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Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

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Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#21
Dropbox it's certainly one of the most helpful startups for the average guy.

I put into use at the last company I was working for (a non-tech company) and everyone got immediately hooked on Dropbox. It made their file-sharing much easier.

So I honestly understand this article, even though for us it's been around for so long.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#22
post #11

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.…

There's this tunnel vision that propagates in highly specialized communities like HN. Stepping back and viewing things from the bigger picture is a skill that is highly underrated. That being said, from my personal observations, Dropbox is knocking on the door and about to have a push outside of the core tech community. This article is just another sign that Dropbox is about to make a big push.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#23
post #11

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 think this article is perfectly valid.

Of course it is. My bigger surprise is that it doesn't feature what I now think of as the ultimate Dropbox evangelising line: "It's a folder. That syncs".

[ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2153046 ]

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#24
post #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…

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#25
post #11

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.…

Spot on. I am incredibly optimistic about Dropbox's future. It constantly blows my mind that home users don't have any file sharing running on their network. The go-to solution is to email files to each other, even while sitting on the same network. When I learned that Dropbox supported LAN sync, I immediately started recommending it as an alternative to emailing files back and forth. Just drop files you would normally email to each other in to the Dropbox folder, and magically it will appear on the other computer. BONUS! If you make changes, they're automatically shared in the other direction. Keep it under 2 GB and you get this for free.

The response I get from users is consistently that of complete astonishment. Registering for and installing Dropbox is, for many people, a more straight forward process than getting file sharing working. Dropbox scratches a very common itch.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#27
post #11

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.…

Spot on. I am incredibly optimistic about Dropbox's future. It constantly blows my mind that home users don't have any file sharing running on their network. The go-to solution is to email files to each other, even while sitting on the same network. When I learned that Dropbox supported LAN sync, I immediately started recommending it as an alternative to emailing files back and forth. Just drop files you would normal…

It "kinda" supports LAN sync.

Files still first need to be transfered to the cloud first before you can sync them over LAN.

At least it was like this the last time I have looked at it (a few months ago).

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#28
post #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…

Someone questioned whether Dropbox could compete with Amazon at scale, but decided to delete it. This is a really valid question. I recalled a while back that Backblaze asked a similar question and came up with a really cool solution.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h...

I see this as Dropbox's future. PaaS is good for getting started, but with numbers like what's shown in that blog post, it's hard to argue that something like S3 is really priced at commodity levels.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#29
post #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…

This same line of reasoning came up with the last few Netflix stories to hit HN. Netflix depends on Amazon who runs a competing on-demand video service. The general consensus is that Amazon's divisions are independent enough to not try anything funny. More importantly, Amazon is big enough that they wouldn't risk the publicity fallout of monkeying with the competition's services.
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