
Dropbox acquires Loom (YC W12) - ukd1
https://blog.loom.com/loom-is-joining-dropbox-2/
======
swanson
In case you're playing the Acquisition Post Drinking Game:

"It’s been a long road and we feel that we have come a long way in solving
this problem. We are elated to announce the next step in this journey"

"It’s been an immensely exciting journey and we are humbled by the support we
received along the way."

[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

~~~
EC1
Honestly, what else are you going to write?

~~~
bambam12897
"We are sooooo filthy rich now. So long suckers!"

I'd be more honest =)

~~~
sidcool
They worked hard for that, didn't they?

~~~
calinet6
I'm tired of this "they worked hard for that" BS with acqui-hires and
shutdowns.

Yeah, sure, they worked hard, but in the end they get a big fat F for the end
result.

Services don't last forever, but I'm not gonna congratulate someone who runs
around in circles for 3 years purporting to deliver a product of value, and
then gives up when offered a better deal for themselves.

They didn't build a product, they built a nothing. It's like reverse
vaporware, and I won't respect it.

~~~
paulbaumgart
They proved that they can build products. That makes them very valuable to
companies with more money than time. It's a significant career success, if
perhaps not quite a business success. And we can congratulate them for that.

~~~
anon808
sure, if the product they made wasn't depended on by people. these kind of
acquisitions seem to always leave the product customers in a lurch. and for
that we don't have to congratulate them.

~~~
paulbaumgart
Assuming this was a smart acquisition by Dropbox, they'll be able to create
more value now than they were before the acquisition. Unless you're arguing
that the acquisition is actually wealth-destroying, it seems pretty selfish to
oppose it.

~~~
anon808
unless I was one of the customers who's out a service I depended on.

------
kylec
This is really disappointing. I have been a paying Loom member since shortly
after the service was released, it's too bad it wasn't enough to keep it an
independent company. After DivvyShot, Everpix, Snapjoy, and now Loom, I don't
think I can trust another photo management startup again.

~~~
calinet6
This is a huge problem with SAAS in general. The ephemerality not only of our
data, but of the entire service, is highly disturbing.

Next time I buy a tool, I'm going to look for something I can hold in my hand
(metaphorically speaking), and use until I decide not to.

~~~
zheshishei
I guess it's time to go back to standalone desktop apps?

~~~
bentcorner
Selfhosting isn't out of the question.

Maybe there's a middle ground? If someone provided me with a VPS but made it
really easy to self-host applications from a curated list, I'd be all over
that.

~~~
calinet6
Self-hosted auto-updated service nodes, that run on your own cloud-connected
server. All your data, your encryption, your permissions, everything.

Then you connect to your services via any thin client (just thumbprint on any
terminal anywhere and you're logged in). Any screen, any device, anywhere.

Someday.

------
subpixel
Crap. I bought a year of Loom for precisely the reason that I do not want my
photos taking up space on my drive. Now I have to explain to my extended
family why all the confusion they put up with setting things up was for
naught.

~~~
SixSigma
My virtual server costs $200 per year and has 50gb of virtual disk space. I
can run whatever I like.

What does buying saas really give me that a whole server doesn't? Obviously
one needs to be a Unix hacker to make it do anything but I've got that
covered.

~~~
smrtinsert
Where? fixed cost?

~~~
eertami
You can get 500gb for <100 EUR/year on those cheap OVH dedicated servers.

------
cschmidt
I think the photo management space is like blog platforms. They die so
rapidly, I don't want to invest the considerable time to try out a new
startup. Dropbox bought out Snapjoy and now Loom. Everpix is gone. I guess
Picturelife is still around.

~~~
innonate
I'm sorry, but I think these startups just give other startups a bad name.

I'm the CEO of Picturelife and I wouldn't dream of rolling over like this so
easily. We have thousands of customers and just killing our service would be
such an assault on their trust.

All these services you mention are just taking the easy way out. There's a
long road ahead for us and we'll going to keep making the product and
experience better for people, no matter what.

~~~
bjeanes
Very very very happy Picturelife user here. Your S3 support is the icing on
the cake — but please charge me a flat fee for using your software with my own
storage. I want to pay for this great storage but your pricing model only
prices on usage.

You're not selling me a utility — you're selling me your fantastic product.
Let me pay for it!

~~~
innonate
Ha! Thanks -- love that you're asking to pay for it. For now our custom S3
support is a gift. In the future we may change that (and grandfather folks
in). In any case, thanks for being a fan.

~~~
cschmidt
I'm sure he is serious, and I'd actually take him up on it. That's out of self
interest - if people can freeload, then it means you are less likely to
survive in the long run. So how about a license fee? Maybe $39-69?

That's kind of the point of this thread, in fact. If you don't charge enough,
then you won't survive, and your users lose. I would be uneasy using an
important service without paying for it (but I do like the idea of my data
living in my own s3 bucket).

