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DBX

dropbox.com

190 pointsgoronbjorn95 comments

Dropbox are in an interesting position- they're practically a "cloud utility". Like if ConEd invited me to "discover the possibilities when you use electricity", I don't really know what I'd get out of a Dropbox conference. It does file syncing. They have an API that allows you to sync files. Right. Either the topics would be so specific that they'd all repeat each other, or they'd be so broad that they would only tangentially touch on what Dropbox does.

That said, there isn't an agenda so i can't find out.

They have an API and therefore a developer community. Also, don't they have business accounts with administrative features? I doubt this is aimed at individual users.

Sounds like someone was hired in the PR/Marketing team and this was the result of their effort.

"Dropbox has how many users? Wow! We should have a conference! imagine if we just get 1% of the users at the conference! Imagine if we charge those attendees $350! WOW - I am a marketing GENIUS!"

Well, Dropbox bought Mailbox, which hints that they are keen to 'consumerize' at least some of their business. Which I'm wary about- like when my cellphone provider makes an app to view my bill, the results are invariably awful. There's a lot to be said for focusing on your core competency, but I can understand the desire to not be another "dumb pipe".

being the best dumb pipe is better than being a mediocre value adder imho.

IE Google Fiber, and all the excitement that's generating.

Google aren't just a dumb pipe provider, though. They've gone from utility to consumer and back to utility again.

I very much doubt that. Charging $350 for a large conference is more like break even money - if that.

I think Guido alone has a lot stuff to share with Python lovers.

I don't like the copy or the lack of content on the site.

The phrase "request an invitation" seems self-aggrandizing and conceited, as if one is supposed to beg for the elite privilege of being "invited" to give them $400. It's purchasing a ticket to a conference, not applying for an American Express Black Card. Their diction shouldn't pretent otherwise.

As for getting people to "apply" for this $400 ticket, they appear to have nothing in the way of information or any hints as to what will occur at this event. It just seems odd that they expect people to "apply" for tickets without any knowledge of the actual conference.

The phrase "request an invitation" seems self-aggrandizing and conceited

To me, it's a classic example of using social proof to create the idea that this event is sought after and valuable. See "if the line is busy, call again later" instead of "operators are standing by."

> As for getting people to "apply" for this $400 ticket, they appear to have nothing in the way of information or any hints as to what will occur at this event. It just seems odd that they expect people to "apply" for tickets without any knowledge of the actual conference.

Who's to say this is the primary way they are selling tickets? I'd imagine an invite only conference has actual invitations...

$350? I'd like to at least get a peek at what's going to go on that day before sinking that kind of money into this.

That is over 3 yrs of Dropbox Pro for one user, so I am curious what they will offer on that single day.

Your time should be a lot more valuable than that, so even if it was free you should evaluate what Dropbox is worth to you. If your work depends on Dropbox in some manner, it will most likely prove worthwhile.

"Your time should be a lot more valuable than that, so even if it was free you should evaluate what Dropbox is worth to you."

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you stating that the price of the conference is irrelevant and that one should only consider the time investment. If so, I disagree. Although $350 might be negligible to some, it is not to most people. The price of the ticket is probably going to be cost-prohibitive to most, and certainly elevates the decision of purchasing one out of the realm of triviality. To most people $350 is a major expense that requires thought, and to many, it's an expense that might prove prohibitive.

To the overwhelming majority of people, money and not time is limiting factor in their lives.

I'm saying that taking a work day off is probably more of a gamble than the $350.

> To the overwhelming majority of people, money and not time is limiting factor in their lives.

Sure, but this site's primary audience is not made up of the overwhelming majority of people. An average HN member has more money than time and likely wouldn't be using their personal money to attend anyway.

He's saying that, if you're reading HN, your day rate is probably much higher than $350. Hence, the conference might not be worth the price even if it were free.

Yeah, but I still do my own yardwork no matter what my day rate is. Some things about money you do based on principle, like not shelling out $350 without knowing what you're buying -- Warren Buffett wouldn't do that, why should I?

