This story sounds like the story of Audion, SoundJam, and iTunes nearly 10 years ago:
Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#72I don't closely follow the changes to Apple developer APIs, so this may be blindingly obvious to others but not to me. Does anyone know if Apple is providing iCloud APIs for iOS/OSX?
I suppose, something similar to the file/db libraries, only these would go let you persist files and settings to iCloud (similar to Valve's SteamCloud for games).
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
A process can't change the address space of another process, period. Even if one is a root process. Separation of address spaces is a basic security service provided by the operating system. So I'm also puzzled how they are able to modify memory in Finder's address space. The closest thing I can think of is that Finder executes arbitrary processes on behalf of the user. That is, when I double click on something, Find…
Not true, at least on OS X: http://www.slideshare.net/rentzsch/dynamic-overriding https://github.com/rentzsch/mach_star I don't know if this is how Dropbox works, but it seems likely.
Dropbox does in fact use mach_star.
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#74I use dropbox everyday for work and my personal life. I have two problems with dropbox though.
1. There is no paid plan between the free 2 gb account and the $100 50 gb account. A nice 10 or 25 gb account would be great. It is hard for me to justify spending the 100 a year when I don't need all that space.
2. There has not been a huge change in dropbox since it's inception. I find myself using it less and less, since it is so easy to share documents with google docs.
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#75I don't closely follow the changes to Apple developer APIs, so this may be blindingly obvious to others but not to me. Does anyone know if Apple is providing iCloud APIs for iOS/OSX? I suppose, something similar to the file/db libraries, only these would go let you persist files and settings to iCloud (similar to Valve's SteamCloud for games).
Never mind. I see it. http://developer.apple.com/icloud/index.php
Does DropBox have anything similar? This looks like something that will run over DropBox.
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I always wished Dropbox had a lower, entry-level tier for around $5/month. I don't need 50gb. I just need 5-10gb.
There's no need to even have tiers - it would be great if they would just charge you $X/GB/month over the free amount.
I'd think it's a deliberate design choice having it this way. If you think about it, paying only for actually used space would mean a lot smaller income for the company.
Maybe it would also erode the magic in it - people would start thinking if they should have this and that files on Dropbox or not. Or accidentally piling up huge bills doing some mistake managing their files...
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#77My biggest issue with Dropbox, and I am probably not alone in this, is still security. After the lapses earlier in the year, I still store most files in a TrueCrypt share in my DropBox folders. Since I can't access the TrueCrypt volume from my phone or other mobile devices, it limits the portability of the data.
We've been told they do encrypt files internally. I don't think there is any usable way to have users manage their keys by themselves. Who wants to input large encryption keys to their mobile phone every time they want to use Dropbox? And if the phone remembers the key, then it's not too far from the current situation.
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#78Drew's case shows how hard it is to generalize. We're generally reluctant to fund single founders. And yet the most successful startup we've funded had a single founder at the time he applied:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html
We strongly encouraged Drew to get a cofounder, and he found Arash before the summer 2007 cycle began. Arash turned out to be the perfect cofounder. So Dropbox is pretty much the best case scenario for a single founder applying to YC. And the variation in startup outcomes is so great that even though we have such a large data set, the best single founder outcome is so far better than any of the multiple founder outcomes.
This is why one of our rules is that we'll break any of our rules.
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#79I don't closely follow the changes to Apple developer APIs, so this may be blindingly obvious to others but not to me. Does anyone know if Apple is providing iCloud APIs for iOS/OSX? I suppose, something similar to the file/db libraries, only these would go let you persist files and settings to iCloud (similar to Valve's SteamCloud for games).
Never mind. I see it. http://developer.apple.com/icloud/index.php Does DropBox have anything similar? This looks like something that will run over DropBox.
Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no need to even have tiers - it would be great if they would just charge you $X/GB/month over the free amount.
I'd think it's a deliberate design choice having it this way. If you think about it, paying only for actually used space would mean a lot smaller income for the company. Maybe it would also erode the magic in it - people would start thinking if they should have this and that files on Dropbox or not. Or accidentally piling up huge bills doing some mistake managing their files...
I don't know about that. Sure, there are some people using 5-10GB of a 50GB account, but I'm sure there are lots of people that are sticking with the free account when they'd gladly pay a little bit $1-$2 for slightly more storage, and people at the other end that are either frustrated by the 100GB limit or haven't even bothered using the service because they know they need to store more than 100GB.
I trust Dropbox has done extensive market research and concluded that having two price tiers, plus the other benefits that come with such simplified pricing, outweigh the flexibility of usage-based pricing.