Many routine practices, from shopping to transportation, ordering food to renting a house and making mobile payments to using smart household appliances are undergoing change thanks to digital entrepreneurs in Turkey. Women are fans of E-commerce and men invariably turn to the internet for electronic items when shopping. People in Turkey are taking advantage of the increasing influence of technology in their daily lives by accessing various platforms through the simple touch of a button, Daily Sabah writes.
In mega cities like Istanbul, taxis can be busy and hard to find on rainy days. The app called Bitaksi, used by those seeking a taxi, is also preferred by taxi drivers. Thousands of taxis in the Bitaksi system belong to private owners rather than companies and are not affiliated with cab stands. They wait for customers in different parts of the city and as a result, they have occasional arguments with police and other drivers. The Bitaksi app relieves those seeking a taxi as well as taxi drivers who search frustratingly for customers. Nonetheless, Turkey’s fastest organizing trade body seems to favor this app meaning slimmer prospects for apps like Uber.
Bitaksi is just one of the numerous apps that re-shape daily and business life. Yemeksepeti.com, which has transformed ordering to homes or offices, is also an app widely used in Turkey. Other apps include gittigidiyor.com, which has changed shopping habits and was bought by eBay; e-trading apps like sahibinden.com and hepsiburada.com; logistics and transportation services like Bitaksi,Getir and tatilsepeti.com. The rules of conventional competition have been radically transformed by these apps. Technology investments by banks coupled with the Interbank Card Center (BKM) and intense competition in mobile payment systems have demonstrated a huge boost for entrepreneurs in these areas. After getting on the radar of international companies, Pozitron Yazılım, an Istanbul-based mobile technology specialist, was bought by the British firm Monitise. Though there are not many in number, ventures in these fields continue to multiply.
Technoparks within universities provide a suitable environment for new ventures. The two largest universities in Turkey, Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ) and Ankara’s Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ), support entrepreneurs in areas such as telecommunications, mobile communication, chemicals and defense industries. İTÜ’s „Arı Teknokent,“which strives to create an entrepreneurship ecosystem, hosts both global players, local technology and telecom companies like Vestel, Türk Telekom, Vodafone and Oksijen.
Turkey provides significant opportunities to create a suitable environment for entrepreneurs. Websites such as yemeksepeti.com, which have changed eating habits, gittigidiyor.com, which led to greater use of e-commerce in shopping, together with sahibinden.com and hepsiburada.com, have been the pioneers of change in Turkey. Now, Bitaksi transforms both taxi drivers and transportation habits. However, there is still a need to pave the way for new and different ventures alongside these. Technoparks within universities serve as business incubators for new entrepreneurs in addition to offering economic advantages. Here are some of the new habits brought about by the new entrepreneurship culture.
From open offices to employees becoming shareholders, from sharing economy to leasing services, from cloud technology to the Big Data, habits and business cultures of digital entrepreneurs act as a new constitution. Entrepreneurs mining Big Data, designing robots that answer customers’questions with smart software, transforming conventional business methods with the apps they develop will permanently change ways of doing business in Turkey as well as around the world. The ever growing number of people who subscribe to music services instead of downloading music is proof of this change. A generation that stores photographs in the cloud instead of keeping them in a hard disk or DVD changes old habits for the better. There should be a suitable environment for local companies that change such habits.
Uber, a company that doesn’t own a single car, changes the transportation habits of people. Without a single store, Amazon offers us shopping suggestions based on our shopping habits. Airbnb, which doesn’t own a hotel or lodging house, hosts people in private homes and gets to know people’s holiday and travel preferences. Facebook looks at what we like and Google looks at what we search for, and both try to figure out our needs and show us ads. It’s this new generation of entrepreneurs that is the chief agents of a changing business and daily life.
Indeed, they will determine the flow speed and the course of digital money in the near future. Moreover, physical money will lag far behind digital money soon. Countries managing to attract digital entrepreneurs to their economy will have greater influence over the flow course of money. That’s why everyone races for providing an attractive environment to entrepreneurs who write digital algorithms.
Reminding that Steve Jobs, the founder and legendary director of Apple, the most valuable company ever in U.S. history, was the son of a Syrian immigrant, U.S. President Barack Obama emphasizes the need for changing immigration policies.
Generations born approximately 15 years ago may have had their first photograph experience not through a camera but with a smart phone. Previously, parents used to buy a video camera to record memories of their children. Filming every moment of their child was a wonderful option. Nowadays, these video cameras have already become a thing of the past. Small compact cameras suffered a decisive defeat against the many features from cameras of smartphones. Though the company has quit producing cameras by now, Samsung currently remains the largest seller of cameras. Since smart phone cameras have become the sole camera in our life, the digital imaging fair Fotokina in Germany has featured new generation cameras and storage devices.
It became impossible for cameras to compete with smartphones as they cannot match their rival’s two strong features: communication and instant sharing. So, digital cameras with the Android operating system acting like smart phones have been released for some time. To entice the new generation of photographers, devices using the same operation systems with smart phones have been designed.
Nowadays, devices that see the smartphone as a complementary product instead of directly competing with them also appear. Thus, Canon EOS M5 tries to meet the needs of consumers by maximizing communication abilities. Along with features like WI-FI and NFC, EOS M5 also offers Bluetooth connection. Hence, you enjoy a permanent internet connection between your smartphone and camera. As a result, you don’t need to take out your camera since you can transfer the images through your smart phone, which establishes WI-FI connection automatically when needed, or quickly glancing at them. Looking at such features, we see that as phones get smarter and communication abilities of digital cameras increase, opportunities for collaboration also increase.
