Last month, when we got the chance to meet Caglar and Nihan from cember.net in Hamburg, they filled us in a bit on the Turkish market. Now in the first part of the openBLOG interview, Caglar describes the historical development of the Internet in Turkey and the Turkish online market in general.

1. Turkey is the fastest growing economy in Europe – what role does the Internet play in the country's economy?

Caglar: Back in 1995, when I was working at one of the first Internet companies in Turkey, I remember that our clients could not get connection speeds faster than 10 bps (not kbps!). I had to tell customers to be patient and wait for a simple text page to load. As a result, not many people were really interested in this “slow and painful” connection back then.

Since then, the Internet has come a long way. Today Turkish internet users are enjoying connection speeds of a few megabits per second, thanks to ADSL and the recent introduction of fiber services. According to the Turkey Internet Report 2007 (only in Turkish) conducted by Beykent University in Istanbul, the number of internet users in Turkey now exceeds 16 million. This of course makes the Internet an important medium for simply everything, from doing business to education to socializing.

A lot of businesses have already adapted, starting to use email in the late 1990’s. By 2000, companies started learning to use the Internet for expanding their businesses as well. There have been announcements in the media that the new Turkish Trade Law will require all companies to have a website. If this happens, even the most traditional businesses will be drawn into the online sector.

ReadWriteWeb’s Emre Sokullu, in his great blog entry “What is it about Turkey” states correctly that the number of young people in Turkey exceeds even that of the most populated countries in Europe, and also that Turkish people have very social characteristics. This is why world’s leading social networking sites and applications have been very successful here.

There is also a significant effort on the e-government side: According to the Global e-Government Report 2007 conducted by Brown University, Turkey’s government websites were ranked 8th out of 198 countries worldwide. With this ranking, Turkey surpassed a lot of EU countries, including Germany and Ireland.

2. How is the Turkish online market currently developing?

Caglar: When Turkish Telecom started providing ADSL service a few years ago, the number of Internet users increased dramatically. This of course affected online business as a whole: Services that require higher bandwidth have been launched, people started shopping, recruiting, ordering, and paying taxes online. And it's not only the younger generation: My mother is a retired teacher, and she checks her emails every day, pays the bills online using the bank’s payment system, and IMs with me and my sister. A lot of companies, both local and foreign, are seeing a big opportunity in Turkey and new investments in this market. The online advertising budgets are increasing rapidly as well.

Read part 2 of the interview next week, when Caglar will tell us more about the cember.net user base, Turkish networking habits and the Dos and Don’ts of doing business in Turkey.