Today I was at a University small business lecture. Someone asked one of the entrepreneurs "What was your biggest mistake?". The guy said his laptop had been stolen, but luckily it was all auto-backed up onto Dropbox. A nice anecdote and good press!
Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
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Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#62I'm glad the article pointed out the cartoon dinosaur riding a shark on the jobs page, even though they mistook it as not taking things seriously, instead of convincingly signalling, by the fact of its nature and presence (as an awesome and surprising drawing on a recruitment page that's subversive of conventional expectations for a potential employer), the claim made in the heading on that page, that Dropbox is a pretty sweet place to work.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft had built in cloud storage, something like live space, or live disk, or something along those lines. It was very similar to dropbox, but for whatever reason it didn't catch on. I know a few people that still use it.
That's the thing - Apple and Microsoft have both had somewhat similar offerings, but in some way they were not as user-friendly, or were not presented to users properly (Apple has iDisk, or something like that). For LAN use, cloud (external) storage isn't even needed though.
I get the feeling that Apple is preparing another big push into this area. Between cloud-iTunes, the mega datacenter, and rumors of some sort of new iPad sync system they've got plans for sure.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#64Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#65Any media outlet tempted to use a "you've never heard of" headline should seriously reconsider. Guaranteed to irritate everyone who HAS heard of it instantly.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#66I 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'm biased because I write for Fortune Magazine, but you put this perfectly. To prove your point, when I wrote about Twitter in Fortune in August, 2008, which was one of the first general business press articles about Twitter, I was well aware that 1) all the cool kids knew about it and 2) the rest of the country, Fortune's readers, did not. Here is that article, which seems a little quaint now: http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/06/technology/true_meaning_of_t...
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If anything, what blows my mind is that Microsoft has failed that significantly on connecting systems which share a LAN. There should have been something as easy as Dropbox built into Windows, and made known to users, at least 10 years ago.
Not sure what the status is now, but for a long time Microsoft intentionally limited the file-sharing (and printer-sharing) capabilities of their "home" class OSes, to avoid cannibalizing sales of their "office/server" class OSes.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#68Any media outlet tempted to use a "you've never heard of" headline should seriously reconsider. Guaranteed to irritate everyone who HAS heard of it instantly.
I heard a radio report in NZ over summer about the kids these days using words like Cool and Wicked in ways that weren't their original meaning.
Someone deserves a medal for epic trolling. (I don't know what the station was -- I was in a hire car and channel surfing and decided to listen to the news broadcast)
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#69> The hottest startup you've never heard of I wish this were true; unfortunately I hear lots and lots about them when they run a "spam your friends for more free space" promotional.
Get better friends.
Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Dropbox for not using this horrible term.
Horrible term? Just because it's the catch phrase du jour doesn't mean it's totally meaningless. I get annoyed with the buzz and malapropism just as much as the next guy, but like it or not, cloud computing is a major global phenomenon.
How? What does it mean?
Any way I try to define it(other than how CNN puts it) I end up leaving out a huge chunk of cos that also claim to be into cloud computing. And I am not exCtly sure if anyone is in a position or authority to tell them "no you've got nothing to do with the cloud".