"Dropbox tallied $116 million in sales last year, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million."
i m flabbergasted at the amount of money there is in this service (and related ones) - is it really that useful? I had a dropbox account since the early days, and i have hardly put any use into it.
What do people actually use it for? Share files? Backup solution?
It was exceptionally useful as a student when I was frequently using lots of computers. As a sort of USB stick in the cloud (with added shared-folders) it was brilliant. The sync, versioning and useful web interface "just work".
I can completely see that if you're a small team and are faced with the problem of shared folders, dropbox would be a good solution. It's not too expensive and a lot easier than setting up reliable and secure self-hosted file storage.
Dropbox has basically replaced my homedir and nearly everything I do now goes inside (documents, photos, git repositories).
It is installed on my home laptop, university desktop, smartphone and tablet. Goodreader (a PDF reader) can sync to a Dropbox directory with PDF files. So I can quickly access all of the papers I ever saved. This is a very convenient way of overcoming ipad's terrible sync-using-itunes mechanism.
Besides sharing files (for which Dropbox is great), I am increasingly symlinking folders to subfolders in my Dropbox to attain automatic synchronization between machines. It's just by far the most seamless and painless to set up solution I know of.
I recently became a paying user and I now store all my personal docs to my Dropbox. My main impediment to doing this was concern about security, but then I discovered and deployed Boxcryptor Classic (https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/boxcryptor-classic), which give me a great deal of peace of mind. It's a fully client-side, zero-knowledge file-system encryption app. I now keep all my documents in my Boxcryptor, which sits in my Dropbox.
I use it for both, but mostly sharing. Dropbox starts you off with 2GB but allows you to increase the size for free by referring other people, which I've been able to do. I've gotten it up to 8GB thus far. I don't rely on it to keep all of my most important data, since that goes well beyond 8GB, and I don't keep anything personally sensitive on there either. If my friends need something like pictures I've taken at a party, I'll put them on Dropbox and let them deal with it, rather than the hassle of email or setting up my own server.
While it's limiting, I like it a lot better than carrying USB sticks with me - I've lost a number of them over the when they'd eventually rip off my keychain :(
- a backup. All important files, pictures go there. My phone automatically copies all my pictures to Dropbox. (although I occassionally move them over to Skydrive to keep within my limit)
- a git repository
- a way to share files between home / work / phone. (I rarely bother copying files over usb to my phone anymore. Memory sticks are gathering dust)
- a way to share files/photos with friends.
- a web server.. well more like a way to share html files with friends.
- an easy way to copy documents to Evernote (using Wappwolf)
Anything meaningful I do on my mobile devices - photos, files, etc. - gets backed up to Dropbox. It's 100% automatic, and has been a real life saver. I also use it as basically a virtual thumb drive to "move" files between work/home. I'm the exact opposite of you: I'm flabbergasted that people don't use it. That said, I wouldn't pay for it. There are much cheaper backup solutions (Crashplan).
I use it to collaborate with a fairly non-technical person, where it's marginally easier to use than email. That's it. I'm actually rather horrified at the people using it for backup and git. These are stupendously bad ideas. Proper collaboration with multiple parties also dictates that some form of locking is required. Something more advanced than yelling "I got it!"
Most of the less-technical people I know who use it use it as a backup. The free tier can restore deleted files within a certain time period (30 days?). If you put your default file locations (My Documents or similar) inside dropbox, it works pretty well as a set-and-forget backup.
I use it for backups. Put important documents in a truecrypt volume. Copy said volume to dropbox.
For non-sensitive items like books, pdfs, etc... dropbox makes it easy to find items online and then share them across my tablets, phones, and other computers.
Cross-computer synching and implicit mini backup. Most of active work of any kind is saved in dropbox folders so I can pull it up anywhere. My desktop folder is replaced by a folder called "Current" on dropbox.
If Apple did indeed acquire Primesense, there certainly is good possibility that they will keep the hardware and software for themselves and stop licensing it out to other companies.
Taptrix (the developers behind Inkpad and Brushes) was YC S10, though if I remember correctly they joined YC after their Brushes app was already a smashing success on the iPad. Brushes was released the same day the iPad 1 came out and the two guys behind it were both Apple veterans. [1] [2]
Brushes — This startup created the Brushes application for painting on your iPhone or iPad. The app was used to create the well-known iPhone covers for the New Yorker. With 250,000 paying users and $60,000 in monthly revenue, Brushes apparently holds the YC record for most profitable startup on Demo Day. Its eventual goal is to become the “Adobe of touch devices” by building a suite of apps. [3]
If I had to guess, I'd say the devs probably have enough money to retire. Congrats! Thank you for contributing your code to the world.
60k a month in revenue for a painting app and people act like I'm crazy when I say its time for Apple to create an iPad with a digitizer, as if no one wanted to paint on an iPad.
Just because someone that's really determined can overcome the iPad's shortcomings and make something that looks professional, doesn't mean that drawing with a capacitive stylus isn't terrible.
Have you ever used a proper digitizer? If you did you should notice immediately how much better it is.
While I hope that this will be the first 4K monitor to do 4K 60p over DisplayPort using SST I highly doubt this is the case. I was hoping the same for the Panasonic's 4K 65" LCD but no such luck.
Still waiting for the first 4K display to support 10-bit 4K 60p over DisplayPort SST and have HDMI 2.0 ports. Will have to wait until CES 2014 for more HDMI 2.0 displays.
No unfortunately. While it's fairly trivial for me to support, the performance difference (a factor of more than 100) between Sketchology and other vector drawing apps makes it impossible to actually load the exported file anywhere.
I tested against Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, iDraw, and Inkpad and was unable to load a file equivalent to drawing for more than about 2 minutes in Sketchology. I'll have a more in depth technical analysis of this soon.
Are you going to be sharing the details of how you've done it or will it remain secret? Just interested because I've done a lot of work with large svgs (sometimes million+ nodes) over the last year (for an ongoing project) so I'm well aware of the performance issues you mentioned.
Thanks! I want to talk about it - I think it's probably the coolest part of the program. It's difficult though, I left my job about 2 years ago to work on this so commercial success is a definite goal. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll be able to give out algorithmic details without compromising that.
Totally understandable. I'm in a similar position myself (though in a completely different space).
If you ever decided the secret was too much to bear and you'd like to get it off your chest you could always drop me an email (in my profile) and we could discuss it :)
Except most 4K displays can't do 60Hz which for most is the bare minimum for computer usage.
I would avoid that Seiki monitor, it can only do 4K at 30Hz max and there are wide reports that it can't even do 1080p at 120 Hz properly (even though its in the spec sheet).
The first 4K 60p input displays are just coming to the market this year. You can see a list:
http://www.noteloop.com/kit/4k/
Right now it is just a trickle but expect a flood of both cheap and expensive 4K 60p displays next year.
Thanks, you are correct. I pulled the Feb 2011 10k, and it is clear -- $30M cash. No other acquisitions were mentioned, so that must be it. That being said, they show no earnouts for FY 2011 or 2012, but that could be because retention payments just got misclassified as comp. I stand by your >$40M comment as justifiable, likely accurate, and definitely more accurate than my estimation.
From the 10K > During 2010, except for the $50 million repayment of our line of credit and cash paid for an acquisition of $30 million, we were able to maintain a consistent level of cash and cash equivalents while growing our business by maintaining our disciplined use of capital.
