ABOUT

Armed with a host of business and consumer experience, Tekin kicked off his career by specializing in business applications of CRM structuring for Mondial Assistance Group. With a desire to shift gears from business-to-business to consumer marketing, Tekin moved over to McCann Relationship Marketing. In 2007, Tekin leveraged his business development expertise and launched a bold new software venture called BeFunky. Today, BeFunky is the parent company of popular consumer software projects Cartoonizer and Uvatar. Tekin holds a B.A from Marmara University and an MBA from Sabanci University.

At 31 years old, Kemal Ozisikclilar's resume already reads like that of an accomplished retiree. A mechanical engineering degree coupled with an MBA opened the doors to countless opportunities in a variety of sectors for Kemal. Noteworthy companies that have looked to Kemal for guidance and expertise include: Xerox where he held a key marketing role and contributed to the growth of the company; General Motors where he held a regional sales responsibility role for Opel, Vauxhall, Saab and Chevrolet; and finally DuPont Chemicals Co. where he was a business development manager for Turkey Middle East North Africa and a sales manager for critical cleaning products. In 2007, Kemal co-founded BeFunky with Tekin Tatar.

Mehmet Ozkanoglu's resume is as animated as each piece in his portfolio. With an inherent ability to create masterpieces using only a piece of paper and a pencil, Mehmet was well suited for the first stop on his career train. At 18, he took a cartoonist position at Leman, one of Turkey's most famous cartoon publications, wearing cartoonist, writer and editor hats. A move to New York allowed Mehmet to spread his wings in freelance graphic design while still contributing to Leman. Upon his return to Turkey, Mehmet became one of the most sought-after cartoonists in the country, working with advertising agencies on leading brands including Fenerbahce, Besiktas Sports Club, Turkcell, Pierre Cardin, J&J, Twigy and T-box. Today, Mehmet oversees all creative development of BeFunky.

BeFunky tools may seem incredibly easy to use, but a lot went into developing the software that powers them. That's where Tolga Birdal comes in. At 16 years old, Tolga began his engineering education at Robert College and was quickly recognized for his intellect upon receiving the Sait Halman Computer Science Award. With an unparalleled thirst for knowledge, Tolga enrolled in Sabanci University's Electronics program where he studied Vision Systems. Noteworthy achievements include his work in license plate recognition, RoboChess, road & intersection segmentation, painting classification, and automatic caricature & cartoon generation. Tolga is fluent in multiple programming languages including OpenCV, Matlab Imaging, LTILib image processing platforms, FANN, LibSVM pattern recognition tools, C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, Visual Basic.NET, J#, Java, MATLAB, Assembler, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Verilog, HandleC and PICBasic Pro. His hardware expertise includes a wide range of cameras, several robots, lighting equipment and industrial control tools.

If you're old enough to remember when MSDOS ruled the roost, you'll appreciate Azer Bulbul's career path. At 16 years old, when most teenagers were at the mall, Azer Bulbul was coding software. His dedication has certainly paid off. Today, Azer is an expert in several scripting and programming languages including Python, Php, Flex, ActionScript,C#.net, C/C++, Java, ASP.net, ASP, MYSQL, MSSQL and Oracle. Azer is also an expert on Cad/Cam production, financial control, POS/Palm office, form flow management, e-learning and accounting systems, and has developed several types of database driven web sites including video-sharing and e-commerce solutions.

Emre Suvari may have graduated from Istanbul Technical University with a degree in architecture, but building houses and office buildings wouldn't be in the cards. Today, Emre designs and builds something a little bit different. Leveraging his follow-up MA in Interactive Multimedia from London College of Printing, Emre landed a position at 4i, a respected London-based brand design agency. Years later, he offered his expertise to Make Fresh Media where he tackled projects for a variety of large clients including Turkcell, Garanti Bank and Bonus Card.

Emre's programming career began before he was old enough to drive. It was in high school where Emre first discovered, then mastered, the intricacies of two programming languages - Pascal and C. His passion for programming would rocket Emre to a career of learning new programming languages and discovering new applications for his talent. The Computer Science and Engineering program at Sabanci University expanded Emre's programming knowledge tenfold. In no time at all, he had developed dozens of web applications using PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL. His discovery of the immense potential of computer graphics peaked Emre's curiosity even further and over the course of his academic life, he has developed applications using OpenGL and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). A terrain rendering game for visualizing Istanbul in 3D, a model helicopter game and multiple virtual reality applications round out the list of software developed by Emre.

Emrah Bala graduated from Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Middle East Techical University. Before completing his undergraduate education, he had already began working for Multi Media Research Group in METU EEE. To improve his skills on computer vision, he started his MS on the subject and began working at Pattern Recognition and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory. As a reseach person and project engineer, he contributed several military projects for TUBITAK and ASELSAN. His research interests are video/image processing, artifical intelligence, artifical neural networks. He is highly experienced on C/C++, MATLAB, Code Composer Studio(DSP), OpenCV, Assembler, Java.