Hi Guys,
It has been a
long time since I wrote a post in my blog. I have been thinking of writing this
post about Dropbox for a long time and I never got the time to do it. I read
the article about Dropbox in the November issue of Forbes Asia magazine and it
was an interesting article.
What is
Dropbox?
Dropbox is a
digital storage service that has 50 million users around the world. Dropbox was
developed by Drew Houston. These days, the concept of Cloud Computing is so
common. You keep your resources in the web and use the resources at any place
with the help of Web. Dropbox provides the cloud storage for you. Dropbox
provides you a free 2 GB storage when you sign up. You can upgrade the storage
to 50 or 100 GB by paying monthly or yearly rental.
How did Drew
Houston get the idea?
Drew Houston was
a code geek right from his young age. At 14, he signed up for a beta version of
online game and began rooting out security flaws. So, the company hired him. He
has worked in 5 projects before starting Dropbox. His mother wanted him to be
normal and tried everything to make him normal. But he spent most of his time
coding at the MIT. By September 2006, he completed his MBA from Phi Delta Theta
at the MIT.
His idea of
Dropbox was formed 3 months later when he was travelling from Boston to New
York. He planned to work during the four hour ride, but forgot his USB memory
drive and had no code. He immediately started to build technology for syncing
files on web. Four months later, he landed in San Francisco and got $15000 from
Paul Graham of incubator Y Combinator. He spent 20 hours a day reverse
engineering all the computers and understanding the concepts.
They presented
Dropbox at Y Combinator event and it attracted investors. By 2008, it had 9
employees and 200,000 customers.
How did they
attract Customers?
They used the
right advertising strategy. They used Google Adwords. It sucked them $300 for
one signup. It was not working. So, they turned their small customer base into
sales people. They give 250MB of free storage for each referral. One quarter of
customers still come to Dropbox in this fashion.
How I started
using Dropbox?
I saw an article
about Dropbox somewhere and started an account some 5-6 months ago. Recently
when I was having lot of important stuffs, related to my higher studies I
needed a backup device. My DVD drive was not working properly. Even if it works
properly, I can’t keep on replacing files. USB drive was a good option, but
then I was afraid of viruses. Just then, I remembered Dropbox and it is just
amazing. I work with all the word documents and excel sheets inside Dropbox. It
gets updated in web as soon as I save the file.
Now I have no fear of losing the files. 2 GB space is more than enough
for me.
Interesting
facts from the article
In the article, I read a few interesting facts about
Dropbox.
- Steve Jobs wanted to buy Dropbox, but Houston was determined not to sell the company.
- Its revenue in 2011 was $240 mn, despite the fact that 96% of its users pay nothing (they use the free 2 GB storage)
- Dropbox has only 70 employees.
- Everyday 325 million files are saved to Dropbox.
- Dropbox’s main competitors are Apple (iCloud), Google, Microsoft, YouSendIt, IDrive and conventional email.
Happy Reading!!!
External Links
Dropbox: Inside story of Tech's Hottest Startup - Article on Forbes
Join Dropbox now - Click here
External Links
Dropbox: Inside story of Tech's Hottest Startup - Article on Forbes
Join Dropbox now - Click here
Interesting Post Karthick, even I am hearing a lot about Dropbox.
ReplyDeleteAnd your post has told me everything about it.
I am off to open a Dropbox account right now : )
Very interesting, the concept as well as its history of origins.. never knew of this. Sounds very useful, will try it out. Many thanks for sharing..
ReplyDeleteI have used this sometime back to upload and save some of my photos and some necessary office file . But it takes a lot of time to upload , though i uses 2.1mbps speed broadband.
ReplyDelete