While I don’t think most readers here care to much about how much money a company has raised, it is important to know that Dropbox has raised a recent round of funding of $250 million dollars and have a $4 billion dollar valuation. It might not directly influence your day to day use of the service, it does mean that Dropbox is a real company that you can hopefully trust to keep your data with. Considering some of the companies that pop up in the online backup and storage space this is good know that Dropbox will be around for a little while.
Dropbox also released and update to their mobile and web API. If you are not a programmer you might not care to much. I bet you do use their API regularly if you use their iPhone/iPad or Android apps. Not to mention if you use one of this methods to backup your WordPress blog to Dropbox you use the Dropbox API. If you are a developer you might want to check out the official Dropbox Blog for more information on the changes to API.
Forbes has also written an article on Dropbox that will be the on the cover November 7, 2011. It is a great article and if you are interested in Dropbox you should have a read. It mentions that Dropbox was once offered $800 million by Apple that they turned down. Some other interesting notes from the article:
- Dropbox has 50 million users.
- 96% of the users are non-paying.
- There is a new signup to Dropbox every second.
- Every day 325 million files are saved to Dropbox.
They also have a great video to go along with the article. Check it out if you have the time.
While I like Dropbox I am curious to see what the next year brings. Besides the fact that iCloud recently launched and is a competitor to Dropbox there is also rumor the Google GDrive is coming soon. Plus Google+ can already upload and sync your photos and video from your mobile device to Google servers.
Add to that the new startup Bitcasa which promises to become your online hard drive and appears be able to blow the doors off of Dropbox.
That is what is coming, don’t forget that Dropbox already has their hands full with competition from SugarSync and SpiderOak. SugarSync appears to have a lead in mobile access and storage offering users the ability to sync data from their mobile devices to their SugarSync account. SpiderOak on the other hand is certainly more security conscious and makes sure users data is encrypted. I can’t see SpiderOak having any problems like Dropbox did when they had a lapse in their password authentication.
What do you think is Dropbox in for a rough year ahead?
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