“In March 2016, I was visiting Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a mutual friend introduced me to Sadik Yildiz, whose family runs a number of information-technology companies. Among them is Yeni Medya, or New Media Inc., which exemplifies just how fast a small maker can get just how big from just how remote a place by leveraging the supernova.
New Media Inc., which was founded by Yildiz’s nephew, Ekrem Teymur, does big data analytics and media monitoring for the Turkish and other governments and the private sector, among many other things. They track all the media, including social media, in real time and can report to their customers what stories appear about them in the media anywhere. They can also inform the customer in real time of the top twenty subjects people are talking about and in what proportions. It is all displayed on a dashboard in colored boxes with the headline and percentage in each box.
“The Turkish presidency is a customer, and through our system they can receive a real-time poll service—every minute you can poll the public,” Yildiz explained to me. “Big data is making things easy for everyone now. The software that we have developed in-house aggregates all the news sources in Turkey and the United States every five minutes—even Google News does not track every source at this pace all the time. We track all the existing stories on Twitter, and we archive all the stories that we track—one million stories a day; no one is archiving like that even in the United States—so if a news source deletes the story they publish about you after it is circulated, you can still use our system to retrieve it and use it for judiciary purposes. And then any government or company can use that to track what is said about them.”
How do you make money?
“The business makes money on a subscription basis depending on how many keywords you want tracked and how many users you will have,” explained Yildiz. “‘Thomas Friedman’ would only be one word.” (A bargain!) “They can give you content analysis, what is being said about you, break it down by geography, where it is coming from, how many people in which city are reading it, who started the story about you or the trend first—that is, who are the influencers—and how many followers used the same wording or how the original wording evolved and changed.”
I was intrigued. It turns out that whispering—like guessing—is also officially over. “All the members of the Turkish parliament are using it to track about themselves,” said Yildiz. “So are some news agencies, [who can] judge their reporters by whose stories are getting picked up most.”
I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear everything being said about me, but I was intrigued by the tool they’d built. How much does it cost? Packages range from one thousand to twenty thousand dollars, he said, again depending on the number of keywords you want tracked.
So with all this amazing technology and reach, I asked, where did you start this company?
“Batman,” he answered.
Is that a real place? I asked. “Yes it is!” Yildiz shot back. “And actually the city’s mayor has sued the Batman movie for using the name without permission!” Yildiz is a Turkish Kurd, and so his family’s company is based in the Kurdish-speaking region of eastern Turkey, in the family’s hometown, called Batman. They have other businesses—construction and water treatment. But their real success came through leveraging the supernova from Batman. How did they do that? It was a family affair that started up as soon as the global flows from the supernova hit their town.
“My nephew, Ekrem Teymur, is the founder and chief engineer behind it—he is forty-two,” explained Yildiz. “He was born in Batman and is the number-one data engineer in Turkey—the company was his idea.” New Media Inc. has one hundred employees, and for a long time was competing from Batman with the biggest companies in the world. Most of the key positions in the company are held by family members—Ekrem and his six sisters, all born in Batman. The sisters, most of whom had only basic education, are now working as the chief editor, “sales managers, and app production managers—a remarkable thing for a city where most of the women are not even allowed by their families to work.
The main business office, though, is now in Istanbul, said Yildiz, “but we still employ a lot of people in Batman.” Thanks to all the connectivity today, they “can sit in their home in front of their computers and do jobs for us—and so it creates a lot of employment opportunities.” Besides Batman and Istanbul, they have offices now in Dublin, Dubai, Beirut, and Palo Alto. Why the hell not?
“There is nothing called ‘underprivileged’ anymore,” said Yildiz. “All you need is a working brain, some short training, and then put your idea into a fantastic business from any part of the world!”
Sadik Yildiz’s story—and I have met so many others like him in the past decade—is a vivid example of how education plus connectivity plus supernova means that “more and more people are being empowered at lower and lower levels of income than ever before, so they think and act as if they were in the middle class, demanding human security and dignity and citizens’ rights,” explained Khalid Malik, former director of the U.N.’s Human Development Report Office. “This is a tectonic shift. The Industrial Revolution was a ten-million-person story. This is a couple-of-billion-person story.” And we are just at the beginning of it.”
