Dropbox Acquires Mailbox 63
Dropbox announced today that it is acquiring Mailbox, an iOS email client designed to take better advantage of a touch interface. The app launched last month, and the Mailbox team says they're already delivering more than 60 million emails daily. Demand for the service continues to grow, so they were exploring their options to expand. They said,
"We can’t wait to put Mailbox in the hands of everyone who wants it. This means not only continuing to scale the service, but also including support for more email providers and mobile devices. Add to that a host of new features and we’ve got a LOT of work to do, certainly more than our current team of 14 can handle. We need to grow and we need to grow thoughtfully, with top-notch people who share our goals and values. Enter Dropbox, the team from San Francisco who helps over 100M people bring their photos, docs, and videos with them anywhere. They’re a profoundly talented bunch who build great tools that make work frictionless, and Mailbox fits Dropbox’s mission like a glove. Plus, they’ve got a ton of experience scaling services and are experts at handling people’s data with care. In short, Dropbox is our kind of company."
people still use email? (Score:3, Funny)
that's like grandma's tech now
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What I am doing and all the communications with my colaborator which are spread in various institute all over the world is fairly asynchronous. What do you suggest as a technology which should be perfectly portable, trivial to use and deployed everywhere that I can convince my collaborator to switch to?
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i see geeks still don't have a sense of humor
but dropbox works fairly well for what you are describing
Re:people still use email? (Score:5, Funny)
I used Google Reader to set up a custom feed, now all my collaborators subscribe to it!
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Until 7/1.
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how do I send a message to somebody through dropbox?
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dropbox is for file sharing
like say you are writing a scientific paper, you can keep it in a shared dropbox folder so everyone will always have access to it.
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Git + LaTeX solves that particular problem quite nicely.
Nothing drives a physicist quite as insane as a Word doc in a Dropbox with track-changes enabled. The poor grad student who has to reconcile all the borked-up figures, tables and formatting quirks that you get from eight people running four versions of Word on the same document....
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I love git and latex and use them internally at my university. But experience proved that that combination does not work well with all collaborators...
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It's not really meant for that, though. Google Documents or some other solution intended for many people editing the same document at the same time would work better.
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No, no, no. You're supposed to ditch your old-fashioned, behind-the-times collaborators and start hanging out with the cool kids. "Work" and "substance" are totes last-century.
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they went extinct! But I hear someones bringing them back
You're confusing two [wikipedia.org] different [wikipedia.org] pigeons.
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In Korea, only old people use email.
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Unless you have aspergers it was quite clear he was being sarcastic.
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Who really using these services? (Score:2, Interesting)
And by "these services", I mean cloud services in general. I have several of these accounts. All of which were something like, get a free 50GB account when you buy this gadget. Even with 100"s of GBs of cloud space available to me, I find I don"t use any of it. Sure, I will upload some large files from time to time if I know I want to transfer them to another PC at work for example.
I never put anything on these services that I cannot afford to lose. I cannot say exactly the main reason, but basically,
1. I w
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100s of milliona of people, grandpa. Yes, they will get off your lawn now.
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i have a 11GB free dropbox account
i have a few GB of documents in there. every few months i will scan in some financial documents to have an extra copy. IRS audit taught me the value of keeping records.
sometimes i use a few GB for sharing photos. or if i'm on vacation i will upload the vacation photos to dropbox in addition to icloud just in case.
i'm doing some writing that i plan to publish on amazon and i use dropbox for that as well. the 30 day restore feature is awesome
there is a huge use case for these
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services like dropbox can be handy. privacy concerned people can use owncloud. (I do, it works fine.)
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the US government already knows my financial situation since i file my taxes and everyone sends the IRS copies of their financial records. what else is the government going to find out about me?
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the government is not the only one interested in data... tax records might not be the only thing you store...
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everyone knows my financial situation since the credit agencies sell their data as well
Re:Who really using these services? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you sure you know what "I don't use any of it" means?
Re:Who really using these services? (Score:4, Interesting)
I use Dropbox, because I have several computers that I want to keep in sync. A couple times a year, I will actually log in to Dropbox... the other 99% of the time, it is just a syncing service between my computers, that has the added benefit of:
Dropbox is different from most cloud services, because if they disappear I still have all my files. They are on MY computer, not just the cloud, and that makes a big difference.
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So, just like the alternatives from Ms, Google, Sugarsync etc then...
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I use both Dropbox and Mailbox. I think both are great services. Part of that evaluation is due to the fact that if either service goes down (or under), I lose nothing. All of my Dropbox files are stored locally and on my Time Machine backup. All of my emails are stored on Google's servers (and if I wanted to, I could download all of them to my computer as well).
This is in direct contrast with many other providers, including Mega. If Mega shut down today, I would lose everything (actually, I've already lost
Mobility/Reliability/Flexibility: Pick 3 (Score:1)
Let me help you (Score:1)
For those wanting some of that action:
http://www.scrabblefinder.com/ends-with/box/ [scrabblefinder.com]
Purpose? (Score:2)
I don't see the synergy here. Maybe they do. But the services seem completely disparate.
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What do you mean, no synergy? They're both *boxes*! Next up, they're going to acquire the Xbox.
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They're both cubic in nature?
crack that whip (Score:2)
...we’ve got a LOT of work to do, certainly more than our current team of 14 can handle... Enter Dropbox, the team from San Francisco who helps over 100M people bring their photos, docs, and videos with them anywhere...
14 lazy people helping 100 million users. They're probably sleeping all day!
100% Slashvertisement (Score:2)
Not one critical word added to the cheesy press release.
Detach attachments and put files in Dropbox (Score:2)
Feature request: Automatically detach email attachments. Put files in Dropbox and create link to file in message.
Mailbox, meh... (Score:2)
I signed up for that a while ago. I waited for my reservation to activate.
I turned fired up the app. I linked a Gmail account (only service they currently work with).
I toyed with it for a day. I found it unimpressive, unintuitive, limited, and not useful.
I unlinked my account.
App removed. I fail to see the value in it.
Good move by Mailbox folks (Score:4, Informative)
Seems like perhaps the Mailbox folks realize this is the absolute top for this simple, albeit, well designed application, and jumped at a chance to sell.
Here's the real metric of the value of this... (Score:1)
...information.
Post is 2+ hours old and only 48ish comments, on a slow Friday afternoon.
IOW: Nobody cares.
GMail only ? (Score:2)
The application looks nice, yes, but there is no way I am adding any dependency to any Google service.