Transcriber: Esra Çakmak Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Image that you wake up at the same exact time as usual.
You feel great today. What a beautiful day, huh?
You get prepared and take the road.
You're walking down the same old road,
and you see the same old people on the street.
But you notice something unusual.
The store at the other side of the road is not open yet.
Just as you are wondering
why the manager who opens the store at 7 a.m. every day is late,
you hear a blaring car horn and the screech of brakes.
Everything is fading now.
Let me take you a few hours after from this incident.
I am sitting in front of my PC in my dorm room.
Then an emergency announcement distracts me.
Urgent! Type O- blood needed.
Facebook, Twitter, all social media,
online news sites get flooded with posts seeking three units of type O- blood.
Your friends, your relatives do whatever they can
to get those three units of blood to a loved person:
you.
Unfortunately,
we frequently encounter similar stories in our daily lives.
Some parts of this story are of course fiction.
But the rest are my memories.
When Google and the US embassy asked us
to find a solution to a social issue with the use of mobile apps,
I immediately thought of all those times
when I saw someone looking for blood for a loved person.
Within 22 hours, we built a location-based android application
to get blood donors and the people who are looking for blood together.
It is based on a basic foundation.
Users can reach suitable blood donors within a certain radius, directly,
and send them requests
to get them to the nearest hospital as soon as possible.
However,
we faced our worst enemy:
the lack of awareness
about how important the blood donation is, here in Turkey.
According to the data gathered by the Turkish Red Crescent,
in developed countries,
five percent of the population donates their blood frequently.
On the other hand,
this figure is only 1.5 percent in our country.
The challenge was to encourage people to donate their blood.
Our solution was to add some gamification element to this serious process.
Everyone, especially millennials,
want fun in every step of their lives these days.
In our application,
we have some fun badges for donors.
Like blood-buddies badges,
when you donate your blood to a Facebook friend.
Or oldies-but-goldies, for three years or older members.
At the end of the day, fun sells.
That element of fun impressed the jury very much.
And their votes took us to the United States,
where we met professionals from academic and business life.
We also met with the American Red Cross officials
and got some very useful feedback on our application.
After getting back to Turkey,
we realised that we missed the key point in the story.
Actually,
the punch line of this story, in our perspective,
is that it only takes one application to solve a crucial social issue,
like saving lives.
Yeah,
I admit,
every social issue comes with much more obstacles than we can imagine.
But I want you to think for a moment:
what if there are more social issues
that can be solved with just a simple application?
I want to leave you with a few words of a great leader:
''I had a dream.
I saw the obstacles ahead,
and when I removed them, my dream came true.''
Thank you.
(Applause)