increasingly in the U.S., London or Paris.

Lebanon has many positives. It has a large proportion of highly qualified citizens, initially educated at prestigious institutions like the American University of Beirut, Saint Joseph University and Beirut Arab University, which graduate numerous executives and engineers. Many of which continue their education in high-ranking European and American schools. There is also the entrepreneurial spirit and multiculturalism that has characterized Lebanon since the Phoenicians, and that integration into the Arab world hasn’t minimized.

Another advantage is that its internal divisions make Lebanon a trans-cultural laboratory, creating people particularly well-suited to understanding interpersonal problems caused by globalization. And when it comes to building a site, in Lebanon you can can easily make it trilingual: English, Arabic and French, as  Delphine Edde de Diwanee and Cyril Hadjithomas de Keeward explained.

Lebanon’s civil society is creating innovative initiatives like the Beirut Green Project, which is attempting to create rooftop green spaces, and  Metel Na shelta, reinventing cause pamphlets, and Twattarna.com, which facilitates debate between political powers via Twitter.

Poor telecom infrastructure

Outside of these strengths, Lebanon suffers. Besides the ever-present threat of war, it has a weak telecom infrastructure, placing it behind Lesotho and Uganda in download speeds, ranking 160th globally.

“It’s a serious obstacle,” says  Elie Abou Saad, head of the multimedia and web agency, Creapix.net. But there’s an advantage in that. “It forces to plan around extreme conditions. It raises the quality of our work, and helps us have a global presence.”

Despite Lebanon’s small population, it has a competitive advantage similar to that of much larger countries: a vast diaspora of between 12 and 15 million people, from a country that has a population of just over 4 million. The diaspora landed everywhere from Senegal to the U.S. There are more Lebanese in Brazil than in Lebanon. They’re successful in their new homes. Maybe not as successful as Carlos Slim – the richest man in the world – but still. They make up a global network, with access to distant markets and, more and more frequently, a funding source for ambitious startups.

No matter how useful it is, the diaspora doesn’t solve the problem of which markets young companies should target.

“The innovation we can create here really doesn’t have platform in Lebanon,” explains  Cyril Hadjithomas, head of  Keeward.com, a media ecosystem operating in several francophone nations and the U.S., during an informal conversation between a group of local entrepreneurs at  Berytech.org, Lebanon’s oldest incubator.

“There’s no viable business model that can limit itself only to Lebanon,” Nicolas Rouhana, head of Berytech, says. “Investors don’t fund companies that are only in the Lebanese market.”

Of the twenty-odd people taking part in the conversation, two said they were aiming at the global market, an ambitious starting point. Another is present in Congo and in France, due to diaspora. A handful of others were targeting the Arab market. “The goal is to sell in the Emirates. That’s more than enough to start with,” one says.

But social networks clear up this complex panorama. Zeina Khoury, founder of  Strat Associat, a student-prep program operating in Lebanon and elsewhere, explains: “They let me reach clients throughout the Arab world, at low cost.” Hadjithomas adds that they’re a vital part of “relaying, translating, accelerating, and pushing us internationally.”

 

Markets, diasporas and social networks in Lebanon

Despite their mere 110,000 km2 and 10 million inhabitants, Cubans used to joke 30 years ago that they had the largest country in the world: our population is in Miami, our army is in Angola, and our capital is in Moscow, they’d say. In some ways, Lebanon’s situation (10,000 km2, 4.2 million inhabitants) resembles Cuba’s. The army is in Lebanon, but the population is spread across the globe, the market extends across the Arab world, the economic capitol seems to shift towards Dubai, and its students are increasingly in the U.S., London or Paris.

Lebanon has many positive sides. It has a large proportion of highly qualified citizens, initially educated at prestigious institutions like the American University of Beirut, Saint Joseph University and Beirut Arab University, which graduate numerous executives and engineers, many of which continue their education in high-ranking European and American schools. There is also the entrepreneurial spirit and multiculturalism that has characterized Lebanon since the Phoenicians, and hasn’t been minimized by integration into the Arab world.

