There have been many startups and among them the ones that have been successful have shown promise by mixing the concepts of necessity and demand for technology in the future. I wanted to talk about DropBox, one of my favorite cloud services, I’ve been using for a few years now. Estimated at a value of $4 billion, it’s a unique concept. It’s a free service and allows the user to bring their personal photos and files anywhere and share them easily. It's available on the web or through their smartphone application.
The DropBox team comes from SanFrancisco, CA. The concept isn’t new, as sites like Box.net, sharefile, hotfile and rapidshare have been working on similar concepts. However, I believe the driving force here is the cloud computing concept. The investment has been a great force in driving the company where it’s going now.
The company basically saves a folder to your desktop, where you can file away any files that you would want to access while you’re away from your computer. I’ve used it to link my files from the non-profit I’m involved with. When I’m in the office, I can save the files to the dropbox folder and later access them from my home computer if I need to work on them. I'm also able to pull it up on my smartphone if I just need to quickly see a file. I’ve also used it for school when working in teams. We will set up a file for our group project and store all our files and research along the way. Any of us can make changes to these files, which can be immediately viewed by the other owners of the file. Another great use of the website is for file storage. If you don’t want to store large files on your computer, with the worry that it will slow your computer speed, you have the option to store it on their website. This can also be done to backup files so that they are in two locations. There is a free service that offers a certain amount of storage. Extra storage can be purchased for a monthly fee, or you can earn extra space if you get your friends to try the service.
The business model is sustainable as it tries to focus on the basic necessity of files and sharing for any office. If you don’t already use DropBox, I highly recommend it.
To get started, click the link below:
www.dropbox.com
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