Spotify - Company Presentation free essay sample

Ninth peer-to-peer technology. To use the service, users must download a program compatible with Windows and Mac SO X. Its business model is to aggregate content from rights holders, distribute it to consumers through a technical platform, and generate revenue through users who choose either a free ad-funded service or a subscription service. The goal of Spottily is to help people listen to whatever music they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. Spottily creates value in its service, which give users convenience and simplicity.Consumer save time with Spottily and have 24-hour access anywhere. In addition, users can interact with other users who share similar music tastes. The company is relatively new on the market, it Nas founded 2006 by the Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Eek and Martin Lorenz and launched for public access in October 2008. From that point, Spottily has expanded from a Swedish market to a market covering several European countries. It now has its eyes on the global market.There are four different versions of the music service called Free, Open, Premium and Unlimited. Spottily Free (invite only) is as the name implies for free, but comes with commercials in between songs. Spottily Open IS free as well, but there is a limitation of twenty hours per month. To get access to Spottily Premium, users need to pay a monthly subscription fee of 99 SEEK, and will gain privileges such as ad free music, offline access, a mobile application and invitations for friends to use Spottily Free.The fourth and newest addition to the Spottily platform is the Unlimited (49 SEEK) option, this allows users to listen to music online, without the ads, but not music offline or on a cell phone. REVENUE MODEL Spottily uses two different revenue models. The most popular version of Spottily is the d-based free version, which is used by over 95% of users. In this version, streamed music is interrupted by 30 second ads at regular intervals. The other revenue model used by Spottily is one based on subscriptions and where the customers do not have to listen to advertisements between the songs.For this version of Spottily, called Spottily Premium/Unlimited, the customers have to pay SEEK 99/49 or about $13/6 per month. In mid March 2010 Spottily was estimated to have approximately seven million users and about 320,000 of these are paying for Spottily Premium. The number of Premium users in January the same year was reported as 250,000 users. According to Spottily UK marketing director Paul Brown, 20000 users are subscribing to the Premium service every week. The increase in premium users can be attributed to several factors. One possible reason could be 1 http://www. Known. Net/news/software/09/05/02/spottily-review-the-tunes-killer 3 that users who previously used the free versions has grown tired of the increased length of advertisement and have therefore switched to the Premium or Unlimited erosion. As well, the Premium version is now offering more advantages than Just the or Apple phone as well as Android phones. , allowing Spottily Premium users to listen to their Spottily playbills on the go. They are also able to download playbills to their phones and computers and listen to them even without an internet connection.For users with high bandwidth, there is also the option of an increased bit rate, which means that the audio quality is increased to near CD quality. Since Spottily is a very pun company as well as a private company, it is hard to obtain recent financial information. The annual report for 2008 reported a loss for Spottily of USED 4. 4 million. However, Spottily was launched for public access in October 2008 which that the financial information for this year does not give us much information about their current financial situation.The largest costs for a new IT company such as Spottily are development costs. Since Spottily is a private company, there are no publicly released figures on these costs but based on Specifys large losses in 2008 and the fact that the company has been forced to ask their investors for over 50 million dollars, it can be assumed that the initial development costs are several million dollars. However he development costs will most likely be much lower for the coming years since these costs are always largest in the start up stages of a company.Marketing and sales, for Spottily, is partly about making potential customers aware of the service, activities, for the company, aim at online service to customers through support fo rums, FAQ and email response management. Through its blob, they have direct interaction with its users where they let the users speak their mind and sometimes also partake in competitions. The blob is a unique way for Spottily to get closer to their customers and enhance its brand, by allowing customers to interact with Spottily like a friend.Although Spottily is directly linked to the big record labels, who recently eave earned a lot of bad will, they manage to monotone on their friend image and Nor in opposition to the record labels. Supporting activities Corporate infrastructure refers to Spottily activities such as finance, legal and quality management Just like any other firm. Human Resource Management is a small part of Spottily, which only has 90 employees, each one with a certain technical knowledge and competence. An example of Spottily unique approach is their way of hiring.Just recently, Spottily held a programming challenge to attract potential employees, a competition that rendered hundreds of applicants ND a lot of media attention from newspapers and blobs. Technology development is ITIL to Spottily in the highly competitive online music industry, where it is important to constantly provide the users with new updated services and functions. Here, Spottily utilizes its blob to get feedback and user interaction on its developments and possible new features.Operations, for Spottily, is the platform that allows the users to listen to the music that the company distributes. This is where the digital transformation process takes place, and thus it is also a somewhat critical activity. Overall, Spottily has realized that if it is going to be able to compete in a web 2. 0 (or possibly 3. 