Users could win additional free space for photos by convincing friends to sign up. Last year Dropbox cleverly added a feature to its mobile apps to automatically upload every photo taken on a user’s smartphone to Dropbox servers for syncing and safekeeping (with the user’s permission). But over the past few years, Dropbox has also become a preferred way to handle moving files on and off phones and tablets, where syncing was an even more unpleasant and unreliable chore. Every file in the Dropbox folder simply appeared on both machines. A service tailored for businesses starts at $795 a year.ĭropbox, started in 2007 by a couple of MIT students, made its name as the simplest way for regular consumers to synchronize all their files between a desktop and a laptop. As the free accounts inevitably fill up, some customers opt for additional storage starting at $10 a month. Users can sign up for a small, free account of 2 gigabytes.
Unlike many of its cloud-service brethren, Dropbox has a working business model. The company doubled its user base this year to 200 million and revenues are said to exceed $250 million (even closing in on $1 billion, according to one report). With the seemingly ever-growing need for storage, Dropbox itself has been growing quickly. So it should come as no surprise that Dropbox, a leading photo- and file-storage service, is seeking to raise another $250 million from Silicon valley on terms that would value the company at $8 billion, as Bloomberg Businessweek reported Monday.
And while many of the photos will never be looked at again, hardly anyone takes the trouble to delete their out-of-focus selfies and blurry pet shots.
One estimate pegs the total number of digital photos to be snapped next year at 880 billion. People with smartphones like to take pictures – lots of pictures.
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