Dropbox has raised hordes of cash ($350 million) in a recent funding round that valued the company at $10 billion from investors that included BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE:BLK), T. Rowe Price Group Inc (NASDAQ:TROW) and Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Today, Dropbox showed the world what it has had in the works for some time by unveiling a number of new features while announcing that since November it has seen its use rise from 200 million users to an announced 275 million today. Between those numbers and the unveiling of Dropbox for Business, Project Harmony, and Dropbox Carousel you can be sure that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Box, and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) took notice.
More secure business solutions
Since this time last year, Dropbox has hired over 500 additional employees and certainly some of them were involved with Dropbox for Business that was rolled-out today. While it was announced in November, Dropbox for Business has been going through internal testing in San Francisco until today. The announcement will certainly make the IT “guys” at the 4 million companies presently using the service happier. Among its features are the ability to access business and personal folders through one sign-in, transfer accounts among employees, and remotely wipe a user’s files when/if they leave the company.
Easier collaboration with Dropbox
Next in Houston today, came the introduction of Project Harmony to those in attendance. As per its naming, Project Harmony focuses on collaboration. “No more taking turns with emails and naming the latest versions final, finalfinal, finalfinalfinal,” says Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston. “Why can’t Powerpoint or any app tell me that someone else is in the document by using our little green check?”
While it won’t be available until later this year and only for Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s suite of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word, it’s expected that it will work on any app while allowing for the use of a chat window in an obvious challenge to Microsoft’s Yammer and other enterprise social networks like Salesforce’s Chatter.
“We like solving big problems that affect billions of people,” says Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston. “Every time you can save someone 15 minutes, that 7,800 years of pain saved multiplied by 275 million users. That’s what we’re about and there are no shortage of big problems to solve.”
Get on the Carousel
Lastly, Drew Houston showed off Dropbox Carousel designed to be your one home for pictures. It offers unlimited access to pictures on your phone while allowing users to share folders of, say, the office Christmas party in one folder. It also organizes photos by location and date, allows for bulk photo sharing, and will certainly add more features in the future with the acquisition of Anchovy Labs that does computer vision analysis and could be used to recognize faces on its own. Carousel is available now for iOS and Android.
