About

DropBoks was created by people who are passionate about making powerful yet simple applications. In addition to referring to themselves in the third person, the DropBoks team enjoys being somewhat fanatical about usability and the user experience in general.

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Other Information

• Type : Private
• Founded : 2005
• Headquarters : Palo Alto, CA
• Key people : Aaron Levie (CEO)

About

Since 2005, co-founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith along with our fast-growing team have established Box.net as one of the most popular and trusted web-based services for accessing and sharing content from anywhere. Today, more than 2 million individuals, small businesses, and Fortune 1000 companies around the world use Box to easily connect with the content and people that matter most.

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For your most popular files Zumodrive stores them locally for offline use. The produce is aimed specifically at notebooks and mobile devices with smaller hard drives.

Currently on Beta, with 1 GB Free Storage

Links

• Zumodrive

MyBloop allows users to upload an unlimited number of files for free. Through this website, you can share your files with anyone, listen to music, create playlists, back up files and share your digital life with the world. Transform your browser into a media center with unlimited storage. There are over 65,000 users adding to our growing collection of 2.5 million files.

There’s nothing to download or install. Get your very own account in just under a minute. You are given complete control, enabling you to easily hide personal documents from public viewing.

Links

• www.mybloop.com

Drop.io is rooted in a model which highlights trust and transparency with the intent of minimizing the amount of information needed to share privately based on private URLs, passwords, and expiration settings. The model of privacy, which is known as Simple Privacy or Casual Privacy has been described by Kellan Elliott-McCrea of Flickr as “a design pattern for sharing non-public information using out-of-band exchange of unguessable tokens.” Another service following the same basic model is Flickr Guest Pass.

The service does not require embedded accounts, identity, search, or any other social elements. Its core philosophy is to create a simple, private system based on inputs and outputs. Users send “in” files (documents, images, videos, audio files, archives, and more) via various methods (web, mms, email, phone and fax) into their “Drops”. Once in the drops, users can view their content and move it “out” via the web, email, mms, and fax.

Drop.io was founded by entrepreneurs Sam Lessin and Darshan Somashekar in August 2007. The company was originally located in Manhattan and moved to its new office location in Dumbo, Brooklyn in 2008.

In November 2007, Drop.io completed a $1.2 million Series A round of financing lead by RRE Ventures to support the company’s development efforts and infrastructure growth. In March 2008, the company closed $2.7 million in series A-1 financing led by New York venture capital firms DFJ Gotham and RRE Ventures.

Drop.io was nominated for the Technical Achievement Award at the South By Southwest 11th Annual Web Awards in 2007.

On June 10th Drop.io and Scribd, the leading platform for online document publishing, announced a partnership to offer rich conversion and viewing within private “drops”, to make it easier for people to share private information online. As of 2008, users can find Drop.io on a number of social networking sites, including: Facebook and Twitter.

Between March 2007 and November 2008 drop.io released a series of feature improvements to their platform including ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ via various interfaces like phone and fax, a twitter ‘subscription’ mode, and a Firefox plugin that allows users to ‘drag and drop’ files into new or existing ‘drops’

In September 2008 drop.io released a very simple API which allows other applications to use drop.io’s file sharing ability in their own applications. Several early applications were built, including usend.io (a simple file transfer app like senduit or yousendit). Arstechnica appears to have built the first fully operational third party application on the API.

In November 2008 drop.io announced having moved 100% into ‘the cloud’ having switched away from all owned and rented physical hardware/servers and claimed to be the largest 100% in the cloud application in the world.

Also in November 2008 drop.io released a major design overhaul which completely changed the front end of the product, but maintained the core service.

In December 2008 drop.io was one of the first services to release a Facebook Connect integration, which allowed users to publish updates of any sort made to any drop directly to their facebook feed.

Drop.io is an account-free service that offers:

• 100 MB of free non-searchable storage with ability to upgrade to an infinite amount of storage for a fee
• Password protection and expiration settings
• Formatting and design customizations
• The ability to store and share images, documents, video, audio, and other digital content
• Free faxing
• Free e-mailing into and out of drops
• Free custom phone number and extension to add more information via e-mail, mms or phone
• Free voicemail sent into drops
• Custom expiration dates for each drop

Links

• drop.io

A maximum of 20 folders (or “libraries”) may by synced, including libraries shared over the internet. Each library can contain a maximum of 20,000 files and each file cannot exceed 4GB.

Windows Live Sync was released on December 11, 2008.

Microsoft bought FolderShare from ByteTaxi Inc. on November 3, 2005, and made it a part of their Windows Live range of services.

On March 10, 2008, Microsoft released its first user visible update to Windows Live Sync (then FolderShare). This comprised a rewrite of the FolderShare website and an updated Windows Live Sync client. Support for discussion groups and Remote Desktop Search was removed, but may be brought back in a future releases. The new client has some user interface and branding updates and contains several bug fixes including official support for Windows Vista. As of April 2008, FolderShare also no longer supports Windows 2000.

Windows Live Sync had undergone extensive platform upgrades, switching from the original LAMP when it was originally built on and acquired, to the Windows Server platform. New UI improvements were also announced to be part of the Windows Live Sync release, integrating it with other Windows Live services. New features of Windows Live Sync compared to FolderShare include:

• Ability to sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each
• Integration with Windows Live ID
• Integration with the Recyle Bin
• New client versions for both Windows and Mac
• Unicode support
• Integration with Windows Live Photo Gallery to sync photo albums between PCs

The FolderShare software has stopped working as Windows Live Sync is released, and users have been asked to upgrade to Sync. After upgrading, Windows Live Sync automatically rebuild the user’s personal folders, however, Sync is unable to rebuild the shared libraries.

