Earlier this month, Google and Dropbox partnered to offer owners of newly purchased Chromebooks access to 100GB of free storage for a year, as a “Perk.” Now all Chromebook owners can access their Dropbox files directly from the Chrome OS Files app.
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Dropbox search capabilities have been given a significant boost for the second time in as many months. The company says that it can now search for text inside PDFs and even image files like JPG and PNG …
Following its IPO filing last week, Dropbox today announced a new partnership with Google Cloud to integrate G Suite with the former’s platform. Integrations range from productivity and communication services, including with the just announced Hangouts Chat. Expand
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An update to the Dropbox Paper Android app today includes a new offline mode, doc scanning feature, as well as support for 20 languages. Expand
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Nicholas Jitkoff, a principal designer at Google since 2006 is leaving the company to be Dropbox’s vice president of Design (via TechCrunch). Responsible for helping create and lead Material Design, Jitkoff worked with product teams around the company to consistently deploy the design language.
Dropbox Paper has been in private beta for about a year, and now the web service is gaining a dedicated Android app as it enters public beta for anyone to try. Paper is Dropbox’s take on a collaborative word processor — think Google Docs — that’s built on a robust cloud syncing service.
Dropbox is getting some notable updates today for both the mobile apps and desktop that bring a number of new productivity tools and features to the service. It’s also changing its mobile camera uploads feature for basic users to require they have the desktop app installed or a paid Pro account.
Yahoo Mail is getting a notable update today for Android (and other mobile app users) that allows access to files stored in Google Drive, Dropbox, and GIFs on Tumblr. You can use the new feature to quickly attach a photo or other file from any of the supported services to emails. Expand
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In a new blog post today, Dropbox has announced the shuttering of the Mailbox app it acquired in 2013, along with the Carousel photos app that launched last year. The beta build of Mailbox for Mac has not seen an update in quite some time, while the iOS version had been left to stagnate, leading many to believe this was the case already, but today’s announcement finally confirms it.
Dropbox says that the reason for the shutdowns was that company had “increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together.”
Dropbox fans, you’re in luck – version 3.0.0 is completely redesigned to follow Google’s Material Design guidelines.
OnePlus has sold only somewhere over a million units of its OnePlus One (very small compared to the big OEMs), and went as far as to call its recent flash sales of the phone as something that would “shake up the industry,” but the company isn’t stopping there. Based on taking a “hard look at the numbers to make sure we were maintaining our commitment to our users,” OnePlus has decided to make the $249 starting price of the One permanent (sorry to everyone who waiting anxiously at their computers to get the deal last week). It also has a new partner in another promotion…
Starting June 10th – and for a limited time, they say – the company will be offering the 64GB OnePlus One with a 1-year subscription to Dropbox Pro, the cloud storage service, for $349. The deal is valid in the US, EU, and Canada. We wouldn’t be too surprised to see this deal lasts longer, though, as Dropbox continues its ugly battle against Google, Microsoft, and others to be the future storage center of people’s millions of files as they move from device to device.
While the OnePlus One is a solid buy for anyone in the market for a gimmick-free, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Android phone sold at cost, we still expect to see a OnePlus 2 soon, with the last word from OnePlus that it would go on sale “sometime in 2015.” Bloomberg pegged the August through September timeframe as when we should see it, and we recently reported on seeing a mysterious device from OnePlus show up in Geekbench test results. Just something to keep in mind.
Dropbox has today updated its Dropbox for Gmail Chrome extension with several new features, including—most notably—the ability to attach folders and several files at once. The update also includes the ability to more easily send larger files, send files to anyone (regardless of if they have the extension or a Dropbox account), and the ability to quickly save files that you receive via Gmail to your own inbox.
Here’s the full change log:
- Easily send large files. Just click the Dropbox icon in the compose window, select files or folders, and click Insert Link(s). No waiting for uploads to complete, no file size limit, and no eating up space in your inbox.
- Say goodbye to zip files. Attach folders and multiple files instantly, without having to zip files up.
- Send files to anyone. Even if they don’t have Dropbox or the extension, recipients can see and download the attachments you send them.
- Quickly save files sent to you. Add files to your Dropbox with a click so you can access them anywhere.