0) world they have to 5 adapt to its changing and dynamic environment. They constantly try to improve their service, by interacting with the community theyve built up.Instead of selling a service directly to their customers, they first ask them: Is this something you would like? If not, we will not produce it FIVE FORCES Competitors Spottily has many competitors, such as Greenshank, Last. FM, and Dozer. All of the mentioned companies offer online services where users can listen to music for free. Some have, as Spottily has, a version where customers pay to skip any commercials. However, some rival companies are illegal Greenshank stated that they do not indemnity their users for any unlicensed material uploaded.Despite the fast paced changes of the internet, these competitors impose a small threat on Spottily. Unless rivals can find new revolutionary ways to offer customers legal music, the threat is not overwhelming. As such, Spottily should focus on attracting those customers who still are not using any of these legal services. Substitutes There are also many substitutes that compete for the same customers. A major substitute to Spottily is Apples well established music service tunes where customers can buy and download music to a computer, pod or phone.Other important substitutes are internet. Overall, the threat of buying CDC in store is not that big as people commonly choose to illegally download in a modern age. This is something Spottily tries to address by making its services easier to access and by continuously expanding its library. Spottily tries to position itself differently from its competitors by giving users the option to have their legal service for free or not and whether users want to pay or having the opportunity to use it offline or on an phone.Spottily puts a lot of focus on its networking effect to find new users and to try to keep them loyal to the company. An example of this is when Spottily published various famous celebrities playbills for users to check out. New Entrants Spottily is very sensitive to new services offering customers a better means of accessing music since switching costs are low for customers. Rather, inconvenience is a bigger factor in that customers would have to redo their playbills still manageable, nonetheless.However, the cost of entrance s very high so the number of new competitors is not very great. By developing Spottily and offering more variation and different services Spottily can differentiate themselves and in that way create a stronger bond between the custome rs and the company. Suppliers Spottily has contracts with many record labels, four of them are among the biggest record labels in the world Universal, MI, Warner and Sony BMW. The suppliers have great power over Spottily with the ability to breakaway at any time if they feel that the service is not bringing in enough revenue.This is one of the biggest threats, since Spottily is dependent on the record abeles. If Spottily improves its brand image and continues to grow as they have since the start, they might have a bigger impact on the record labels, which could result in a power shift and increased bargaining power (for Spottily). Customers The customers of Spottily consist of three groups; Free, Premium/Unlimited, and advertisement users advertisement users being customers that pay to have their commercials mixed in with the free users playbills.By creating software that is easy to use, quick and hassle free, in combination with giving different options of using the service and instant development, S pottily gives consumers an alternative to the illegal market. Spottily has also realized that in order to reach out to the younger crowd, they have to provide different options for different segments and subbasements. Spottily strategy for attracting customers vary a bit depending on the type of customer.Free users are attracted extensively through social networking and word of mouth, everyone can connect their playbills to their Backbone, Twitter, Youth, and Flicker accounts, and Premium users can also send invites to friends. The company also hopes to convince customers to upgrade to Premium accounts by mentioning this possibility during commercial breaks. However, taking into account their strategy to attract customers, one might assume that the majority of people reached are of a younger age, socially active, and frequent users of computers and the internet.To reach out to the older demographic, the one that doesnt use Internet and online social networking frequently, Spottily has unveiled a new collaboration with the Swedish company Tell that may, on the other hand, have a chance to draw the attention of an older pendent on maintaining a large user base in order to attract advertisers, if so me small change in service cause the number of free user to dwindle it could have major effects on their sources of income.Therefore, these sensitive user and customers could be considered to have medium to high bargaining power. Peer-to-peer technology is a way of networking computers over the internet so they can exchange files directly. In relation to Spottily, users can share music among each other through the program and there are even possibilities to import songs from either tunes or directly from local files. The peer-to-peer technology is a fast and free way to get access of music in a very short time.Although at the same time, there are illegal users of pop technology. Spottily can cannibalize on the sales that the music labels are losing to the advancement of the Internet. By allowing users to legally listen to music via streaming it on demand probably the most attractive feature of the program and one way to strategically attract users. With international intellectual property laws tightening up, Spottily is an easy alternative; it also offers seers another option to other indirect competitors like tunes.One of the biggest changes for the music industry during the 20th century were the rise of recorded sound and the radio, which lead to a change in power from the sheet music publishers to the record indus try. Similar changes are taking place today En falling revenues have led to the demise of many music retailers, and musicians are more dependent on music promoters. In the last decade, a remarkable growth in digitally distributed music has been witnessed. During 2009, more than a quarter of the music recording industry revenues came from digital distribution according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.Of course, there has also been a massive growth of illegally downloaded music, but it has been difficult to prove the correlation between this development and the falling sales of music albums and revenues of record labels. Furthermore, recent increases in consumer spending on music related hardware and software have provided many technology companies with a promising new income-stream. The field in which Spottily is engaging in is a very dynamic one. With a revolutionary business model, what Spottily essentially is trying to do, is to sell a service which people are now getting for free.

