B20 Notes, First Day.

With President Calderon

Los Cabos is a beautiful small resort town of Mexico on the Baja peninsula. It is similar to our Antalya in Turkey, with big resorts and endless beaches. President Calderon chose this beautiful secluded part of Mexico to host the world's business and economy leaders.

The Four Billion Dilemma...

And why isn’t technology fixing things?

First day of G/B20 in Los Cabos , Mexico, there were two very interesting speeches on technology and its applications. One at a fifty thousand feet level with biomedical changes and genome and how it will change us humans; the other on real life applications to problems for other 4 billion people; power and electricity. 

Dean Kamen is president of DEKA company. He worked on stairs climbing wheelchairs; prosthetic arms; pap smear test machines prior.  In his opening line he mentioned all the CEOs who are coming to G20 represented business who operated mostly in the 60 countries in the world and had no interest to go beyond that for economic reasons and he made a call to the room for everyone to focus and help to find a way to fix two very fundamental issues that people in remaining of the world faced today. Water and electricity. He talked about two billion people on earth with no access to electricity and over one billion people with no clean water access; and the other two billion scrambling to get it.

Celebrating global women summit in the city of Athena; 
Goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization!

I have several favorite cities that I love going back to in the world. Since I got the invitation to attend Global Summit of Women in Athens, I been so anxious. I kept on planning, just being happy that I would go to Athens finally after a while. You see, I am originally from Izmir, a beautiful Aegean town right across the sea from Athens, same parallel, same geography, same climate.And in the years I used to cover Greece from Istanbul, I always would feel like I was visiting Izmir with the palm trees, four story apartments w sun shades, our very own food but called Greek food mostly with greens, oh and if I may add, the very same loud and beautiful blonde women Izmir is known for J I did my usual round, ran to the Benaki museum to smell the ethnography of a part of my town Izmir brought to Athens at end of last century; as well as traditional clothes, artifacts, paintings, ancient and archaeological finds from Asia Minor-the land which we call Anatolia today.

World Economic Forum on the Bosphorus

We as team participated in the “World Economic Forum on the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia” which convened more than 1,000 leaders from industry, government and civil society last week in Istanbul. Quite a spectacular event with attendance such high level from all countries surrounding Turkey. 

Nairobi - Conveying the Naked Truth

Places of Interest: Innovation Hub, Nairobi Fairmont Hotel, Nakuru National Park

Third trip in past six months to Africa, this time brought the whole gang, my colleagues with me to Kenya. It is a different feeling. Normally when I talked about Africa, or anyone else for that matter, one keeps talking about opportunities, sharing observations, convey excitement, uncertainties and issues only through own eyes; own rhetoric in the context of whatever is being discussed. And you never can be sure how it is perceived. Whether people around you think you are like a news reporter talking on this far away land where only wars and famine or coups happen. Or they think you are talking about an exotic land where man hasn’t taken over the animal kingdom yet; or specially concocted for a movie set-but for sure somewhere on a planet not within today’s world.

Visiting a South African township

Self-sustaining community center meets technology

First ever place I landed in Sub-Sahara Africa is Johannesburg. It was late 90’s. I remember exactly how it felt: I was stunned and kept on trying to register why I knew so well this was the tip of Africa. It was warm with green beautiful trees I never saw before; and had this amazing color of a sunset falling on the thousands of people walking from work to their townships. The city has gotten much more advanced and crowded since.