You can grab the Chrome extension in the Chrome Web Store right now for free. It’s still in beta, so don’t expect everything to work perfectly, but it looks like the app is nearing a full release soon—as today’s release is version 0.9.6.
Dropbox today officially announced its Dropbox for Business API allowing corporate IT systems to integrate the cloud-syncing platform for businesses into their own solutions. Dropbox says its newly announced Business API (application programming interface) will let developers take advantage of “team-level functionality” and corporate partners to further integrate Dropbox for Business into their own systems. Specifically, the Dropbox for Business API will provide the following benefits for partners:
Following an announcement earlier this month that Microsoft was adding Dropbox integration for syncing and sharing to the Office mobile apps, Dropbox announced today that the feature is now available in its latest app updates for Android and iOS.
The integration essentially allows users to tap into Dropbox storage directly from within the Office mobile apps, but it will also include the ability to send links to files from Office using Dropbox, open documents from Dropbox in Office, and more. Dropbox has instructions on how to use the new integration with Microsoft’s Office apps on its website.
To get started, make sure your Dropbox app is up to date on your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone, then open any Office doc, spreadsheet, or presentation in your Dropbox. Tap the new Edit icon (shown above) to start editing in the latest Office apps. When you’re done, your changes will be saved back to Dropbox automatically.
Earlier this month the Microsoft Office Mobile for Android app was updated with its part of the integration allowing users to “open, edit, and save documents from Dropbox.”
You can get the new features through the latest Dropbox app for Android starting today and the latest version of Microsoft’s Office Mobile for Android app. The integration is also expected to arrive for web users early next year.
Microsoft and Dropbox announced a new partnership between the two companies today and a commitment to bring integration between Dropbox and Office apps on Android and iOS. Currently Office users rely on local storage for saving files or Microsoft’s own OneDrive service for saving and syncing files, but the newly announced partnership will allow Office users to use the popular Dropbox service as an additional storage and syncing option and introduce new features between the productivity apps and syncing service. Expand
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The online blogging and content creation platform Squarespace launched two new apps for Android this afternoon. Starting today, Squarespace Note and Squarespace Note are both available on the Play Store. For those unfamiliar, Squarespace is a service that features website building, hosting, and blogging capabilities for a monthly fee.
After several requests, Dropbox for Android users can now export files to their device’s SD card. This new feature will help keep important items like documents and photos accessible whenever offline or switching from one device to another.
Today, Google, Dropbox and the Open Technology Fund announced Simple Secure, a new non-profit organization focused on making open source security tools easier to use. The group recognizes that several effective consumer-focused security options currently exist, however it also points out that these platforms have poor adoption rates because they’re too confusing for people to use. Stating that security measures like two-factor authentication are often avoided and viewed as a hassle.
Dropbox has today slashed its pricing and doubled the maximum storage space from 500GB to 1TB. Up until yesterday, you’d have been paying $500/year for 500GB; today you can pay just $120/year (or $99/year when paying annually) for a terabyte.
The new deal finally brings Dropbox into line with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, with Apple’s new iCloud pricing – which includes iCloud Drive – also looking to be broadly similar … Expand
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When a totally revamped version of 1Password for Android was released to the Play Store earlier this summer, the AgileBits developers still weren’t quite sure on how to price the app. Since the release, the app has been free for anyone to use. At the time of release, AgileBits said that eventually, a premium version would be released with many of the features hidden in it. Now, in a blog post, the developer team has announced that, as part of today’s 1Password 4.1 update for Android, many of the premium features are behind in-app purchases.
Dropbox this evening began rolling out an update to its app on Android, bumping it to version number 2.4.3. The biggest change with this update is the addition of in-app previews for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents, as well as standard PDFs. The search process has also been revamped and now tracks recent queries and offers typeahead suggestions.
Photo: Associated Press
According to a new report out of Re/code, Google will be joining forces with a variety of other tech companies to fight patent trolls. The Mountain View company will join Canon, SAP, Newegg, Dropbox, and Asana to ward off the trolls. Between the six of them, the companies hold more than 300,000 patent assets. The companies aren’t licensing their patents to one another, but rather joining the License on Transfer network. With this network, the companies promise to grant licenses to one another whenever one of their patents is sold, preventing it from being used against them by a troll.
