AVCR became "Best App" in App Store with Funimate

"Selfie" trend is gaining new dimensions all over the world. A kind of Entrepreneurship Selfie is happening at ITU ARI Teknokent. Sometimes the first project of an entrepreneur is enough to reflect his success. Kemal Uğur converted his experience in the global mobile communication sector into a successful entrepreneurship story with his newly founded AVCR company under the roof of ITU ARI Teknokent, the first mobile application he developed, starting out as a hobby at first, took the first place in the App Store. The mobile video application called Funimate of the micro-scale AVCR was introduced as "Best New App" in the App Store when first developed and it became "Best App" in the "Selfie" category by drawing great interest in more than 100 countries. Funnimate provides mobile users innovative and fun filters to quickly make a short video or animation. With Funnimate, users can add some extraordinary effects with creative designs and texts to the short videos they capture using their mobile phones and tablets. The application is the first project that was realized by AVCR established by Kemal Uğur who gained global experience in the field of "video processing and compression" by working with giant companies and returned to Turkey.  Kemal Uğur worked for companies like Nokia and Imagination abroad for years, holds 2 doctorates and carries the "Selfie" craze of the world to a whole new dimension with Funimate. Funimate turns the selfie applications into designable and editable, creative animations. When video creation and sharing gained widespread usage, it made "video compression" technologies a must. Because if the videos are not compressed they require much bigger bandwidths. Due to the heavy traffic of social media and global video-sharing websites, the video compression technology is being developed in a common standard which is easy and equally usable by everyone. Giant firms of the mobile communication sector are leading the new developments in this field. Kemal Uğur, worked as the R&D Manager at Nokia in Finland which is one of the leading companies, aims to bring the technology development process in this field to Turkey upon his return. Kemal Uğur graduated from ODTÜ Electric Electronic Engineering Department in 2001, completed his master's degree in Canada, went to Finland as per the request of the R&D Center of Nokia in 2004, came back to Turkey after 10 years to establish his own business. As soon as he returned to Turkey, he started to work for an international customer to develop technology under the roof of ITU ARI Teknokent. AVCR, consisting of 2 people, is a micro-scale company but started to achieve very important works way over its scale. Kemal Uğur describes the product of his company as "brain power" and along with the technology development works for his international customer at AVCR, he also created a mobile application as his frist product. He developed Funimate as a hobby, a very simple end-user oriented application that uses mobile video process. Kemal Uğur says that Apple emphasized Funimate a lot and he will pay more attention to this field and develop new products next year. Funimate has a technology that uses the graphic processor of the mobile device in the background and presents the end-users entertaining effects that will increase the attraction of the self-videos in sharing environments like Vine. So, users especially between the age of 14 and 18, live an entertaining video show experience like a game without realizing the complex technology behind. The technological infrastructure of AVCR enables Funimate to run much faster than similar applications. If we can watch films or videos on the Internet, we owe it to the vide compression technologies even if we bo not realize that. Because Internet does not have the bandwidth to allow non-stop video data flow yet. While we own Internet as a communication area that raises our quality of life and enriches our daily lives, the "unnamed heros" who develop the new technologies often become important unnoticed milestones of technology.