年度7大应用软件开发商大阅兵
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信息技术咨询公司高德纳公司（Gartner Research）称，今年全球手机应用软件下载量将逼近180亿次，销售额高达151亿美元，几乎是去年营收的三倍。《财富》杂志（Fortune）将在本文中为您介绍这个欣欣向荣的市场中一些最成功的企业,它们囊括了从加州山景城的互联网巨头到芬兰赫尔辛基逐个字节挑战极限的游戏公司。 |
Global mobile app downloads will reach nearly 18 billion this year with sales of $15.1 billion, nearly triple last year's revenues, according to Gartner Research. Here, Fortune profiles some of the most successful entrepreneurs in this thriving market, from an Internet giant in Mountain View, California to a game company in Helsinki, Finland pushing the envelope one byte at a time. |
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Spotify：全球音乐触手可及 2008年，这款软件在欧洲问世，凭借可让用户免费无限量聆听超过1,500万首乐曲的 “免费+增值”（freemium）创新模式，这一简单、合法的“自助餐式”音乐服务在欧洲部分国家掀起了流行热潮。最近，Spotify公司的首席执行官丹尼尔•艾克对《财富》杂志称：“我们想创造的体验是，全世界所有的音乐全部触手可及。” 为了实现这一目标，Spotify不仅运行速度飞快，而且比苹果公司（Apple）的音乐软件iTunes还要时尚得多，尽管它所有的音乐都依托于云服务。用户在听音乐前无须预付费，但“免费”期是由广告资助的；6个月后，用户就会接到通知，要求其订购Spotify的某个“尊享计划”（premium plans），费用是每个月10美元。通过这些计划，用户可在手机里存储歌曲。 艾克坚信，尽可能降低初次使用门槛，同时辅以出众的用户体验，是赢得用户的关键所在。截至目前，这一软件已有超过1,000万用户，据称其中200万人是付费用户。该公司今年7月登陆美国，希望能够通过一年的运营就能获得丰厚的回报，网罗5,000万名美国用户，。听起来雄心勃勃吗？确实如此。但Facebook近期整合了Spotify的应用，此外还有硅谷的大力支持，因此，一切皆有可能。 |
Music: Spotify Launched in 2008 across the pond, the simple, legal "all-you-can-eat" music service made waves in parts of Europe with an innovative "freemium" model that lets users listen to over 15 million tracks for free. "The essential feeling we wanted to create was to have all of the world's music available at your fingertips," Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told Fortune recently. To that end, Spotify is wicked fast and snappier than Apple's iTunes, despite the fact that all its music resides in the cloud. Users don't have to pay a cent upfront to tune in, but the "free" tier is ad supported and after six months, users will be asked to pony up for one of Spotify's premium plans that scale up to $10 a month. Those plans allows users to store songs on mobile devices. Ek believes that presenting as low a barrier of entry as possible and coupling it with a sharp user experience is key to reeling in users. To date, it has more than 10 million users, a reported 2 million of whom pay. The company expects its U.S. launch in July to pay off in a big way by netting 50 million Americans by the end of its first year of stateside operations. Ambitious? Sure. But with Facebook's recently-launched Spotify integration and Silicon Valley's blessing, anything's possible. |