Another advantage is that its internal divisions make Lebanon a trans-cultural laboratory, creating people particularly well-suited to understanding interpersonal problems caused by globalization. And when it comes to building a site, in Lebanon you can easily make it trilingual: English, Arabic and French, as  Delphine Edde of Diwanee.com and Cyril Hadjithomas of Keeward.com explained.

Lebanon’s civil society is creating innovative initiatives like the Beirut Green Project, which is attempting to create rooftop green spaces, and Metel Na shelta, reinventing cause pamphlets, and Twattarna.com, which facilitates debate between political powers via Twitter.

Outside of these strengths, Lebanon suffers. Besides the ever-present threat of war, it has a weak telecom infrastructure, placing it behind Lesotho and Uganda in download speeds, ranking 161^st globally.

“It’s a serious obstacle,” says Elie Abou Saad, head of the multimedia and web agency, Creapix.net. But there’s an advantage in that. “It forces planning around extreme conditions. It raises the quality of our work, and helps us have a global presence.”

Despite Lebanon’s small population, it has a competitive advantage similar to that of much larger countries: a vast diaspora of between 12 and 15 million people, from a country that has a population of just over 4 million. They have landed everywhere from Senegal to the U.S.; there are more Lebanese in Brazil than in Lebanon; and they’re successful in their new homes. Maybe not as successful as Carlos Slim – the richest man in the world – but still. They make up a global network, with access to distant markets and, more and more frequently, a funding source for ambitious startups.

No matter how useful it is, the diaspora doesn’t solve the problem of which markets young companies should target.

“The innovation we can create here really doesn’t have a platform in Lebanon,” explains Cyril Hadjithomas, head of Keeward, a media ecosystem operating in several francophone nations and the U.S., during an informal conversation between a group of local entrepreneurs at Berytech, Lebanon’s oldest incubator.

“There’s no viable business model that can limit itself only to Lebanon,” Nicolas Rouhana, head of Berytech, says. “Investors don’t fund companies that are only in the Lebanese market.”

Of the twenty-odd people taking part in the conversation, two said they were aiming at the global market, an ambitious starting point. Another is present in Congo and in France, due to diaspora. A handful of others were targeting the Arab market. “The goal is to sell in the Emirates. That’s more than enough to start with,” one says.

But social networks clear up this complex panorama. Zeina Khoury, founder of  Strat Associate, a student-prep program operating in Lebanon and elsewhere, explains: “They let me reach clients throughout the Arab world, at low cost.” Hadjithomas adds that they’re a vital part of “relaying, translating, accelerating, and pushing us internationally.”

 

 

Innovation: The magic and the method

When Otavio Good sees the word “salida” in a Spanish-speaking country, he thinks of “salad” instead of “exit.” To avoid the embarrassment that can result from mistakes like this, the Mountain View developer created WordLens, a smartphone app that instantly translates texts, from signposts to menus, with a simple camera view.

Right now the app can translate English, French and Spanish, with German, Italian and Portuguese coming soon. Chinese and Arabic versions are also in the works. Designed for tourists, the app translates texts without using wi-fi – roaming would cost a fortune – and generates translations from a pre-installed dictionary. Built for the iPhone, it will soon be available on Android devices.

The app is so fast you’d think it was magic. This is exactly how it was described by Daniel Glazman, who introduced it at Nexplorateur Forum,  held March 15th and 16th at the UNESCO Palace in Paris. The app was voted one of the 10 best global apps of the year.

Irritated by people (journalists heading the list) who ask him when he got the idea for the app, Good spoke instead of the innovation process. “There isn’t an aha moment,” he said. So there’s no story to tell, unfortunately. In this he agrees with Steven Johnson, whom he tells me he’s never read.