~~~
innonate
Well, our company's PayPal address is linked to nate@picturelife.com -- if
anyone wants to pay us for the custom S3 service they are already using, and
we are giving away for free, they can feel free!

Like I said, as we take another look at pricing (we are in the middle of it
now) we will think about what to do on a more formal level.

Thanks for the feedback.

------
rafeed
I think this is the first time in recent history that a company actually took
care of its users after acquisition. Most of the time after the deadline to
export your content, it's a big "fuck you" to the customer. At least Loom is
making it easy to transfer content to Dropbox and is providing users with the
same space on Dropbox as well free for a year. I can respect that.

------
yukichan
It's Dropbox startupageddon today or something:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604809)

Also:

[http://recode.net/2014/04/17/as-it-becomes-an-app-
platform-d...](http://recode.net/2014/04/17/as-it-becomes-an-app-platform-
dropbox-gobbles-up-more-than-one-app-startup-per-month/)

------
deciplex
For those who missed it, this is a company that also acquired Condoleeza Rice
on its board recently. Yes, Dropbox, aka 'next' according to a few NSA slides
that have been making the rounds, is now taking advice from Condoleeza
'Warrantless Wiretapping' Rice. Run away. Sprint.

------
inklesspen
Well, this is awfully disappointing. I'm in the process of migrating my stuff
off of Dropbox due to the Dr. Rice issue (only problem is a lot of apps use it
as their sole syncing service); I have no desire to move gigabytes of photos
into Dropbox's control.

~~~
innonate
FYI Dropbox is one of the places you can import/sync from
[https://picturelife.com/settings/networks](https://picturelife.com/settings/networks)
(need to login first)

------
otikik
Every time I read that name all I can think of is:

"Welcome to the age of the Great Guilds"

And then I open things with "ECED".

~~~
0161
So I'm not the only one... :)

Personal cultural reference for those who are confused:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_\(video_game\))

------
luser
Happy for the guys who got acquired....BUT thinking as a consumer, this type
of thing makes me very nervous about relying on teeny tiny SAAS businesses for
anything long term.

------
badusername
Shutdown an entire service, and roll over to the guys that say you will work
on a service that was your competitor till today. Seems like people don't care
much about their sweat and tears these days.

~~~
dragonwriter
People invest sweat and tears _for_ something -- quite often material
security/wealth -- I don't see how fully committing to the new source of
security/wealth is undervaluing what they invested previously. Heck, _wasting_
that previous investment by not doing so would seem more like not caring about
it.

------
leejoramo
What about Snapjoy? This is not the first photo related sight that Dropbox has
picked up. So far I have not been impressed with Dropbox's photo efforts. Why
should we think this will be different?

------
kingnight
The other day when Carousel was announced, loom was mentioned in a hn thread
as a competing service. It's offering was certainly compelling in many ways,
and had me weighing switching. If I didn't have such a giant library, I
probably would have on the spot. Now, in a way, I'm thankful I don't have to,
and I hope they integrate the positives that loom had over Dropbox/Carousel.
This is the first acquisition I've read about in a while that has me excited
as a user.

~~~
Roedou
Do you find Dropbox works for you with a giant library? I have ~1.5Tb of
photos at this point, which seems too big for any of their accounts. How do
you have it set up?

~~~
kingnight
Ha, is "giant" relative or what... I am currently at ~98% of my 215GB Dropbox
account and am stressing about what to do. The next tier doesn't seem cost
effective for me and I don't have much room for clearing house.

One thought I have is converting a sizable portion of old Canon CR2 raw files
to adobe DNG since I've noticed that reduces filesize by roughly 20% for the
files that I have. This isn't really a long term solution though and I'm
actually kind of unsure of what to do. I keep hoping that I can hold out long
enough until Dropbox's gb/price get's halved again. Then I'd likely be set for
some time.

I really can't think of a cloud service for ~1.5TB of photos. Have you found
anything that would suit your purposes?

I also use crashplan for offsite archiving of my photo library, but I really,
really, like having the entirety of my photo catalogue accessible everywhere.
Excessive, sure, but definitely nice.

With loom, I am hoping they integrate the jpg rendering of raw files into
their photos views on web/mobile.

