Images: Courtesy of Dropbox
Dropbox is going head-to-head with some of the largest companies on the net.
This morning, the San Francisco startup unveiled several additions to its flagship file-sharing service as well as some entirely new services, directly challenging outfits like Google and Facebook and underlining its ambition to become Silicon Valley’s next big company.
For the average internet user, the biggest news is the arrival of a new photo-storing and sharing app, dubbed Carousel. The app is available for iOS and Android, and the team that built it was led by Gentry Underwood, who previously oversaw the elegantly designed Mailbox email app acquired by Dropbox last year. Carousel takes photos stored in Dropbox and organizes them into galleries according to when and where they were taken, and it includes sharing tools that closely resemble the way you send photos via SMS text messaging on your smartphone.
The San Francisco startup unveiled several additions to its flagship file-sharing service as well as some entirely new services, directly challenging outfits like Google and Facebook.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said the app is part of a larger effort to create all sorts of new apps for your daily life. He calls this the company’s “home for life” strategy, an approach that puts Dropbox squarely in Facebook’s competitive space — something that was underscored by a product-launch video that resembled nothing so much as the video Facebook put out when it launched its new Timeline photo interface in 2011.
“We’re moving from one app called Dropbox to this whole family of apps, this whole set of services designed to work better together,” Houston said.
In keeping with that theme, Houston said that Dropbox for Business — which lets a corporate IT department control a separate file-sharing folder attached to your main Dropbox account — has emerged from its limited release period and is now available to all businesses. And the company has beefed up its primary service in other ways. The coolest new tool is a real-time collaboration widget that lets users know when two of more people are using the same file. Currently available for Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, this tool adds an icon to the edge of these apps when someone else opens a file. If you then click on this icon, you can open up a chat window, which also includes an “update” link to sync up changes with everyone else who’s currently in the file.
As an engineering feat, real-time file-syncing is one of the tougher problems in the world of online consumer software. And it’s an extremely competitive space, with Google Docs and Microsoft as well as startups like Box.com battling it out for a place on your machine.
The company also announced the long-awaited release of Mailbox for Android. And for iOS users who have already come to depend on Mailbox’s sweet swipe tool — a kind of snooze button for your email messages — you can now do the same thing on your PC with the limited beta release of the new Mailbox for Desktop.
By expanding beyond its original mission of backing up and syncing files and going up against bigger, more entrenched competitors like Google and Facebook, Dropbox is taking a big risk. But its approach reflects a savvy understanding of how those companies managed to grow into the giants of the net. As Dropbox expands its family of services, it locks consumers into ever-greater dependency. Storing files is one thing, but adding email, photos, and collaboration creates a “home” that’s hard to leave once you go inside.
Source:
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/dropbox-google-facebook/?mbid=social_fb