Consequences of immigration

Income Inequality in America essays

Income Inequality in America essays In every society there will be those who are better off than others. There are people who are poor and people who are rich. That is the natural way things are. The American way of life for a long time was to have a society where the majority of the people are not poor or extremely rich, but rather in a middle class. After the end of World War II America enjoyed a time of prosperity where everyones income rose. Unfortunately that trend didnt last forever and in the 1970s the middle class began to dissolve. From the time after World War II until 1973 the graph of annual growth rates of household income looked like a picket fence, meaning that the poorest fifth of the population income grew at about the same rate as the wealthiest fifth and everyone in between. From 1973 to 1993 that graph begins to look more like a staircase with the farthest left stairs being underground. The poorest fifth of the population actually began to make less money while the wealthiest still enjoyed considera ble growth of income. This trend is leading America into an age of huge income gaps between the very rich and the poor. The best way to demonstrate the new trend in income distribution is to look at the salaries of CEOs compared to that of the average worker and how they changed in the last thirty years. In 1970 the average annual salary in America was $32,522. By 1999 this number grew to $35,864, which is a small increase. In that same span of time the average annual compensation of the top one hundred CEOs went from $1.3 million to $37.5 million. In 1970 the CEO was making thirty-nine times the wage of the average worker. In 1999 that CEO was making more than one thousand times the pay of the average worker. This huge increase in the pay of the top one hundred CEOs shows what is going on in America during the last thirty years While the average workers salaries are growing at a very small pace the richest people&ap...

Further study on the previous lecture Term Paper

Further study on the previous lecture - Term Paper Example The wake of a tornado leaves the untold destruction to infrastructure and property in the billions of shilling especially when it strikes cities but in the early detection ensures that there is little or no damage to property. Shearing in the winds especially where air masses converge is one of the formative phases of tornadoes. The convergence happens when cold air meets hot air, and the warm air is forced to rise. The convergence point is called a cold front. The directions of the air masses at the top rotate in the opposite direction to those at the bottom. Rotors can be setup due to the shear in the wind. The rotors refer to cylindrical air masses, which are perpendicular to the direction of the wind. The rotating cylinders may be changed to move vertically. The bottom and top part of the rotors rotate in different directions. Tornados are invisible since they are rotating masses of air and droplets but may be visible due to the dust collected along the way or other visible particles. The winds in the tornado rotate cyclically where the vortex on the south due to the wind direction rotates in the opposite direction to that of the north. As a result, there are two vortices whereby one rotates clockwise and the other anticlockwise. The vortices are, therefore, negative and positive vorticity. The vortex in the cyclone grows into a big cyclonic element in the storm referred to as mesocyclone. A funnel cloud forms when the interior of the vortex spins around. The funnel like cloud formed results in the formation of a tornado. Many tornados rotate in the direction of bigger storm systems and hence have a cyclonic vorticity. A tornado over water is a waterspout. The destructive nature of waterspouts is to ales extent (Pike, 133). They are evident on waters in subtropics. Their speeds are low, and therefore they travel slowly over the water. Their occurrence is evident in the Adriatic Sea and Florida. Their effect on the water cannot reach the measure of a

