You’re Never Too Big–DropBox Drops the Ball
I spend a bunch of time talking to different vendors about their products and services – having done what I do for a few years now it’s interesting to see how companies that I knew when they were tiny 3 person start ups start to act once they’ve got hundreds of employees, lots of customers [...]
Bought vs. Sold (Why Jive is a dinosaur & Dropbox is the future)
Both Dropbox and Jive are successful companies that are much in the news recently. Jive just filed its S1 for its IPO, while Dropbox raised its first major round of funding at a $4 billion valuation. What’s most interesting to me is that they represent polar opposites in terms of business models. They illustrate the [...]
Battle in the Clouds: Intelligence on Google Apps
Google Apps is used by more than 40 million people and signs up 5,000 new businesses every day according to numbers recently cited by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. But what do all those millions of people actually use Google Apps for, and how heavily do they use it? At Spanning we have a unique view into [...]
The Lesson of Dropbox: Usage = Value
Word on the street is that Dropbox is about to raise a major round of financing at a $5 billion+ valuation. While some will cry “Bubble!”, I think there’s a different lesson we can learn: Usage = Value. Let’s face it–Dropbox isn’t the most complicated business or technology. It’s a relatively simple storage app that [...]
Designing Terms Of Service Is As Important As Designing A Product
Dropbox revised their Terms of Service (TOS) over the long weekend. That triggered a flurry of activities on Twitter. Dave Winer even deleted his Dropbox account saying that he would revisit it once the dust settles. A lot of people concluded that there’s nothing wrong in the new TOS and that people are simply overreacting. [...]
What to do When a Tech Giant Decides to Eat Your Lunch
An edited version of this post originally ran on TechCrunch. This version has some additional details on a portfolio company I’ve invested in, which are disclosed below. WWDC. The annual Apple event where no real hints about what products they plan to release are floated in the public domain in advance. No private head [...]
Dropbox Shows Why We Can’t Have The Cloud The Way We Imagined
For the past few weeks, Tech Media is buzzing with discussions on Dropbox (see previous CloudAve coverage) security. Dropbox from their modest beginnings have grown big with 25 Million users. Recently, a security engineer Derek Newton exposed a serious security issue with them where they store the machine hash in an unencrypted form in any machine [...]
Dropbox Releases Version 1.0 With New Features
Image via CrunchBase Dropbox (see previous CloudAve coverage), the cloud based storage vendor, announced the release of Version 1.0 of their product. Ben wrote about Dropbox in the early part of 2010 and I have been following them ever since they came out in open. I am a Sugarsync customer but I have a great [...]
Oxygen Cloud differentiates by targeting Enterprise
I love Dropbox. It has been part of my backup strategy for a long time, but my increasing use of mobile devices and tablets has made it absolutely invaluable. All the documents and files I use on my main computer are constantly synchronised – seamlessly, painlessly, and effectively invisibly – with Dropbox, making them easily [...]
Syncplicity Enhances Their Business Edition To Compete Harder In The Crowded Marketplace
Syncplicity (see previous CloudAve coverage), the cloud based file storage and management company, yesterday announced the release of additional features for their Business Edition. This will help them compete harder with services like Sugarsync, Box.Net, etc. in the business space. With this release, Syncplicity makes it clear that they want to target the corporate accounts. [...]
Box Takes on Desktop Sync, the Space Gets Ever More Crowded
I’ve written before about a number of desktop sync products I use – these products help me to keep my life organized across multiple devices (see my Syncplicity posts for example). The fact is that, for me at least, I live on three different laptops, a desktop from time-to-time and one or two mobile devices [...]
Dropbox – Envisaging a Future Well Beyond Files
I’ve been talking a lot recently to cloud storage, cloud synchronization and cloud backup vendors (all variations on a theme but they all have a different emphasis to what they do). Recently I had a couple of opportunities to talk with Dropbox, first with founder Drew Houston, and later with recently appointed SVP Marketing and [...]
SaaS Vendors Should Learn The Art Of Security Before They Open Shop – Dropbox Issue
Image via CrunchBase I have long talked about the importance of securing the SaaS app here and, also, in my Twitter stream. Many of the industry observers with a security bend of mind has long warned about the possible outbreak of security issues once the SaaS applications becomes mainstream. This really puts the focus on [...]
Zumodrive Launches, Forgets About Transparency
Krish wrote in December about the importance for startups to do the math early and publish their pricing: In the absence of any word about the future pricing plans, users are hesitant to put their data on these storage startups, usually offering generous amounts of storage space. Why would anyone spend their valuable time uploading [...]
A Note to Cloud Storage Startups on Pricing
Image via CrunchBase, source unknown Here is a note to all cloud storage startups. Please set your price before going into beta. Almost all the cloud based storage startups I have come across open their business to beta without even having any idea of what they are going to charge for their service in the [...]
