Is everything has to be about money?

Is everything has to be about money? E-Tohum's founder, Burak Büyükdemir, has been fighting to get Turkish startups as good as those in Silicon Valley almost single handedly for over a decade. It was great to see that his efforts, together with his wonderful team members such as Elif Çoşkunkan, were not in vain. Thousands of entrepreneurs and investors gathered in Istanbul.

At this year's event, there was also a competition to become the world's best startup.

Startup Istanbul gathered 25,000 startup applications from 135+ countries and shortlisted 4,000+ of them. Shortlisted startups were interviewed by the startups selection team and the 100 most promising were chosen as Startup100. The chosen startups met with mentors on Oct. 6-7 at Istanbul Technical University. Fifty of them pitched to investors on Oct. 8, competing to be one of the 15 finalists on the stage of Volkswagen Arena on Oct. 10.

In the end, CashBasha from Jordan was chosen as the best. CashBasha enables customers in emerging markets to shop on their favorite e-commerce stores with ease. With CashBasha, customers from the Middle East and North African region can shop from popular foreign online shopping sites and receive their items right to their doorstep with the preferred payment, logistics, customs clearance and customer service solutions all taken care of. CashBasha currently serves Amazon U.S. orders into the region and is growing to add more merchants and marketplaces. 

Innovera Labs came in second with its A.T.A.R. software. The A.T.A.R. was built to automate defenses against cyber-attacks. Organizations today are drowned in cyber alerts, with a typical organization getting somewhere between 300 to 3,000 alerts per day from their defensive systems. This is...