Dropbox is an unassuming little company devoted to placing documents, presentations and other files in a synced cloud so that users can access it remotely from any device with an Internet connection. Despite its potential, the service has remained relatively unassuming, until now. Dropbox is making bold and ambitious plans.
At its first ever developer's conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO and co-founder Drew Huston started things off with the assertion, "Today, the hard drive goes away." Now that the service can boast 175 million users, the company feels the time is right to take things to a new level. With that mindset, Dropbox has developed a new platform to make its services broader and more flexible.
"We want to be sure that stuff is always available, no matter if you're on your laptop at work, a tablet on a plane, or a smartphone on the bus," the company wrote in a post on its blog. "Keeping devices and apps synced with your most up-to-date info has gone from "nice-to-have" to essential, which creates a real challenge for the people developing apps."
The new platform is built upon an understanding of how modern people work on documents. It consists of having users save all of their data to a synced offline cloud. This will make it possible for them to work on a document and rather than limiting themselves to simply saving it to a device, puts it online for them to access from any device. The hope is, in the future, people will be hitting a "sync" button rather than a "save" button in order to store all of their files safely. CNET describes the overall platform as "a set of tools directed toward developers for determining how apps access data across both desktop and mobile platforms and devices."
The company seems to be eyeing developers and apps for the system in order to have innovative developers expand the scope and reach of the service to realms that cannot even be quantified yet. More specifics for the platform's technical specs can be found HERE.
With more than one billion files saved to Dropbox accounts everyday, people already seem to be comfortable keeping things as sensitive as photo albums, tax returns and word documents in DropBox's cloud. It only makes sense for the company to expand upon that rich marketplace.
