I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community. I bet if you looked you would have found something similar about Twitter at some point where social media savvy people were going "WTF? I've used it forever"
Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
11–20 of 90 posts
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#12[deleted]
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#13I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community.…
>cloud computing -- that catchall phrase corporations use to describe services delivered via the Internet
With this line they are streets ahead of most pure tech sites in terms of accuracy.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#14>> "...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."
Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.
I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#15Eh, "you've never heard of"?
Told my parents about Dropbox (for about the 10th time) 4 weeks ago, they're finally using. Told my in-laws about it on Monday. I don't think that they meant you (or the other millions of people already using it)
Edit: typo
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#16While I'm sure Dropbox has their work cut out, you know they are onto something when you run into their flyers outside college dorms cross country in Chapel Hill, NC.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#17I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community.…
I agree, this will be big for dropbox and they deserve the acknowledgement. However I think a lot of us here feel the same way, which you can deem as somewhat childish. Its the sentiment "we were here first".
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#18counterpoint: Dropbox is a great product, clever tech, insightful marketing etc. Even the YC application was great. And I think there's a large market (even its present size is more than enough to sate my own avarice), but... it doesn't seem that it could become a truly huge company (like Xerox, Google), without launching a series of increasingly unrelated products. Though perhaps that's true of many huge companies (…
possibly. that said, 100m in revenue 4 years after launch with a fairly unbounded market (every consumer), looks like quite the promising start.
> Benioff predicts sales could hit $100 million this year. (The company declined to comment.)
Unfortunately, a prediction; and also by someone not privy to actual figures...
> Dropbox reportedly experiences well over 10 times year-over-year growth...
Sounds pretty good!
> ...and positive cash flow.
The mildest expression of profitability possible. Though I'm pretty sure they're doing way better than >0.
From scanning many acquisitions, my feeling is of the order of $200 million. Though I'm basing that mainly on business acquisition (e.g. by Oracle), so I might be very off for consumer acquisitions (considering youtube, facebook, twitter etc).
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#19I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community.…
Forbes wrote a story on Dropbox last summer. Interesting to compare the two takes.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0628/technology-file-shari...
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#20My mom came to me earlier asking me to help her install Dropbox. She's about as informed about computer stuff as i am about fashion. That's a good sign for Dropbox :-)