Links

• Windows Live Sync homepage

Box.net was founded in 2005 as a college business project by Aaron Levie (CEO) and Dylan Smith (CFO). It was incorporated in April of that year. Originally based in Washington, Box.net moved to Palo Alto, California, United States in late 2006.

Box received angel capital from Mark Cuban in 2005, then raised a Series A round of $1.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2006. In late 2007, it raised a Series B round of $6 million from U.S. Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Box.net currently has over 2 million users and serves over 1 million files a day. In 2007, Box.net was named a WebWare 100 Award winner in the “Data” category. It was also chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the “AO 100 Top Private Companies” for 2007. In 2008, it was named in the Webware 100 again, in the Utility and Security category.

Box.net’s product offering was initially consumer-focused. In August 2007, it introduced its Enterprise offering, targeting larger organizations and emphasizing collaboration tools.

In December 2007 the company launched its OpenBox platform, which connects data from Box.net with other applications and services across the web. Included in the launch were online services EchoSign, Autodesk, Zoho, ThinkFree, Scribd, Picnik, Zazzle, Twitter and Myxer.

API

Box.net has an API for developers, which is implemented over conventional XML. Box.net was the first Internet storage provider to launch an open API.

Box.net API documentation is available at the OpenBox Developer Documentation Site. There are currently more than 1000 developers in Box.net’s Developer Network.

Featured applications and free plug-ins are featured on the main site: Box Apps.

With the launch of its OpenBox platform, Box.net recently added the ability for developers to create services that will interact with a user’s files on Box.net.

Products

Box.net is a subscription-based service. Current plans include:

• Lite: 1 GB of space, 25MB file size limit (free)
• Student: 2 GB of space, 50MB file size limit
• Individual: 5 GB of space, 1GB file size limit and password protection
• Professional: 15 GB of space, 1 GB file size limit, 5 Guest user accounts, SSL, password protection and more.
• Enterprise: Provides a scalable business solution for small groups and large companies. Enterprise users have access to an administrative panel allowing complete control of regular accounts as well as personalized branding options.

Links

• Box.net website

Wuala is a free social online storage which allows its users to securely store, backup, and access files from anywhere and to share files easily with friends, groups, and the world. Tens of thousands of users and thousands of communities around the world are already actively sharing millions of files, growing quickly.

Wuala is based on a revolutionary technology that was researched for the most part at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).

Users start with 1 GB of storage but can get as much as they want, either by trading idle disk space or by buying additional storage. All files get encrypted before they leave the user’s computer and the user chooses who gets access to which folder. No one else – including us – gets to see the files. Wuala comes as a convenient application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that can also be started directly from within the browser, elegantly bridging web and desktop.

Wuala is developed and run by Caleido Inc., a start-up based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Links

• Official Wuala Website

MyOtherDrive sharing services offer public sharing, private sharing, and no sharing. Publicly shared content is indexed and searchable.

They have the lowest price offering in the industry. They support free accounts, which can store up to 5GB. For $1.99 per month, users can have 25GB, file linking, and fast transfers. For $4.99 per month, customers gain support for AES 128-bit encryption and scheduled unattended backup. They also offer larger storage accounts and business / government accounts as well.

Links

• Visit MyOtherDrive

Here’s our shortlist of some of the most popular Cloud Storage and file syncing Web Services:

• Windows Live Sync (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare) is a free-to-use application by Microsoft that is designed to allow files and folders between two or more computers be in sync with each other on Windows (XP and later) and Mac OS X based computers, similar to Live Mesh’s data synchronization services.
• dropbox – Dropbox is a storage application and service operated by Evenflow, Inc. The service enables users to store and sync files online and between computers. Dropbox has a cross-platform client (Windows, Mac and Linux) that enables users to drop any file into a Dropbox folder that is then synced to the web and the users’ other computers with the Dropbox client.
• Wuala is a free social online storage which allows its users to securely store, backup, and access files from anywhere and to share files easily with friends, groups, and the world. Tens of thousands of users and thousands of communities around the world are already actively sharing millions of files, growing quickly.
• box.net – is an online file system that allows users to store, access and share files remotely. Its services include online storage, file hosting, and file sharing. Box.net was founded in 2005 as a college business project by Aaron Levie (CEO) and Dylan Smith (CFO). It was incorporated in April of that year.
• Drop.io is an online file hosting and sharing service that is designed to be simple and emphasizes privacy. It allows users to create online sharing points called “drops” that are used for uploading and sharing documents, images, video, audio, and other digital content without accounts, registration or e-mail addresses. Drops are non-searchable and not networked.
• Zumodrive stores your data in the cloud and allows easy access to all of your files from any device. The product streams most files as if they were on a local drive.

  For your most popular files Zumodrive stores them locally for offline use. The produce is aimed specifically at notebooks and mobile devices with smaller hard drives.

• MyOtherDrive is a leading Internet service offering tools for managing and sharing data online. Our service enables users to backup, share, and search files online. MyOtherDrive is one of the fastest growing online storage companies on the Internet….

• MyBloop allows users to upload an unlimited number of files for free. Through this website, users can share their files with anyone, listen to music, create playlists, back up files and share their digital lives with the rest of the world.