Dropbox Model and History

This article was written by Phineas Upham

Dropbox has made a habit of becoming a household name. Beginning with their work on the Apple iOS operating system, the company has always attempted to expand into digital life. In 2013 alone, it doubled its user base through partnerships with mobile phone makers.

The company has stated that its goal is to help users access information from anywhere. That includes mobile devices, and users have grown to rely on and appreciate the reliability of the cloud-based storage.

Dropbox has made a few changes to make its services more competitive. It began using new tools called Saver and Chooser, which free the user up to work with data in new ways. Now, users can pull data from applications outside of Dropbox and save it to their folders. This is particularly helpful for those who utilize Yahoo’s mail service.

It also created Datastore, which allows users to save their state in one location and retrieve it in another. For example, say that a user is playing a game on his iPad. With Datastore, that user can suspend his game and pick it up from another device that has Dropbox enabled.

Dropbox is seen almost exclusively as a product for the individual user, but the company has made moves to change that. It currently offers project tracking and management platforms in addition to its storage services to help teams collaborate. Dropbox is currently valued at $10 billion, and remains privately owned.

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About the Author: Phineas Upham is an investor at a family office/hedgefund, where he focuses on special situation illiquid investing. Before this position, Phineas Upham was working at Morgan Stanley in the Media & Technology group. You may contact Phineas on his Twitter page.