Dropbox: Files Without Borders | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox: Files Without Borders

forbes.com

59 pointstomh-24 comments

Rodeo producer North American Midway Entertainment saved $25,000 in the first six weeks using Dropbox by eliminating overnight FedEx shipments with paperwork.

Wow. Talk about having a great story to tell. I'm sure there's a lot of individual users of Dropbox (myself included), but the business cost-savings angle could be a huge one for them to pursue.

Since Dropbox only does one-way access for people without an account, I assume they saved 25k by distributing paperwork, not receiving.

This implies they've been wasting almost $5,000 per week because they didn't find a content host / run an FTP / frickin E-MAIL the stuff.

What. The. (technological) Fail. You'd think they'd look into something like that a little earlier, as with a bit of setup an FTP host can be essentially as easy.

edit: hell, just use a Google Docs form, that handles distribution and filling it out and combining the results.

I think that's the point of Dropbox. Setting up FTP isn't as easy. Dropbox is so friendly people use it in lieu of more complete, cheaper solutions.

Setting it up - absolutely. Using it once it's in place - pretty close.

I don't expect them to set it up themselves. Just to hunt someone down and pay them a couple thousand to solve their ridiculously expensive problem.

I agree - FTP requires servers to be set up etc. In most corporate environments that can take a long time (for good reasons, you don't go changing perimeter firewalls without some kind of change control) - much easier for everyone to install Dropbox and start sharing stuff in minutes.

Google docs has an API, they also have folders. http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html

I've used Google docs folders for team projects that include file types other than those used for documents, it simply 'stores' it in the folder along with revision history.

Is any weekend hacker thinking what I'm thinking?

For a company that isn't very tech savvy (which may be the case for a company distributing so much papers around) dropbox provides the benefit of being dead-simple.

Absolutely true. Dropbox is one hell of a cloud backup solution. With Dropbox iPhone app, I have all my important files with me in my pocket.

Does anybody have numbers on their current free/paid users?

From the article:

He won't disclose details, but probably 2% of Dropbox's members are paying customers, putting revenues at $14 million this year.

2% is waaaay too high

Google docs does handle most files for uploading and downloading. I don't use it much, but it's cheaper than dropbox, but less capable as well.

Dropbox is just incredibly well done. I tried using services like xdrive, strongspace, idisk and a few others over the years and they all felt so cumbersome that they never stuck. Dropbox by comparison seems to sync incredibly fast, has a sensible way for dealing with conflicts, and just seems to hit a sweet spot of simplicity and functionality.

dropbox is great but their upload speeds kills the service. I get around 40-60kb/s while on other sites i get 400-500kb/s

Good to see Dropbox getting the coverage - it really is a killer application for end-users.

They need to create some more paid plans. More variety would be wonderful!

I still remember that HN post announcing his project, before getting accepted to YC.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Dropbox is definitely great, and it really do deserve its extremly widespread usage.

It has actually made it so simple to do a backup that it gets done. Most impressive.

You have to use gnome to use Dropbox, hopefully they fix that. Then all the systems folk will probably use this for quick n' dirty research projects.

No you don't. I've been using Dropbox in KDE for months now.

http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/dropbox_kde.html

A little searching goes a long way :)

Thanks for this info. Last time I looked into this it appeared to be a Nautilus thing only.

This is quite slick.

You can use it purely from the CLI. I do this in Arch, works nicely. And most of the hacks are provided from the dropbox guys themselves...

http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/TextBasedLinuxInstall

http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons/PythonScriptToMakeStub...

Uhm, I'm pretty sure the command-line interface does not require Gnome or Nautilus...

AFAIK you just need the Nautilus file manager.

Nope, they have a CLI app that works just fine. They do need to rework their Linux instructions on their site to make this more obvious though.

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