Surface Analysis Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words - 1

Surface Analysis - Assignment Example Using a combination of electrostatic and magnetic fields which distinguishes the ions on the mass to charge ratio, these secondary ions are drawn into a mass spectrometer. By varying the strength of the magnetic field one can assess ions of different mass to charge ratios. (ii) It is capable of finding out the extent of impurity concentration present in a specimen and represents the same as a function of depth. The sensitivity of this instrument is in the range of 1 ppb (-10^13 at/cm^3). auger electrons from the material on collision. These auger electrons have specific kinetic energies which depend on the electrons emitted. This method therefore creates element maps capable of identifying chemical composition. Some of the applications of AES include This advanced technique uses x rays in dislodging electrons from specimens and these have distinct kinetic energies depending on the nature of emitted electrons. It is particularly useful in providing information regarding the type of bonds that exist between electrons. This is because any change in binding energy is reflected in the XPS spectrum chart which shows crests and troughs. The crests obviously reflect the high chemical boding energy that existed and the troughs vice versa. Its applications include This essentially consists of a tip mounted on a cantilever. The specimen is placed below this cantilever and dragged back and forth. The laser which is focussed on the cantilever bounces off the surface onto the photodiodes. As the cantilever tip moves up and down due the surface irregularities of the specimen, the surface of the sample is plotted showing irregularities. Uniform movement of the sample is achieved by using a piezoelectric crystal which generates a voltage on applying a pressure. This helps in plotting out the surface profile.  

