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| iCloud became world wide top cloud storage service |
蘋果 (Apple)(AAPL-US) 在眾多科技領域中，都維持領先地位。一份由 Strategy Analytics 所做的調查顯示，在雲端媒體服務，蘋果也是美國榜首， iCloud 及 iTunes Match 市占達 27%，遙遙領先其他競爭者。
據《ZDNet》報導， Strategy Analytics 調查發現，2012 年第 3 季的雲端媒體服務，iCloud 及 iTunes Match 用戶占 27%為最高，其次是 Dropbox 的 17%，Amazon Cloud Player 以 15% 緊追其後，其次才是 Google Drive 的 10%。
蘋果能取得領先的關鍵之一，是他們自 iOS 5 以來，就力推 iCloud 媒體同步，而他們在 MP3 及平板和智慧型手機，都有強大的市占，帶來雲端服務的優勢。
Strategy Analytics 數位媒體部主任 Ed Barton 表示，雲端領域中，「音樂」是最重要的戰場。包括蘋果、Amazon 及 Google，約 90% 利用雲端儲存音樂。即使 Dropbox 比例不是這麼高，也仍有 45% 比例儲存音樂。
一如預期， 年輕人最常使用雲端媒體服務，這次的調查中，20-24 歲美國人使用的頻率最高。不過另一方面，多達 55% 受訪者並不使用雲端媒體服務，也顯示這個領域還需要更長期的經營發展。
Mailbox Cost Dropbox Around $100 Million ( Dropbox 併購 Mailbox )
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| Dropbox + Mailbox aim at platform service as iCloud |
Disrupt alumnus Dropbox made the second in a series of super-savvy, super-early stage acquisitions today, picking up hyped-up email management app Mailbox in an acquisition that we’re calling “DropMail.”
We had been hearing that Mailbox was raising money, piquing the interest of Andreessen Horowitz among others, which is why today’s news that the company sold to the harmoniously named Dropbox didn’t come as a surprise. Sometimes an acquisition is the easiest way to raise resources for growth — especially when you’re tackling as expensive a problem as email. And have a six-figure wait list.
And we’re hearing that this particular acquisition was not cheap — The post-pivot startup cost the storage company “well over” $50 million, according to multiple sources. And we’ve heard that that the price was around $100 million in cash and stock.
Yahoo had also made inroads with the email platform, founded by IDEO veteran Gentry Underwood, which makes sense considering the brand decline of Yahoo Mail as well as the latter company’s dismal mobile traction. But Dropbox’s allure and sympatico vision made more sense for the fledgling startup, whose impressive numbers gave co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi the courage to take a swing at email.
In any case, we can probably expect to see Dropbox handling email attachments real soon.
Dropbox Acquires Snapjoy And Puts Photos Into Its Focus ( Dropbox 併購 Snapjoy )
Less than one week after Dropbox aqui-hired Audiogalaxy to beef up its cloud music ambitions, today comes news of another acquisition, this time focused on another form of media, photos: the cloud-storage giant is buying Snapjoy – like Dropbox, a Y Combinator-alum — which lets users aggregate, archive and view all of their digital photos from their cameras, phones and popular apps like Flickr, Instagram and Picasa, and then view them online or via an iOS app.
We first got wind of this deal via an anonymous tip — and then tracked down what was happening. The news has also been confirmed by Dropbox and Snapjoy themselves.
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| Dropbox will learn Pinterest to aim at Photo platform service? |
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed — or, more precisely, in the words of co-founder Michael Dwan, the price was “A furlong of sunshine or a bucket of rainbows, whichever is less.” Dwan says other companies were also knocking on Snapjoy’s door — but declined to say who. Other investors in addition to Y Combinator included SV Angel, Quotidian and the Start Fund, along with Jawed Karim, Yael and Noam Shazeer and Garry Tan.
I asked Dwan why he decided to sell. The simple answer is scale. “The user experience we always wanted was limited by our development capacity and the economics of scale,” he told me in an email exchange. “Dropbox has some of the best talent in the world and is operating at incredible scale, so a lot of the barriers are removed. The equation in my mind is simple: (Mac + Windows + Android + iOS + Linux + Web clients) * rock solid infrastructure * 100 million users = infinite possibilities.”
Dwan declined to give any details on how many users Snapjoy has signed up, or any other usage metrics, or how many people have been subscribing to its paid tier versus only using the free service.
The move is a sign of how Dropbox continues to “move up the value chain,” extending its touchpoints and service offerings to customers beyond simple storage facilities. The move opens Dropbox up into being more of a full-service digital photo center, rather than just a place to store your jpegs as backup or when your own hard drive runs out of space.
It’s an interesting time in the world of photos — with companies like Instagram under the microscope over what it may or may not decide to do with its users’ data; services like Flickr extending its functionality as a place to create pictures as much as it is a place to store and share them; and Twitter also entering the fray. Snapjoy potentially gives Dropbox its own oar to dip into the stream. It will also put it into closer competition with Facebook Photo Sync. Right now the two partner on filesharing in Facebook Groups, but with moves like this into photos, a bread-and-butter area for Facebook, we could see that relationship changing.
Dwan tells me, and Snapjoy also notes in a blog post, that it will continue to serve its existing customers — a possible sign that the service will live on in another form as part of Dropbox — but for now it’s closing itself to further sign-ups. It looks like Dwan, who co-founded the company with JP Ren, and others are relocating from Boulder, Colorado, to San Francisco. Whether that will be the full, existing team of six people or only a part is still being worked out.
Just as the Audiogalaxy acquisition played to Dropbox’s existing popularity as a place to store music, this, too, could give Dropbox a chance to expand how its users make use of photos stored in Dropbox’s cloud — already a popular use of the service. Dropbox, interestingly, had previously extended its photo capabilities on Android; Snapjoy’s iOS focus, therefore, is complementary to that.
Apple buys Locationary, a startup building a Wikipedia for location
Apple has acquired a Canadian startup called Locationary, which uses crowdsourcing and game mechanics to create a database of up-to-date location and business information data, reports AllThingsD.
Apple will no doubt use Locationary’s location data services to make its maps much more accurate.
分析
- 在雲端媒體服務，蘋果也是美國榜首， iCloud 及 iTunes Match 市占達 27%，遙遙領先其他競爭者，其次是 Dropbox 的 17%，Amazon Cloud Player 以 15% 緊追其後，其次才是 Google Drive 的 10%；這分析發現 Microsoft 的 Skydrive 提供更大雲端儲存空間，但市占卻是最低，因此，雲端儲存媒體是以方便性及其他平台實用性為生意為主；
- 由雲端儲存媒體服務延申至雲端儲存媒體及應用平台生意模式，Dropbox 併購 Mailbox 及 Snapjoy 往應用服務平台生意模式發展，Google Drive 早已將已將 Google docs、Google music 與第三方應用服務軟體結合直接攻向雲端應用服務平台模式來提升市占率；
- 依 Apple iCloud 雲端媒體應用服務平台生意模式，未來 Dropbox 及 Google Drive 最能跟上 Apple ，台廠仍須思考那一種雲端媒體應用服務平台生意模式適合台灣，否則，tablet 及 smart phone 持續低價化時代，台灣電子產業要往那裡走？
- 同時值得注意 AAPL 並購 Locationary，同時正仔細看一些 social apps 公司，讓雲端媒體應用服務平台更完整；
