40 Facts About Dropbox

Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc, headquartered in San Francisco, California, US that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.

Dropbox has experienced criticism and generated controversy for issues including security breaches and privacy concerns.

Dropbox brings files together in one central place by creating a special folder on the user's computer.

Dropbox uses a freemium business model, where users are offered a free account with set storage size, with paid subscriptions available that offer more capacity and additional features.

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Dropbox offers computer apps for Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux computers, and mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone smartphones and tablets.

Dropbox founder Drew Houston conceived the Dropbox concept after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT.

Dropbox was officially launched at 2008's TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual technology conference.

In July 2012, Dropbox acquired TapEngage, a startup that "enables advertisers and publishers to collaborate on tablet-optimized advertising".

In May 2014, Dropbox acquired Bubbli, a startup that has "built some innovative ways of incorporating 3D technology into 2D views, and packaging it in a mobile app".

In January 2015, Dropbox acquired CloudOn, a company that provided mobile applications for document editing and creation.

Dropbox later announced in April 2017 that Hackpad would be shut down on July 19, with all notes being migrated to Dropbox Paper.

Dropbox said the reductions were necessary in order to focus the company team structure and focus on top level priorities.

Dropbox has computer apps for Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux computers, and mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone smartphones and tablets.

Dropbox's apps offer an automatic photo uploading feature, allowing users to automatically upload photos or videos from cameras, tablets, SD cards, or smartphones to a dedicated "Camera Uploads" folder in their Dropbox.

In 2014 Dropbox raised financing from BlackRock Inc and others that values the company at $10 billion.

Dropbox uses a freemium business model, where users are offered a free account with a set storage size, with paid subscriptions available that offer more capacity and additional features.

Accordingly, Dropbox's revenue is a product of how many users they can convert to their paid services.

Furthermore, Dropbox announced shared audit logs, remote wipe for business administrators, and account transfers, as new features of its Business offering.

In January 2017, Dropbox introduced "Smart Sync" for Business and Enterprise customers, a feature that lets Windows and macOS users see all files in the Dropbox folder, but only download specific files on-demand.

Dropbox Business is Dropbox's application for corporations, adding more business-centered functionality for teams, including collaboration tools, advanced security and control, unlimited file recovery, user management and granular permissions, and options for unlimited storage.

In July 2016, Dropbox announced a new "AdminX" administrator dashboard for Business customers, offering improved control of company files and users.

In September 2012, Facebook and Dropbox integrated to allow users in Facebook Groups to share files using Dropbox.

In November 2014, Dropbox announced a partnership with Microsoft to integrate Dropbox and Microsoft Office applications on iOS, Android and the applications on the web.

On July 10,2018, Dropbox announced its partnership with Salesforce aiming to improve brand engagement and team productivity.

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Dropbox software enables users to drop any file into a designated folder.

The file is then automatically uploaded to Dropbox's cloud-based service and made available to any other of the user's computers and devices that have the Dropbox software installed, keeping the file up-to-date on all systems.

Dropbox offers a LAN sync feature, where, instead of receiving information and data from the Dropbox servers, computers on the local network can exchange files directly between each other, potentially significantly improving synchronization speeds.

In July 2014, Dropbox began migrating its performance-critical backend infrastructure to Go.

Dropbox originally used Amazon's S3 storage system to store user files, but between 2014 and 2016 they gradually moved away from Amazon to use their own hardware, referred to as "Magic Pocket", due to Dropbox's description as "a place where you keep all your stuff, it doesn't get lost, and you can always access it".

Dropbox uses SSL transfers for synchronization and stores the data via Advanced Encryption Standard -256 encryption.

Functionality of Dropbox can be integrated into third-party applications through an application programming interface.

Dropbox prevents sharing of copyrighted data, by checking the hash of files shared in public folders or between users against a blacklist of copyrighted material.

In March 2013, Dropbox acquired Mailbox, a popular email app, with Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood saying that "Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we've decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together".

TechCrunch noted that Dropbox Notes appeared to be a new version of "Project Composer", a previous iteration of the service with roots from the acquisition of Hackpad in April 2014.

Dropbox Paper entered open beta in August 2016, allowing anyone to join and test the product.

Dropbox has received several awards, including the Crunchie Award in 2010 for Best Internet Application, and Macworlds 2009 Editor's Choice Award for Software.

Dropbox headquarters, located in San Francisco, were originally on Market Street, until its expansion to the China Basin Landing building in July 2011, allowing for a significant space increase.

In December 2012, Dropbox set up an office in Dublin, Ireland, its first office outside the United States.

Dropbox expanded into its second US office in Austin, Texas in February 2014.