Turkey’s leading telecommunication and technology company Turkcell
(NYSE:TKC) (BIST:TCELL) concluded its App Marathon for young developers
with the grand prize: One of the 60 teams that have started to develop
mobile applications from scratch in April will be heading to the Silicon
Valley at the beginning of November. The winners are the developers of
the “Damaged Road” – an application which reports physical problems on
roads through crowd-sourcing data from drivers.
Navigating the “Damaged Road” with Turkcell’s App Marathon
In April, Mustafa Ferhan Akman, Suleyman Celik, Mustafa Musa Ulker and
Hamdi Recep Dogan joined Turkcell’s App Marathon with the goal of
finding a solution to a problem that they also suffered from as drivers.
Following the first 6 weeks of intensive coding, they made it to the
shortlist of finalists.
Over the course of the summer, they fine-tuned their app, adding on new
users and receiving 24 thousand road reports in 4 months between May and
September. They attained the critical numbers required for the success
of their crowd-sourced product, and they finally won the top award in
Turkcell’s App Marathon. The “Damaged Road” will now take them to the
Silicon Valley where they will be meeting investors and visiting
innovative companies in a tour organized by Turkcell.
Turkcell’s “Developers of the Future”: A family of 25 thousand members
The App Marathon is part of Turkcell’s “Developers of the Future”
program, a broader initiative to grow the coding community in Turkey.
The program, which celebrated its first anniversary in September,
enjoyed massive interest in its first year. 25 thousand people
registered to become community members, benefiting from 8 million pages
of content on how to code in iOS, Android and Windows.
Over the course of the year, 850 thousand logins were registered. The
amount of information that community members accessed via program
website http://gelecegiyazanlar.turkcell.com.tr
amounts to 400 thousand hours of information or 50 thousand books.
Thousands of potential coders overcame the language barrier thanks to
knowledge made available in their native Turkish while many benefited
from volunteer mentoring provided by Turkcell employees and ecosystem.
In order to ensure the success of the program, Turkcell also introduced
an examination component. The participants take exams with minimum
passing score of 75% following each training module. Successful
participants receive certification of accomplishment that grants them
entrance to the “Mobile Application Development Sufficiency Exam” that
is conducted twice a year. 5,400 certificates were issued in the first
year of the program.
Turkcell’s “Developers of the Future” is supported by intensive
initiatives geared towards production such as the Game Development
Marathon – held in Istanbul with the cooperation of Bahcesehir
University’s BUG game lab – and the aforementioned App Development
Marathon. With “Developers of the Future”, Turkcell contributes to the
realization of Turkey’s ambitious goals in developing information and
communication technologies.
ABOUT TURKCELL: Turkcell is the leading communications and
technology company in Turkey, with 34.6 million subscribers as of June
30, 2014. Turkcell is a leading regional player with its approximately
69.5 million subscribers in nine countries as of June 30, 2014. It has
become one of the first among the global operators to have implemented
HSPA+. It has achieved up to 43.2 Mbps speed using the Dual Carrier
technology, and is continuously working to provide the latest technology
to its customers. Turkcell Superonline, a wholly owned subsidiary of
Turkcell, is the first telecom operator to offer households fiber
broadband connection at speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps in Turkey. As of
March 2014, Turkcell’s population coverage is at 99.49% in 2G and 86.37%
in 3G. Turkcell reported a TRY2.9 billion (US$1.4 billion) revenue with
total assets of TRY21.8 billion (US$10.3 billion) as of June 30, 2014.
It has been listed on the NYSE and the BIST since July 2000, and is the
only NYSE-listed company in Turkey. Read more at www.turkcell.com.tr
You can now follow the most up-to-date Turkcell developments on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/TurkcellNews
Copyright Business Wire 2014