About

thebluebear dot-com

Musings on dot-coms, user experience, music, and beyond…

Heya! thebluebear dot-com is Onur Kabadayi’s blog and homepage.

I live in the beautiful mega-city of Istanbul. I’m currently with Hurriyet, Turkey’s leading news media group, as an Internet Products Manager / Specialist. I also consult people on various new-media matters, including web application development, customer relationship management, and e-marketing.

In order to trace the origins of my passion to Internet and Technology, one must go back to days when I was 7 – a child struggling to explore his first computer, a “Commodore 64”, and trying to execute BASIC programming codes explained in the users’ manual. Many years later, while I was studying at the Bilkent University (B.Sc. Management), this passion turned into a hobby of authoring columns and administering websites for some prominent Turkish computing magazines.

Then, I moved to USA and earned a masters degree in Marketing from the Northwestern University (# 1 ranked), focusing on new-media and CRM. In the years to follow, I lived in Chicago and San Francisco while working for both Fortune500 companies and start-ups as a Product Manager and CRM Consultant. Going through the journey of starting an online media start-up and raising funding in the early web2.0 era, I’m an aspiring entrepreneur, and greatly appreciate and respect everyone who has the guts to try!

As a new-media professional, I’m committed to deeply explore the user perspective of digital products. I usually assume a product-centric role, collecting insights via user interviews and data-mining, charting the ideal design, interactions, content to deliver superior user experiences, and overseeing marketing communications efforts. Bridging technology, business, and user goals, I relate to my role as a “new-media architect”, and had managed numerous inter-disciplinary and distributed project teams.

Always in search of opportunities to discover the new and the interesting, I love music and sometimes DJ, am a social media enthusiast (see the “find me on” widget at right), a movie buff, a biker, a snowboarder, and a backpacker who extensively traveled around Europe and America.

If you like to know me more, stay tuned on this blog, and feel free to connect on Facebook & LinkedIn. You can also find my email address on the Facebook profile badge below…