Young Developers to Visit the Silicon Valley as Turkcell’s “Developers of The Future” Celebrates 1st Anniversary

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

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