The technologies underlying the digital economy go beyond the Internet and personal computers. Information and communication technologies were placed not only in technological products such as mobile phones, but also in a very wide product range such as MP3 players and digital cameras. Information and communication technologies are used in other products including washing ma-chines, cars, credit cards, and industrial products (lasers, instruments, robots).
In order to provide the continuity of cheaper, better, and easier use, organi-zations find new and enlarged use areas in information and communication technologies every day. As has been pointed out by observers specializing in information and communication technologies, in the last 40 years, a critical step in the transformation of technological potential in economic productivity is that users of information and communication technologies discovered the thought of “How can we use processing power quicker and cheaper than usual?”
Today, even listing one-tenth of new applications, whose use areas are formed in a wide range, has become a large task for sectors (Atkinson & Mckay, 2007: 7).
The most important areas of the digital economy, spread to a large area, are reported below:
• Transportation and Telecommunication: Thanks to transportation and tele-communication technology, political and economic borders in countries lost their importance. An event that is experienced on one side of the world can affect a place on the other side of the world in a very short time. Thanks to this, transportation and communication costs largely fell and people and markets were able to more easily communicate with the removal of borders.
Furthermore, the nation-state lost its importance and economies became more dependent on each other. With economic globalization, in goods and services, cross-border operations for international capital movements in-creased (Öztürk, 2005: 38).
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• Education: With the flexible production digital economy, digitalization, net-work structures, and the service sector stand out and increase the importance of investments in people, resulting in lifelong learning becoming the main target (Salur, 2012: 54). With the digital economy, we entered a period where investments in people are higher than physical capital (Pohjola, 2002: 143). At the same time, as the digital economy becomes widespread, universities, private course service providers, and other educational services, thanks to technologies such as video conferences and online cooperation portals, are able to present courses via remote education without the need for face-to-face communication (OECD, 2014: 72). This also gives the opportunity for more people to benefit from the services that are presented.
• Financial Services and some Economic Innovations: Although banks, insur-ance providers, and other firms, including non-traditional services, still sup-port the operation of branch networks, there are significant opsup-portunities for customers to manage their own finances, conduct administrative procedures, and access new products online. The better use of data also provides oppor-tunity to grow in connection with products such as personal spending analy-sis used for consumer understanding and advertisement income. The digital economy enables specific operations to be completed more efficiently, includ-ing followinclud-ing digital indices, managinclud-ing investment portfolios, and buyinclud-ing and selling with a high frequency (OECD, 2014: 72). Thanks to financial operation becoming easier with the use of the Internet, many Internet users are able to directly manage their transactions in financial markets without the help of a mediator. Together with technological developments, e-finance applications acquiring a place for themselves change the surface of the financial service industry. With new forms of service, in which banks, brokers, and firms take place online, there is an opportunity to present a comparative financial service to consumers in different countries (Claessens et al., 2001: 3).
On the other hand, the digital economy is interested in the multidirectional trans-formation of commercial interactions and operations and also in providing in-novations. For example, together with the digital economy, new digital money payment processes emerged including the “digital wallet” and “bitcoin” (Rouse, searchcio.techtarget.com). The digital wallet is a type of software that enables money to be kept, spent, and made available on electronic devices of the user. It is an electronic wallet, in which credit cards, bank cards, or prepaid cards can be recognized in a single place. Since digital wallets provide communication between users and banks, in the transactions, which are conducted on the wallet, although authority belongs to the user, security is mostly under the responsibility of bank.
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According to the studies of Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group3, it is expected that the digital wallet will be the first payment method preferred by smartphone users in 2017 (psmmag.com). Bitcoin is an electronic money transfer unit actu-alizing between users that are connected through a computer network system (Ege, 2013: 23). Since the explanation of Bitcoin, which is one of the important innovations of the digital economy, and a description of how it recently acquired a place in our life will be discussed in the following sections, at the moment, we only provide its definition.
• Manufacturing and Agriculture: The digital economy, beside controlling robots and having the ability to monitor production processes in the factory, provided an increase in planning and development. The products produced have also become increasingly information intensive. In the automotive sector, in sup-posedly 90% of new features of cars, there are important software components.
In farms, products, animals, and land can be observed using environmental quality systems. Increasingly, routine procedures and agricultural equipment can be kept under control via automation systems (OECD, 2014: 72).
• Health: The digital economy, in the health sector, creates a revolution by pro-viding opportunities from remote diagnosing using health records to increas-ing patient experiences and system efficiency. In addition, the digital economy provides an opportunity to announce medicament and other treatment options.
• Media and Broadcasting: The digital economy, with its increasing wideband access, thanks to traditional media players, largely opened new ways for trans-mitting content. Furthermore, via enabling non-traditional new resources and participation in news media, and forming social networks and user content, the digital economy provided an increase of user participation in the media, which largely changed the media and broadcasting industry. In addition, the digital economy increased the strengths of the company for receiving infor-mation about the views of the digital economy and towards the use of this information (ECD, 2014: 73).
In health, education, and telecommunication sectors, with digital transforma-tion applied in many areas, productivity increase occurred and, together with the increase of digital applications, has continued to increase. Revolution in in-formation and communication technologies has many comprehensive benefits.
3 In the financial services sector, established in the US in 2002, they are a technologi-cal and management consultancy, presenting complex technologitechnologi-cal solutions (www.
bloomberg.com).
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In many issues such as improving quality of life, making it easier to receive information, and improving the quality of health services, the digital economy plays an active role. Although the importance of these benefits have already been mentioned, perhaps the most important benefit of this revolution is the effect of the digital economy on the economy and economic production. Information and communication technologies are the main factors that are responsible for reversing the slowing of productivity between the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and are the maintaining elements that exist today (Atkinson & Mckay, 2007: 10).