Good detailed six conditions necessary for creating “innovative software”:

• Competence: Good has studied computer graphics since he was seven.
• Adopting technologies as soon as they appear: early adopters often get criticized, but, “if you want to have a chance to lead in the field” you need to be open to trying new things, he said. “This is  valuable,” he added, “for communities.” I believe he was thinking here of companies, but perhaps also countries.
• Reliance on community: What you gain by availing yourself to friends and colleagues is much more important then the risk of someone stealing your idea. No doubt because innovation is a slow and complex process.
• Experimentation: “Start building and you’ll begin to see the real issues,” he said. Good said that he works on a new software idea ever fifteen days. For the last five years. “I rarely finish them,” he said. “But it’s good. It helps me figure out what makes sense and what doesn’t.”
• Taking risks: “We underestimate the value of risk,” Good said. His first was “in a research project that ran for two years, even though I didn’t know where I was going. There weren’t any devices capable of doing what I had in mind when I started. There was no market – hardly 2 million iPhones.”
• Hard work: Which, to the chagrin of journalists, doesn’t make for a very good story: “There’s a bug, you debug. There’s a bug. You debug. Hard work is a part of the innovation process whose importance is often forgotten,” he said.

 
Shakespearean conclusion: there is method in his magic.

In terms of innovation, magic is only in the end result, and doesn’t happen every time. Everything leading there is a result of a rigorous method.

It’s up to us to whether we think that’s a good thing, but don’t tell me it’s not a good formula.

 

In Yogurtistan, a currency valuable online and off

Cemil Turun is, without a doubt, one of the most ambitious people I’ve ever interviewed. He wants to create a currency that works in both the online and offline worlds. Facing my obvious journalist’s skepticism, he hurries to add that his company, Yogurt Technologies (yogurt.com.tr) is one of the first six Turkish companies to receive VC financing. So some people take him seriously. What’s his plan?

The first step was the creation of  Yogurtistan.com, “a 3D world that’s very different from Second Life. It’s built on Adobe Air, and it works on all browsers. From it you can access iTunes, read books or watch full-screen TV, just like at home.”

Just as we go from one store to the next, on  Yogurtistan.”you go from Migros to Quick Silver [two companies popular in Turkey] without changing tabs,” Turun said. This creates “a new web” that lets users better mimic offline behaviors. “When we are watching a movie and listening to certain group’s music, or buying a jeans, we’re creating data about our preferences,” he said. “Today, these preferences are not connected to my social networks in a meaningful way.”

The next step is the creation of a currency that allows users to pay for services or complete transactions online, as well as “paying at the restaurant you eat dinner at,” he said during a meal in Istanbul. The secret is adding “a fourth dimension based on online ‘engagement,’” Turn said. “A virtual sword generated by your actions in the last ten hours has value but does not buy you a glass of wine, does not record your engagement.” This is what his team hopes to change: “We want to bring the value of your virtual engagement to the offline world.

“We’re working on creating a special currency that will work in both worlds. It’s unique, and very disruptive,” Turun said. He called it ‘Kayme’ – an Old Turkish word that was used in the nineteenth century when bank notes were first introduced – and it has value both online and off.

In Turkey, Turun relies on a well-developed system of loyalty points. “We have agreements with most loyalty-point systems for exchanging with our virtual currency.”

This is where the endeavor is huge.”The big internet companies don’t think about offline behavior, the most important part of our lives. One day, when you go to a restaurant, you’ll check if you can pay with Facebook Credits. They’re going to have to change if they want to survive long-term. Friendship is great, but spending money is an essential part of our lives. We need a currency that can be used in both dimensions.”

His clients already include Coca-Cola and Turkcell, Turkey’s largest mobile company. These companies are also interested in user-behavior data (having it collected is opt-in). “The brands will be reaching  users via small apps that we will serve in Yogurtistan. Those users who have opted-in will be paid Kayme by the brands. So the virtual currency, Kayme, will be backed by actual advertising budgets.”

The idea might seem crazy, but that’s where things are trending. Mark Andreessen (who created the first web browser and today is an influential Silicon Valley investor) is convinced that “software is eating the world.” And Reid Hoffman, co-founder of PayPal and Linked-In, writes in Forbes that “We’re at the early stages of a massive wave of innovation in the payment industry.”

Turun is not alone in trying to innovate in this area. But can he succeed? Here’s what he thinks, via email: “A company like Facebook would be in a better position But it’s too big for a turn like this This is the essence of any start-up. We have only our desire to make this work. I think that if we succeed, it’ll because I’m crazy enough to think we can.”