~~~
ChuckMcM
What is your access pattern on that 215GB? Is there any of it that you don't
touch for at least a month? There has been a lot of work in the past on
hierarchical storage managers for Enterprise types but perhaps there is a
market for one for regular users. Something that moves your data constantly
into S3 or Glacier and then if you haven't used it on DropBox for a month it
deletes it there, only to bring it back if you look for it.

~~~
kingnight
There is definitely a huge drop off for access to files after a certain age.
I'd say after a month there is really very little need for me to access them
directly. After that, it is sporadic for when I would want a specific file.

A benefit of Dropbox/Carousel (+ Lightroom locally), is I can fly through all
215GB via thumbnail representations without having to call the file
explicitly. If there were some mechanism to offload storage to s3 or glacier,
while retaining the nice UI afforded by the Dropbox/Lightroom clients, I would
be all over that.

------
creativityhurts
For what is worth, they're better off with Dropbox than with Facebook :)

Loom had a lot of success since Everpix got shut down, now it's interesting to
see which startup will fill their place.

------
gkya
I reckon this "big companies hoovering up smaller ones" phenomenon will
eventually cause the startup economy to die. None of the services are
reliable; they come up, start their services with a "no warranties, use at
your own risk and we go away at our own disposal" policy; then some big
company like Google, Facebook or the newfangled giant Dropbox buy them out and
mix them into themselves. The service is gone. The users have to recover. The
only acquisitions I can recall, which did not disrupt users recently was that
of Instagram's and Vine's (also WhatsApp, but that's too recent to be sure,
isn't it?). But the wonted story is that money is poured onto the owners, and
the services get killed. Now, I am not an entrepreneur, and am not that
knowledgeable about business topics, but I can see that people become less
likely to invest in startups each day, every time news of these kinds hit the
headlines. Sad, that is.

------
jscheel
I was considering signing up for Loom a while ago. It was great value prop for
a problem that pretty much everyone runs into eventually. However, there were
a few red flags that made me think they were going to go the way of Everpix.
Good to see they didn't completely shut down, but I'm also glad I didn't
bother spending time with them.

------
aashaykumar92
Seems like a strategic acquisition to help Carousel grow.

~~~
Dorian-Marie
For those who don't know:
[https://www.carousel.com/](https://www.carousel.com/)

------
smackfu
Interesting that Loom was less expensive than Dropbox, even with the value add
photo stuff.

~~~
mikejarema
For those interested in comparing, here are the respective pricing pages for
each:

[https://loom.com/plans](https://loom.com/plans)

[https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade](https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade) (consumer
plans)

~~~
smackfu
I suppose it's not a huge difference, other than Loom having a 50 GB plan and
Dropbox not having one.

~~~
nolok
Loom: 250 GB / $150 ($0.6 per GB)

Dropbox: 200 GB / $200 ($1 per GB)

It's quite the difference

------
anon808
I see that dropbox (a YC portfolio co) bought 2 other YC portfolio cos. I know
it's a stretch, but does YC actively pitch smaller portfolio companies to
their more successful portfolio companies? Keep the cash in the family.

~~~
namenotrequired
It might simply show the usefulness of the YC alum network, which I've heard
nothing but praise for.

------
seanmccann
"couldn’t be happier" — don't people want to build companies anymore?

------
salberts
It's great to see how photo storage solutions get faster, prettier and
cheaper. Now it's time to make them smarter. Most people I know feel swamped
with photos as there are no decent tools to clear this photo-mess.

------
uptown
For anyone looking for a host-your-own photo solution, I highly recommend
taking a look at Koken. I've been using it for awhile, and it's phenomenal.

[http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

------
nayefc
iCloud photos work much better than Loom. Loom is buggy. And it will suck more
at Dropbox, just like what happened to Mailbox (seriously, what has Mailbox
been doing for 6 months after iOS 7 has been released?!).

~~~
donholly
They've been working on Carousel :)

------
inklesspen
Since paying Dropbox is not an acceptable solution for me, I've asked Loom to
refund the money I paid them (perhaps foolishly, I signed up for the $50-per-
year plan and paid up front).

So far, they've refused: "Thanks for writing and we appreciate your position.
Unfortunately, I am very sorry but I cannot offer you a refund at this time."

This is very disappointing.

------
daanlo
Sad too see a great product go, but happy to see it make its way into a
product I also use :-)

------
bitsweet
congrats to the entire Loom team

------
lttlrck
Upon exporting to Carousel:

"This app is in development mode and cannot accept more users. Contact the app
developer and ask them to use the Dropbox API App Console to apply for
production status."

------
antoni
There is already an "Export to Carousel" option for logged users, which leads
here: [https://loom.com/migrate](https://loom.com/migrate).

------
debt
Awesome. Loom should consider changing that landing video image though on
their homepage. It just...something seems...not right. Or maybe make that iPad
more prominent.

I don't know.

------
sunilkumarc
So totally how much of space are we gonna get now ?

~~~
antoni
"If you switch to Carousel, you will have the exact same amount of free space
you had in Loom. Any referral bonus you received on Loom will be preserved
into your new Dropbox account as well." See:
[https://loom.com/migrate](https://loom.com/migrate)

