Emre Berkin is Vice President for Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Chairman of Microsoft’s Middle East and Africa (MEA) operations. Emre has overall responsibility for 79 countries.Emre Berkin is credited with accelerating the growth and expansion of Microsoft’s operations in Middle East and Africa. With his initiative, Emre and his team worked closely with key government leaders, industry partners and customers to enable governments, citizens and businesses to benefit from the information technology revolution. Today, as a result of this sustained effort, Microsoft is seen as the number one preferred enterprise partner and a driving force in software development and IT growth in this region.

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Taleworlds, an independent game studio founded by a Turkish couple, is creating little waves in the gaming community since April 2005. Their first title “Mount&Blade” is a PC game that combines an intuitive combat system with role playing elements.

The designer of Mount&Blade is Armağan Yavuz. Following his graduation from the Computer Science and Informatics Department of Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, he pursued academic studies on Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence. Armağan and Ipek came together several years after their graduation from the same department and embarked on Armağan’s ambitious game project. Little did they know about the difficulties of game development, but they had the enthusiasm and courage.

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Born in Izmir, Turkey, Meltem (Yaşaroğlu) Birkegren graduated from T.E.D. Ankara Koleji in 1969. She studied at the Academy of Economical & Commercial Sciences in Ankara (AITIA), majoring in Foreign Trade. After graduation in 1973, she joined Ericsson Türk Ticaret, Ltd as Assistant Trade Director, and eventually became the Trade Director. She remained in that position until May 1985 when she got married and moved to Sweden, where she was rehired by Ericsson to work at their headquarters. After two years in Stockholm, she moved to Nassau, Bahamas with her husband where she stayed until August 1988 when she moved to Ft.Lauderdale, Florida in the U.S.A. where she still resides.

She started her own Export company in 1989, and has been in the same business ever since. Her company exports heavy duty machinery parts, especially for ships engines, as well as equipment and parts for larger hotels. She also provides Turkish interpreter services, and she is a partner at Europe House, Inc.

Meltem who always wanted to be a journalist fulfilled this dream partially, by first posting news articles on different Yahoo groups and the Turkish Forum, then she started her own electronic online newspaper called Turkish Digest.

The news in Turkish Digest is in English and about Turkey, collected daily from a variety of sources. In a very short time the site reached a reader capacity of couple thousand “hits” per day.

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