I think you're both saying that $350 is too expensive.

That's assuming a lot.

So it's ok to shell out 350 dollars just because your day rate is higher? Sorry, but the logic of that statement fails me.

Why spend 350 dollars on this vs something else would be rather interesting point to make.

Really? Mine's a fraction of that.

True. However, there are also the more difficult-to-measure networking benefits of attending a conference like this. Dropbox are a great technology-centered python shop. One may bump into a future co-founder, or a college senior may impress someone enough to be offered an internship, or an Ops guy could find inspiration in how they scale, etc. So it is possible that even if your direct day-to-day work doesn't depend on Dropbox, you could find it beneficial.

Come on! This is one of the most remarkably run companies around today. They never do anything halfway. If you balk at $350, you either aren't their target market or you don't think very highly of Dropbox.

$350 is about an hour and a half of work, at $215 per hour. That's chump change. Most significant conferences are about $300, such as ConvergeSE which happened just a couple weeks ago.

Dropbox knows that people will buy tickets because they believe in Dropbox, and then Dropbox will make it awesome. Then everyone will know that when you've got a company that does things right, you can trust them with a tiny percentage of a typical webshop's daily paycheck, which they already knew anyway. And if $350 seems like a lot per person, when you add up all the costs involved it's really not that much. Money adds up quickly when a conference is done right. Most conferences pay a full-time employee for months just to make sure that the wifi won't melt under the load of hundreds of conference goers. There are a huge number of things to think about and make sure that everything goes right.

I'm shocked at this thread. Utterly shocked. Someone else actually complained that the three letters DBX are already taken. Come on! Every possible three or four letter acronym is taken. This thread is crazy. There is nothing of value here, at all, period. Not sure what happened to HN here.

I am genuinely wondering if this comment is meant to be sarcastic.

I think it pretty obviously IS sarcastic...

Here's the blog post about it: https://blog.dropbox.com/2013/05/introducing-dbx-dropboxs-fi...

It's also rather sparse on details, but the line about being the first to see Dropbox's new products as the most important thing seems to indicate an intention to use the conference as an announcement platform.

Edit: TechCrunch is also reporting[1] that you'll be able to interact with the Dropbox API team:

> Dropbox tells me the three focuses of the one-day conference will be learning about newly launched features on its platform, giving developers a chance to meet and get help from Dropbox API engineers and designers, and highlighting what third-parties have built on top of Dropbox so far.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/06/dropbox-conference/

Meh, doesn't seem worth paying $350 just find out about new Dropbox products when it'll probably be on Hacker News the same day they make the announcement anyway. :)

"People create more than a billion memories, thoughts, and moments in Dropbox every day."

Interesting copy. If you replaced "Dropbox" in that sentence with Facebook, it would work just as well.

Maybe that's Dropbox's endgame? An emphasis on "moments" rather than "files"?

Some time ago, Dropbox offered me up to 3GB more free storage if I just turned on "auto uploading" for photos from my Android phone to my Dropbox folder. "Hey, free storage? OK."

I don't use Dropbox consciously - not daily, not weekly, not monthly - but I upload my photos to it automatically in exchange for more storage in case I one day need it. Like a backup service I don't actually have to visit except in emergency.

Not sure there is a lot of value in me for Dropbox, but they do get to make outrageous claims about 1B daily uploads, which includes every photo I've ever taken with my cell phone.

I wonder how many files are uploaded where people consciously uploaded to Dropbox.

I'm curious about the accuracy of the statement. That implication is people intentionally upload/share over a billion files every day?

Given that dropbox is more of a sync service, I'm curious if that number more accurately reflects the number of files shared total or perhaps the number of sync events that occurred?

If people are actually uploading & sharing >1B files every day, Dropbox is immensely bigger than I had thought. Instagram, for example, sees 40M photo uploads per day.

That doesn't seem unreasonable at all. There are plenty of power users like myself who do pretty much everything in Dropbox, and there are also plenty of tiny little files created every day that can count towards that.