Employee Attitude And Performance Management

Employee Attitude And Performance Management Employees are the major drivers of any form of business and good employee performance is the most important need for the current competitive business environment to run successfully. Many organisations have started to attach a great emphasis towards the knowledge workers as claimed by Armstrong and Baron (1998) which makes it even more essential to understand the various practices of performance management. Performance Management and Performance Appraisal are very important tools; it helps to motivate employees to work hard and improves overall companys productivity Based on the study of Armstrong (2000) , performance management aims at improving the current results of the organisation or individuals or a group. A simple way to describe performance Management it is A process that significantly affects organizational success by having managers and employees work together to set expectations, review results and reward performance (Bowen, J. 2007). Performance appraisal is a way of giving employees feedback about their performance at work. According to ACAS (2003)  ¿Ã‚ ½Performance appraisal is an assessment of employees performance, potential and development needs. Performance appraisal is an opportunity to take an overall view of work content, loads and volumes, to look back on what has been achieved during the reporting period and agree objectives for the next( ACAS, 2003). 1.1 Background Study Research Question Performance Management , regular, balanced and systematic appraisals must be administered consistently in order to evaluate the performance of each individual in the organization. This allows human resources to pinpoint the weaknesses of an individual ¿Ã‚ ½s work style and the strengths. They can then share this information with the employee in order to affect a change in performance. This in turn will lead to more productivity and potentially better returns on human investment. Design of Organization, Analyze the work processes and recommends improvements when necessary. HRM also need to scan the world environment and identify emerging trends that will affect the organization and the management of people therein. In this role, the HR person contributes to the development of and the accomplishment of the organization-wide business plan and objectives. The HR business objectives are established to support the attainment of the overall strategic business plan and ob jectives. performance appraisal method that  ¿Ã‚ ½ranks individuals performance by counting the number of times any one individual is the preferred member when compared with all other employees in an organization ¿Ã‚ ½ (Decenzo, D and Robbins, S. 2001) According to Rue and Byars (2003) they illustrate the Paired Comparison Method using an example  ¿Ã‚ ½Suppose a manager is to evaluate six employees. The manager firstly compares the first employee with the second employee on a chosen performance criterion, such as quantity of work. If the manager thinks the first employee has produced more work then the second employee, he or she gets a higher rating. The first employee is then compared to the third, fourth, fifth and sixth employee on the same performance criterion. A better rating is given to the employee who produced the most work in each of these paired comparisons. The process is repeated until each employee has been compared to every other employee on all the chosen performance criteria. The employee with the best rating is considered to be the best performer. Likewise, the employee with the lowest rating is the lowest performer ¿Ã‚ ½. The main drawback of this method is that it can be used only in small organizations, wit h small numbers of employees, but in large organizations with large number of employees, it is difficult to compare each employee with every other employee in the organization. An appraisal method in which the employee ¿Ã‚ ½s performance feedback comes from such sources  ¿Ã‚ ½as self assessment, peers, team members, managers in the organizational hierarchy, and also from external sources such as customers, suppliers and other interested stakeholders has become very popular in contemporary organizations ¿Ã‚ ½ (Decenzo, D and Robbins, S. 2001) 360-Degree appraisal is a very useful tool, the data for appraisal is collected from a wide range of resources and it provides a very through picture of how an individual ¿Ã‚ ½s performance is viewed and can be an extremely powerful tool in analyzing performance. According to Foot and Hook. (2005) they state.  ¿Ã‚ ½To have any genuine value or meaningful impact, 360? feedback must be far more than a standalone activity. It should involve managing the individual ¿Ã‚ ½s expectations, aligning questionnaires to competency frameworks, setting goals to integrate the exercise into personal development plans and providing feedback from trained facilitators. The process surrounding the 360? process itself is complex, and how well HR and learning managers plan that process will determine what impact it will have ¿Ã‚ ½ this shows that while 360? feedback is not an easy process to introduce into an organization,  ¿Ã‚ ½it does nevertheless provides a powerful tool that fits well with t he performance management and performance appraisal approach ¿Ã‚ ½ (Foot, M. and Hook, C. 2005) Career Management, managing people is one of the most difficult aspects of organizational management .It means dealing with people who differ physical and psychologically. HR need to always talk with employees to find out what are individual assessments of abilities, interests, career needs and goals or all kinds negative feedback. 1.2 Research Questions 1. What is the relationship between performance appraisal and Employee attitude? 2. What is the attitude of employees towards goal setting? 3. What is the attitude of employees towards agency relations? 4. What is the attitude of employees towards dynamic capability? 5. What is the employee attitude towards relevant resources? 1.3 Research Objective 1. To investigate the relationship between performance Management and employee attitude 2. To investigate the employee attitude towards goal setting 3. To investigate the employee attitude towards Agency relations 4. To investigate the employee attitude towards Dynamic capability 5. To investigate the employee attitude towards Relevant resources 1.4 Problem Statement Many SME ¿Ã‚ ½s in Malaysia are facing numerous problems in the current business world which comprise of the information age, development of the technological factors at a rapid pace and globalisation are some examples, these changes are very rapid and highly unpredictable and the only department which manages this pressure is the HR department and the polices of the department which have equipped themselves to overcome these situations and volatile changes in the business environment and such policies include manpower planning performance plans and development performance plans and frequent appraisal of employees and performance guidance. Many organisations fail at this level which is a major concern, and the organisations which have overcome these obstacle have gone a long way bringing in many revolutionary changes in the business world and HR practices. (Becker et al., 2001; Zairi, 1998). 1.5 Significance of the study SME ¿Ã‚ ½s represent the major group of business organisations in Malaysia based on the Malaysia SME ¿Ã‚ ½s Report (2008) which contributes to a total of 99.2% , which in itself has its own significance and lays emphasis behind conducting this research study . The research paper also aims at establishing the relationship that exists between performance management practices and employee attitude. The purpose of this paper is to establish the relationship between performances 1.6 Research design and research context: The research philosophy which the researcher thinks is suitable is the positivist philosophy of research. The method used will be a survey method with questionnaires with both primary and secondary sources of data. This will include questionnaires, interviews and document analysis. The data analysis technique for the proposed research will be multiple regression analysis to find the relationship between the variables. In terms of the research context, the proposed research is based on Ahsan Ullah and Routray ¿Ã‚ ½s (2007) research employee attitude and performance management in Malaysian SME ¿Ã‚ ½s. The research will be carried in Malaysian SME ¿Ã‚ ½s. The reason for choosing Malaysian SME ¿Ã‚ ½s for this research purpose is largely due to their representation in Malaysian business as claimed by the Malaysian SME ¿Ã‚ ½s Report (2008). 1.7 Structure of Dissertation The dissertation is laid out in five chapters; the first chapter introduces the reader to the concept of Mutual funds and describes the aims and objectives of the study. The actual study begins from chapter two with Review of Literature analyzing the concept of mutual funds and assessing the previous research carried in analysing the mutual fund performance. The contents in the research report can be elaborated briefly as shown under the following headings. Chapter One: Introduction The first chapter of the research study as the name suggests the chapter introduces the study and the major area of focus in the research. The chapters clearly describe the aims and objectives of the study giving the reader glimpse about overall research. It also gives out the scope of the research and spells out the rationale behind the study. Chapter Two: Literature Review This chapter primarily prepares the study for empirical work by looking at evaluations and conclusions drawn on certain theories and concepts to check for similarities and difference made by past writers on similar or related studies. It ¿Ã‚ ½s on this basis, that later stages in the research are developed. In particular, academic journals, websites and textbooks that articulate models and related theories are used as a reference. Chapter Three: Research Methodology The Chapter three reviews a range of research methods and highlights the strength and weakness and also research design discussion. Chapter Four: Research Findings and Analysis Chapter four discusses the main research findings and provides critical evaluation of primary and secondary data ¿Ã‚ ½s about the leadership behaviors in the engineering organization. Chapter Five: Conclusions and Recommendations After careful examination, evaluation, assessment and analysis of data, in this chapter, the study points out how the aims and objectives of the research are met. It points out how the respective objectives are realized and tries to give an answer to the research question. 1.8 Limitations 1. The Research Study will be based only in Malaysian SME ¿Ã‚ ½s in Kuala Lumpur due to time constraint. 2. The research study will be cut short to just the evaluate the relationship between employee attitude and performance management 3. The research study will be carried out in Limited number of organisations only. 1.9 The Research Framework Adapted from James Kagaari (2010)

