Bölümde (Bilkent Bilgisayar Müh.) bitirme projesi olarak da yaptığımız ollaa ile bölümün bu dönemki en iyi bitirme projesi ödülüne layık görüldük. Hepimizin şimdiden bu projeden çok şey öğrendik. Başta takım arkadaşlarım cesur coder’lar Uğur Kumru ve Ecem Ünal’a, hocamız Prof. Fazlı Can’a ve yardımlarıyla emeği geçen diğer herkese teşekkürü buradan borç bilirim. Bu da böyle bir hatıramız olsun. 
One of the most important lessons I learned during my startup adventures so far is, creating a business/product relying on third parties is one of the most dangerous choices. Here is what sucks.
All apps submitted to the App Store go through an evaluation process. Sometimes it takes 2 days and sometimes 15 days. You can’t estimate what could possibly happen because the process is not transparent. Even updates go through the full evaluation process. You have a critical bug in your iPhone app and you changed only one line and submitted an update, now you have to wait about a week to get it fixed. (more…)
Recently we have released iPhone app of our mobile social network ollaa. However there have been arguments about why don’t we support iOS 4.x and forced minimum iOS 5.0. In fact it is mostly about trade-offs we made before starting development. iOS 5.0 SDK has several features that made our development phase much easier such as automatic reference counting (makes the code readable and maintainable) and storyboards (made having feedbacks on UI flows and designs possible and removed the need to have separate mockups for flows and UIs)
iOS 5.0 SDK also comes with Core Image library which we use some of it in our app and we are planning to use more of it in the future (spoiler: image filters that we are planning to add soon). They are much inexpensive to develop in iOS 5 SDK. Another important feature of iOS 5 is seamless Twitter integration, where you can connect your Twitter account to ollaa with one click – no username, password is needed if you already using Twitter app on your iDevice.
When we look at upgrade stats of iOS, as of last month 82% of all users have iOS 5.x which clearly indicates it is growing really fast. (Trivia: 40% of iOS users upgrade in 5 days after when an update comes out.) Even if support for the 18% is pretty important (and it will decrease considerably), we currently do not have man power to do this. We are a team of 3 and only one of us is working on our iOS app.
We are really sorry for the convenience we caused for iOS 4.x users. Thanks to Ugur who made our perfect iOS app possible.
While we’re waiting for our mobile social network app ollaa to get approved for iOS App Store in next two days, here’s the mobile OS percentage of 1000+ users signed up for beta invitation. Pretty much shows market shares in Turkey. (Follow @ollaaApp for news.)
(Prelude: At ollaa.com we are 3 undergrad CS students, developing a mobile social network.)
We have faced several difficulties in our startup adventure until now. Here’s a few of them:
Things are slow: When everybody is supposed to pay attention to college courses, development is not so agile and you cannot expect all team members to push feature implementations everyday. GPA-hobbies balance is pretty dangerous. Therefore, you keep postponing release dates. (more…)
In this blog post, I decided to make a compilation of appearances of Turkish startups and notable Internet-related events in Turkish market written in TechCrunch. They are limited to occurrences that directly came out directly from Turkey rather than US-located startups with Turkish co-founders. I am pretty sure this list will grow up in 2012 and so on, perhaps including us.*
Asagi yukari Ekim’den beri tek projeyle mesgulum. Twitter’dan takip edenler muhtemelen bu zamana kadar yuksek olcude reklama maruz kalmislardir. Duymamis olanlar icin, 2007‘den bu yana ilk defa yeni bir startup macerasina atiliyorum: ollaa.com
Kisaca, hayatinizdan belli anlari cep telefonunuzdan arkadaslarinizla paylasabildiginiz, arkadaslariniz arasinda ve sehrinizde hangi aktivitelerin populer oldugunu kesfedebildiginiz ve oneriler alabildiginiz bir sosyal ag.
Yogun bir takim calismasi esliginde bu projeyi hem gercek bir is hem de ayni zamanda okulda bitirme projesi olarak yurutuyorum, malum artik son sinif oldum. (zaman gercekten hizli geciyor) Plana gore ollaa, dogrudan Ingilizce olarak cikacak ve global olarak acilacak. (more…)