For example, deep down in my Dropbox I have a Code directory, which has plenty of other folders for most of the personal projects I work on. If I create a rails project, that puts in a bunch of basic files which can easily count for 100. I initialize a git repository on there and that can generate a few hundred more files. All of those add up quickly.

Here's the results of a few commands showcasing the size of my personal dropbox, and I'm sure there are other power users who are similar to me.

ls -aR Dropbox | wc -l

74397

du -sh Dropbox

32G (Just to note, .dropbox.cache accounts for 10G)

Right, so it's the latter -- People are using dropbox as an automated rsync. Which is fine.

It's just fundamentally different than people sharing over a billion memories and moments each day, I'd argue their tagline is very misleading.

Their tagline does say "create" rather than "share".

Well, people don't Instagram entire project directory trees with months or years of cruft, but they will stick those in their Dropbox. I would kind of expect Dropbox to boast much higher numbers.

The future should be a 'cloud' that is basically just storage with a bunch of specially handling for specific instances (e.g. DropBox is online storage, but you can use it to share your photos). Hopefully this will be standardized in a way that doesn't funnel everyone to a specific provider.

That's sort of what I'm working on with Trovebox [1]. It's specific to photos (and videos soon) but you can select upwards of 7 storage services. Anything from Dropbox and S3 to storing files at the Internet Archive.

The software is part of my fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation and everything is open sourced [2].

[1] https://trovebox.com

[2] https://github.com/photo

Yea I thought that was funny too. My guess is that a majority of these "memories and moments" are not even images. We use DB to store all of the files for our app and 90% of them are text files.

I kind of hate how soft they make it... "I upload all my moments to my cloud and then frolic through the fields because technology is so meaningful!" give me a break

Why should I fork over $350? Because you're Dropbox? C'mon. Gimme some idea of why I should bother going...

Do you need a keychain maybe? Perhaps a plastic cup that is cheaply screenprinted?

Anything in that vein would certainly help more than just: "Come spend $400 watching something you can read online ten minutes after it happens"

Much like any conference.

However most conferences are good for networking, not sure about a very specialized dropbox one however...

Amazing UX design. These Dropbox designers have really stepped up their game. Try resizing the browser window or submitting a blank form. It's the little things that matter.

That's amazing UX? Everyone was so happy about flash going away and now we are just moving into abusing html to do annoying animations on every possible thing. I find it grating.

Why does the text disappear and then reappear at the top, seems like anti-UX

Also their font is not very legible.

I find the graphic at the bottom to be absolutely beautiful. It's one of those rare moments where I looked at the DOM to see what was going on under the hood.

Unfortunately, this page also seems to cause Chrome's rendering engine to consume a full core on my machine to run. I'm not sure if that's Chrome's fault or the page's fault, though.

UX maybe, but the visual design with that light gray text on white is terrible. On my MacBook, I had to turn the brightness up to painful levels, and even then it's barely readable.

Amazing? Here is what it looks like on Chrome 27 under Ubuntu: http://i.imgur.com/rDiKbvd.png

Poor contrast with small type is not cool. The resizing is neat, I guess.

Does it really just show the upside down "63 days" at the top for you?

I had the same backwards number on windows chrome

Very Nice & Simple, a few subtle things going on and only has 717.5kB page size. Nicely done, I'll dig around for a bit but probably will not be attending.

>> only has 717.5kB page size

Nearly a meg for a paragraph-long event invite!

When I resize the window the day counter at the top overlaps itself. And why is it upside down in the first place?

Are they using a public lib to achieve the resizing?

Why would you need one? It's just media queries with the added use of a general css3 transition on the elements so the browser animates them when they transition to the new position/size.

The font is kinda awful here on Chrome/Win7.

That's a general problem with chrome on windows rendering sites with custom fonts. It doesn't have directwrite, unlike Firefox and IE.

It's awful in Chrome on 10.6.8, too. Not sure what they were thinking with that color and that aliasing.

Clicking on the boats on this page makes them sink.

Loose clicks sink ships.

Odd analogy to tie-in to your event registration page. Sinking ships?