Essay --

On BBC documentary called Seven Ages of Britain, which was hosted by David Dimbleby, one of the most famous contemporary artists, Damien Hirst, was once asked that did he pay for all the diamonds to make For the Love of God (2007, figure 1), which is so called as the diamond skull because it is made of a plenty of diamonds. Hirst answered that artists used what around him or her, and money was around him. Therefore, he thought that what he could do with money, and he could do something amazing with them. Consequently, he created For the Love God. What should be spotlighted is the point that an artist creates his or her works with materials, which are around them. As Damien Hirst said that money was around him, money was around people in the world whether the amount of money is great or humble. In short, money is one thing that people, including artists, could easily find in their routine life. Therefore, there has been a possibility that artists could try to create his or her works with money. Or at least, some artists see money as their potential art medium. There are several artists who actually tried to make his or her works with money. It is not saying that artists make money by their works, or artists make their works with supporting of their rich patrons. Also, it is not saying that artists design the currency. However, artists who create his or her works with money are artists who are using actual money as their medium in this paper. Furthermore, those art works, which are using money as their important medium, would be called as ‘money art’ in this paper. In short, there are some artists internationally who create money art; for example, Andrà © Levy, Justin Smith, Hasegawa Yosuke, and so on. Among money art artists, I wo... ...ously representing the real world. He uses various banknotes form other counties. For example, he uses U.S. dollars ($), British pounds ( £), Japanese yens ( ¥), Korean wons (â‚ ©), European euros (â‚ ¬), and so on. These currencies are representing their countries. He does not cover their nationalities, so it is possible to say his works are representing their nationalities. Also, the currency represents economy and politic. Even though he tried to cover money’s economical value, it is impossible to remove its value as economical index because it is money. Also, most of figures portrayed on money are political figures of their country. Therefore, money is a metaphor of one nation’s political and economic status. Hasegawa Yosuke illustrates Globalization of today’s world by putting his moneygami together. Shortly, his money origami works are representing the real world.