经济学人下载:克隆入侵网络公司

One battleground will be China. There, opaque  rules have kept many American firms at bay , leaving the field open for Chinese ones to develop similar services. Diandian, for example, resembles Tumblr, an American blogging platform. Zhihu, a question-and-answer service, looks a bit like Quora, an American firm.

其中一个战场就是中国。在那，一些不透明的规则使许多美国企业发展受阻，为中国的本土企业发展相似服务提供了很大的空间。例如，点点就是模仿的美国轻博客社区Tumblr。知乎，这家社会化问答网站就和美国的Quora如初一辄。

Another battleground will be Germany, where three brothers, Alexander, Oliver and Marc Samwer, have become the copycat  kings of Europe. The brothers have a knack  for spotting good business models in Silicon Valley, and then quickly starting something similar in Europe. They later sell these “clones”, sometimes to the firms on which they were modelled.

另一个战场会是德国，那有三兄弟Alexander，Oliver和Marc Samwer，他们是欧洲著名的抄袭之王。他们的本事就是能很快的发现来自硅谷的好的商业模式，然后迅速在欧洲发展相似的业务。再卖掉这些“克隆”企业，有时就卖给被他们抄袭的企业。

The Samwers scored their first success in 1999 with Alando, an online auction house which they sold to eBay. They have notched up  several other big deals since then (see table). In 2007, beside their investment vehicle, European Founders Fund, they set up Rocket Internet, an incubator  that uses its own pool of experts—now around 90 people—to help launch several start-ups a year. Kinnevik, a Swedish investor, has a stake and also invests in its portfolio .

Samwer兄弟在1999年觅得了第一桶金，他们在成功成立了一家相似的网上拍卖行Alando后，又回卖给了eBay。那之后，他们还完成了若干项别的大交易(见表格)。2007年，除了他们的投资工具——瓯洲创始人基金，他们还成立了一家名为Rocket Internet的公司，这是一家创业孵化器，主要依靠自己的专家——现在大概共有员工90名，每年帮助若干企业创业。来自瑞典的投资人Kinnevik就有在该公司的股权，并参与了其他的投资组合。