It's an easter egg. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

"Play in our sea and we can sink you"

Bit early to become Twitter? :)

There's also a Loch Ness monster too.

It looks weird that the battleship is moving backwards.

Every yacht seems to go backwards as well! Glad someone else noticed.

Not the tanker, unfortunately. That would have been fun to see go down.

Pop this in your URL with the tanker on screen: javascript:void(document.getElementsByClassName("tanker")[0].className += " sink")

Or, for those of a more surrealist bent: javascript:void(document.getElementsByClassName("fortmason")[0].className += " sink")

Try it on the "join" button and it "sinks" upward.

Clearly the conference is organized by ignorant younglings.

DBX is Dolby X - a Dolby noise reduction system for audio recordings, from the late 70s and onward. We had a separate box in my dad's audio stack that essentially had just one push button on a panel. That button was called DBX and it caused an audio signal to get mangled if it was recorded and de-mangled when it was played back. Good old analog times :)

dbx is a company and a noise reduction format. It competed w/ Dolby. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbx_(noise_reduction)

A-a-and you are correct.

Am I the only one who thought DBX was Dropbox's new ticker symbol? :)

They don't even own DBX.com... which is the trend these days. They should be trying to get it with all their money.

I agree with a lot of the commenters here. If your website doesn't explain the conference clearly then there's no predicting the crowd that will be in attendance. People are basically gambling on the fact that this will be worth their time.

If that's 1 billion new objects created every day, then I believe that puts them somewhere in AWS's top 1 customer.

Not necessarily if you take data deduplication into account. (You don't upload files they recognize the fingerprints for.)

I thought they were announcing their IPO and a ticker symbol in a dramatic way. I was disappointed that it's just a conf.

DBX looks to be available as a ticker symbol and I hope it will make a good ticker symbol for them someday.

If you open up the "join us" modal and then click outside the modal, you get a orange box that says join us and requires you refresh the page to get back to where you were.

Not true. I'm visiting with Chrome 26.0.1410.65 and clicking outside the box does close it.

However, clicking on 'request an invitation' without completing the form does make it do a nice little dance :)

I get the same thing as dubcanada in Chrome 27 on Windows 8.

You can't tell if $350 is expensive or not if you have no idea of what you are getting for it. I wouldn't go to the conference even if it was free and 2 meters from home.

I need a basic idea of what's going on there, and the main advantages. Usually, I go to a conference to listen a little, and socialize as much as I can. Different kind of conferences, different people. I discover other people who have other crafts.

Well, maybe it's just me.

Seems expensive for a single day event that will likely require travel, unless of course it's targeted at SF devs.

Great design though!

Here I was thinking this was their stock symbol and they'd gone public all of a sudden.

Why do people have to pay to attend these conferences? What is dropbox, or any company for that matter, going to give away or share that is so much more valuable than the price of the tickets?

It's less about the money and more about filtering for people who are serious about attending.

Just like WWDC or F8, I'm guessing you'll get to speak with engineers and designers at Dropbox to get a sense of where the platform is going. If you're building products on top of Dropbox, this is invaluable.

Is DBX going to be dropbox' stock symbol?

The design of the page is actually not that bad. We like it :)

I prefer adb.

$350 is a filter not the basis for a "profit center".

If I could upvote this more than once I would.

It limits the number of people who are going to show up and ensures that there is some level of interest by all in attendance. Even if 1000 people go to the first conference, that is hardly a big money maker — $350,000 disappears quickly with costs associated with hosting the conference.

They will make money, but it's hardly a boondoggle. The real benefit for Dropbox is getting 500-1000+ developers all in the same location sharing ideas, creating, giving them feedback, etc. A few days of a conference is worth months of emails/tweets/HN/etc — in both directions.

Those complaining about the price probably don't have any business interest in Dropbox and are unlikely to attend — which should suit everyone just fine.

What a useless link title. Was it submitted that way, or did the overzealous moderators get to it?

I agree. It's like the opposite of a typical Reddit link title.

Reddit headline:

HN headline:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com