Dropbox continue expansion, claiming over 175 million users

Dropbox was launched in 2007 and has become one of the most popular online share platforms. The company now claim they have more than 175 million users worldwide. The company are not resting on their laurels and they plan to replace your hard drive.

DropBox CEO Drew Houston spoke to Wired and said “We are replacing the hard drive.”

He added “I don’t mean that you’re going to unscrew your MacBook and find a Dropbox inside, but the spiritual successor to the hard drive is what we’re launching.”

The news hit during the company's first ever cloud centric developer conference, DBX which started early in the morning in San Francisco. Dropbox are expecting more than 500 developers to attend the event. The new ‘Drop Ins' feature is also going to be discussed.

These new plugins will make it easier for DropBox users to save and upload files to and from websites, mobile applications and devices. Buttons could be added to websites allowing the user to  ‘save to Dropbox' or ‘share from Dropbox'. The plan is to let the end user seemlessly share files via Dropbox across multiple platforms.

Yahoo services already have a webmail option with Dropbox upload/download support for easier file transfering.

Other sites are already looking at adding their own Drop Ins – such as Shutterstock, Outbox, Check and Loudr.

Houston also discussed the DataStore feature, which is (according to him) “Dropbox’s way of moving beyond files and storing other information.” Dropbox are showcasing a new application programming interface for Dropbox which will allow developers to store their Dropbox linked software's metadata.

In theory if your smartphone powered down during a game of Angry Birds or while working in office you could use your tablet and all the data would be stored via Dropbox so you could continue at the point you left off.

Kitguru says: Dropbox is without question a very useful tool.

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