Three MCL students presented their case studies about business startups in industry in the last lecture of the entrepreneurship course this summer.
Chien-Yi Wang presented Adobe. Adobe has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more recent trend towards rich Internet application software development, including digital marketing and digital media solutions. The company is famous for its development on the “Portable Document Format”, which is adopted worldwide as a common medium for electronic documents. After the hallmark technology of PDF standard, they were devoted to develop powerful software and services for people to create suitable digital content, deploy it across media and devices, measure and optimize it over time and achieve greater business success. Adobe has a unique business model which could optimize the revenue by distributing their products in several ways. The company spent lots of money on the marketing side which allowed them to stand out among their competitors. Nowadays, their products all go on the cloud for customer to subscribe and make people easier to collaborate and use via different platforms. Adobe is also leading computer vision researches which could benefit the whole digital media community.
Eddy Wu presented Fitbit Inc. Fitbit is one of the most well-known technology companies that produce activity trackers – the wireless wearable devices that measure data such as number of steps, quality of sleep, and other personal metrics. Fitbit is a fast growing company since its establishment; its revenue increased from $14.5 million in 2011 to $745 million in 2014. Fitbit went public in Jun, 2015, and the shares jumped to about $30 a piece at IPO day and valued the company over $6 billion. There are many reasons for its huge success. First of all, while its competitors put more efforts on the hardware development, Fitbit focused more on providing better user experiences with their apps, which are created by dedicating two-third of their RD resources in software programming. Secondly, Fitbit has built up their own brand image throughout these years with their marketing strategies, so that their brand name is almost synonymous with activity trackers nowadays. On the flip side, Fitbit also faces a lot of challenges going forward. There are dozens of competitors in this category due to the surging market, and we especially cannot ignore Xiaomi that already has over 24% market share in 2014. Apple watch, of course, poses another big threat to Fitbit. Thus it’ll be very interesting to see how Fitbit develops after its IPO.
Wayne Hung presented dropbox. Dropbox is a service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere, and share them easily. As a tech startup providing cloud service, Dropbox was founded in 2007 at San Francisco and expanded extremely fast. It created a single product for everyone in all platforms. It creates people’s potential need and just made all the users happy. Its business model is based on “freemium” model, which means the majority of users don’t pay for it. However, through the referral program and growth hacking, Dropbox just kept getting new users and even create 2M revenue in 2013. Nowadays Dropbox has a lot of competitors such as Google Drive, Box, and iCloud. How to keep attracting new users and creating revenue will be the major challenges for Dropbox in the near future.
Their impressive presentations won great interests from audience. By sharing their studies and observations, the presenters showed valuable gain of knowledge and experience in those summer short courses.
