Turkey: The land that embraced Facebook, FriendFeed and startups

For the past couple of days I’ve been in Turkey, absorbing the tech scene in Istanbul (tomorrow I’m in Munich, Germany, for DLD). I was invited over by the Nubridge Venture Summit which brought together a panoply of European VCs to listen to Turkish tech companies set out their wares. What emerged is a picture of a country in high growth, as this economy and its entrepreneurs latch on to the possibilities offered by the Internet and mobile platforms.

But first, let me tell you a story. Two years ago I contacted Turkey’s pre-eminent “Web 2.0″ blogger, Arda Kutsal of Webrazzi. I said let’s do a TechCrunch Europe meetup in Istanbul. Duly, a few weeks later I took a flight out, got to the hotel he mentioned and figured Arda had organised the meetup in the bar. No, said the receptionist, “It’s in the Grand Ballroom.” I headed down the hall to find about 400 people. That was the kind of thing that was going on then.

Two years on, with a packed room full of European VCs and private equity people hearing pitches from a wide range of Turkish technology companies, it’s clear the investment community is keenly interested in this market.

This was an event that probably couldn’t have happened two years ago. Even though Turkey is going through a period of high growth, it took the perfect storm of wider internet adoption and social networking (particularly the rise of Facebook here) to turn Turkey into an emerging startup market. As I said to about 30 journalists from the Turkish press on day two of the event – you don’t actually see all these investors in one room very often, unless it’s at something like TechCrunch 50, or events like Le Web. Something has happened to Turkey in those two years. So here’s some context.

Turkey is now the third largest country on Facebook according to ComScore (see illustrations).

It’s a few million behind the UK, and with 75 million people in Turkey (26.5m of whom are online) it’s likely to become the second biggest behind the US fairly soon.

How on earth did that happen? I’ve spoken to Facebook and people here in Istanbul and what emerged was the story of a campaign by early adopters in Turkey to get Facebook to release them the tools to translate it into Turkish. After that the site exploded in use. There was no local social networking clone with the same functionality, and the young popuation (over half of Turkey is under 30 years old) made Facebook look like the hip Western site to “be seen” on. See below:



It also helped that there is a large ex-pat Turkish population in Germany, with Facebook increasingly acting as a networking bridge between families spread across the two countries. On journalist here told me that many people don’t even have normal email addresses – they just use Facebook email.

Furthermore, last year ComScore released a report showing Turkey has the third most engaged online audience in the world, with 30 hours spent online each month – that’s actually behind the US and Canada. See below:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/01/23/turkey-the-land-that-embraced-facebook-friendfeed-and-startups/