Cadbury's Turkish flavor

I am not sure if Cadbury is marketing this chocolate in Turkey but who needs a chocolate like this which has a taste identity crisis? Apparently they tried to put Turkish Delight inside but the taste got a big thumbs down from the Sidis. There was not even a taste of Turkish Delight in this chocolate. It seems in the UK, the brits have had something similar for years....



Will Cadbury start introducing chocolates under Dairy Milk Greek, Dairy Milk Armenian, Dairy Milk Kurdish, Dairy Milk Lebanese, Dairy Milk Iraqi or Dairy MilkIranian?

Facebook mania in Turkey

Can this be a new mania in Turkey. When my sister sent me an invite to be a friend, I knew that Facebook was getting a viral effect in Turkey. Yes, I told her I am already your brother....
I am not complaining about this craze, because thanks to this craze I got connected to my highschool and college budyy Robert.

New face of e-training: Elsevier Training Desk

Nop, our new TrainingDesk is not your father's Oldmobiles.

The new TrainingDesk includes a blog by Gali Halevi, a wiki where customers can collaborate and share their training experiences; and plenty of tutorials and presentations about Embase, Scopus, Science Direct and Engineering Village. I think this is a great attempt to make training more interactive and get customers input and contributions. I can see the wiki turning into a great collection of training materials including videos which are created by our academic and corporate librarians, and students. It's refreshing to see that our customers can access to all these products' training materials in one location. Also we are taking the training to a new level i.e from teaching boolean search to topic-focused online seminars. Now let's see how our customers will use the site.

Pfizer is tapping into Sermo's network of doctors

This week Sermo ( a social networking site for physicians) and Pfizer announced a strategic collaboration. This is from the press release:

Pfizer, working together with Sermo’s physician community and other Sermo partners, plans to pursue a number of key objectives through this collaboration, including:

• Discover, with physicians, how best to transform the way medical information is exchanged in the fast-moving social media environment


• Create an open and transparent discussion with physicians through the innovative channel offered by online exchange


• Engage with the FDA to define guidelines for the use of social media in communications with healthcare professionals


• Work with physicians to develop a productive exchange between pharmaceutical professionals and the Sermo community

What can STM publishers learn from Shelfari's new widget

Shelfari launched its new widget where users can publish their bookshelf. Now here is an idea for all STM publishers: how about creating a widgets where our customers can publish easily the articles that they are downloading and reading to share with other in their blogs? (yes, you need to have subscription to read the full-text)

Customer focus, customer centric: lessons from Amazon

Once you put customer centricity as your main mission success is closer to reach:

"There's another situation, too, where I think being customer focused is better, and thats when you are a leader. If you're competitor focused, you tend to slack off when your benchmarks say that you're best. But if your focus is on customers, you keep improving"

"Years from now, when people look at back at Amazon, I want them to say that we uplifted customer-centricity across the entire business world"

Jeff Bezos, at HBR October 2007, "The Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos.

Research Trends:Scientific trends using bibliometric analysis

Research Trends which is powered by Scopus is a our new bi-monthly newsletter "providing objective, up-to-the-minute insights into scientific trends based on bibliometric analysis."

The first issue has great articles for anyone interested with bibliometric analysis. The most interesting for me was the Country Trends section where they cover Turkey and her research output. (btw if there was a commenting feature in these articles probably we can generate some conversation around them.)

"The increase in research articles across this period [2000-2006] is occurring at an average rate of 17% per annum over the period 2000-2006, as compared with a 3.5% p.a. overall growth in the same period"

I think another factor that is helping the research output in Turkey is her population. Turkey which has over 71m people has the youngest population in Europe (second is Ireland) .When I was visiting Turkey this summer one of the things that I noticed was almost in every corner that was a university. This trend is not just in Istanbul but in the southern part of the country too. Unemployment is high among graduates, so sometimes is better to stick around in the university and do some research.

PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials

PLoS new hub is another way to create a dynamic and interactive community in is specialized topic. Register users will be able to rate, annotate and discuss articles.

"Currently, the PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials features articles originally published in PLoS Clinical Trials, along with clinical trials articles from PLoS ONE.

In the future, this new resource will expand to include articles from all the PLoS titles that publish clinical trials. It will also feature open-access articles from other journals plus user-generated content." via bbmg