Dropbox is introducing its latest product today, a photo and video management app called Carousel that integrates many of the features from the photo storage service Snapjoy acquired by Dropbox back in 2012.
The company unveiled the app at an event today in San Francisco as a gallery to store and share all of your photos and videos. The app is built for quick and easy sharing of one or multiple photos to phone contacts or email addresses (even if the recipient doesn’t have a Dropbox account), allowing you to get around the upload limitations usually associated with sharing photos. With everything backed up in full resolution directly to Dropbox, it essentially becomes a standalone app to manage just photos and videos that you want to store in Dropbox.
With Dropbox, we built a home for your photos and videos but never gave you a great way to experience them. We’d like you to meet Carousel, the newest member of the Dropbox family. It’s a gallery that houses your entire life’s memories. Even more, Carousel lets you share and relive these memories in private conversations with friends and family.
Carousel is now available as a free download on the App Store for iOS and the Play Store for Android.
[tweet https://twitter.com/carouselapp/status/453949761830154240]
The company also made some other product announcements today including news regarding versions of its Mailbox app for Android and Mac OS X.
Last night, it was reported that Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside would be stepping down from his position to become the chief operating officer at cloud storage company Dropbox. Woodside has now confirmed this decision in a blog post on the Official Motorola Blog, saying that he will step down as CEO at the end of March.
Woodside goes on to announce that Jonathan Rosenberg, who was the SVP of Products at Google from 2002 until 2011, will step in as COO at Motorola Mobility on April 1st. Rosenberg worked closely with Woodside and was “intimately involved” with decisions at Motorola. Google Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora will remain Executive Chairman of the Motorola Operating Board and continue to oversee strategy at the company. It looks as if Motorola will be going without a CEO after Woodside leaves, leaving Lenovo with a lot of control.
Woodside says he is leaving Motorola Mobility “in great hands” and that he is immensely proud of what the company has accomplished in the past 18 months. He also notes that he is excited for the next chapter for the company under Lenovo, who purchased it for $3 billion last month.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston has also issued a statement on the news.
“We’ve long admired Dennis’s leadership at Google and Motorola where he ran multi-billion dollar businesses and built amazing organizations around the world. We’re so happy to welcome Dennis to our team — I can’t imagine a better person to help us bring Dropbox to global scale.”
Read the full resignation letter after the jump:
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, Dropbox plans to name Motorola CEO and 10-year Google veteran Dennis Woodside as its first chief operating officer. Citing people “familiar with the matter,” the report says that Woodside will focus on further expanding Dropbox services into businesses and schools, as the company faces stiff competition from other services, such as Box Inc.
Woodside joined Google in 2003 and was tasked with helping manage the search giant’s relationships with partners and advertisers internationally. He became the CEO of Motorola Mobility when the company was acquired by Google in 2011. Of course, Google just sold its Motorola Mobility unit to Lenovo last month for $3 billion, meaning that Woodside’s rein at Google would be coming to an end.
This is a big loss for Motorola. Even though Woodside didn’t return the company to profitability in his short tenure as CEO, he did release several very well-received smartphones, including the Moto X and its lower-cost sibling the Moto G. It remains to be seen who will take over when Woodside officially steps down from his post at Motorola.
At Dropbox, Woodside will be the business veteran of the team, working under chief executive Drew Houston chief technology officer, Arash Ferdowsi. Dropbox has reportedly been slowing down in terms of growth, with its sales slowing and questions being raised about whether it is profitable or not. Woodside will certainly have his hands full at Dropbox.
This isn’t by any means the first time we’ve seen a cloud storage provider offer up a special offer, in fact it seems like the cool thing to do these days. With that in mind, it’s worth noting that Amazon is throwing its hat into the proverbial free cloud storage offer with 50GB of storage with the purchase of over 100 carrier-branded Android smartphones.
Back in May Google rolled out new contextual quick action buttons in Gmail that appeared next to messages in your inbox allowing users to, for example, quickly RSVP to an invitation or check-in to flights. Today Google announced on its Gmail blog that it’s rolling out even more quick action buttons in Gmail. One of the new buttons will allow users to rate and review restaurants and save Google Offers with a single click:
For example, you can rate and review restaurants you ordered from on Seamless and even modify OpenTable reservations—all without opening an email. And for the deal lovers out there, you can conveniently save a promotion from Google Offers with one click, making it easy to find and buy it when you’re ready.
Another new quick action button will allow YouTube and Vimeo uploaders to click a “View video” button next to emails in their inbox to jump right to viewing their finished uploads (pictured below). The same button will also appear for Dropbox, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Expand
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Earlier this afternoon we reported on a new feature from Dropbox called “Drop-ins” that lets developers seamlessly upload and download files from Dropbox within their apps. Yahoo! has now announced that its Mail app for Android has been updated for support with the feature.
From within the Yahoo! Mail app, simply tap the attachment icon and choose “Share from Dropbox” to share files from the cloud with your emails.
In the app, start a new email, tap the attachment icon and choose “Share from Dropbox.” If you’ve already linked your Dropbox account, then you can start choosing files to share right away. If you don’t have an account, just sign up from within the app.
The update should be available very soon on the Play Store.
Dropbox kicked off its developer conference in San Francisco today and with it came a few updates including new tools for devs and the announcement that the service now has 175 million users. That’s up about 75 million users from just last November.
The developer conference also included some announcements about new tools coming to let third-party app and website developers easier integrate Dropbox. The company is introducing a platform for developers that includes a new API called Datastores, allowing app devs to store and sync data from their apps across multiple devices and platforms. It’s something developers have been doing on their own for a while (for example 1Password), but now Dropbox is making easy for all:
The Datastore API provides developers a new way to sync data beyond files across a variety of devices and platforms. The Datastore API allows developers to save their app’s structured data (e.g. contacts, to-do items, and game state) on Dropbox and handles all the magic necessary to sync it quickly and reliably. Users of a Datastore-enabled app can be sure their data will be up-to-date across all their devices whether online or offline.
It also showed off new “Drop-ins” that will let devs easily integrate the ability to open and save from Dropbox within their apps: Expand
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0ee3R3tfdd4]
You probably know by now that Google just unveiled its new cloud service called “Google Drive.” The service integrates with Google Docs online, offers an Android app, and it provides a desktop app for Dropbox-like functionality. In addition, Google announced availability of a Google Drive SDK and 18 web apps that used the SDK to create apps integrated with the service.
Integrating your application with Google Drive makes it available to millions of users. Drive apps are distributed from the Chrome Web Store, and can be used with any modern browser. Plus, your app can take advantage of Google’s sharing, storage, and identity management features.
So, what exactly will the Google Drive SDK allow you to do? Google will allow you to integrate sharing through Drive directly into your apps that manage files such as web app Lucidchart. Google already partnered with 18 apps that have integrated Drive features. The post also explained how Google would let you tap into Drive’s storage and indexing features:
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<em>Google Drive appearing in Google Docs during testing.</em>
Are you ready to ditch Dropbox? According to a new report, Google’s long-rumored file storage service Google Drive is set to launch next week. The Next Web said the service is likely to launch next Tuesday, and it will provide users with 5GB of free storage. Much like Dropbox, which currently trumps the industry, users will be able to store any file on the service’s servers for access anywhere. Being Google, however, Drive will most likely also integrate throughout Android and other services—as Apple does with iCloud, though it is a bit more limited. Drive will also launch with integration into other third-party services, according to a leak from last week. We will also look out for the announcement, because we hope this not another source wrong about the launch date.
Google’s rumored alternative to Dropbox just got a name confirmation while suggesting third-party integration.
The Verge reported that online computing graphic tool Lucidchart implemented a link for integrating Google Drive to its control panel for automatic synchronizing to the cloud. The link quickly disappeared, but the leaked screen capture above seems to verify Google Drive’s name and a taste of what it can do.
According to recent reports, Google’s Drive is coming any day now. Dropbox, not wanting to lose an opportunity to get in under the wire, is doubling its referral bonuses. Instead of the normal 250MB, users can now get 500MB per referral for a maximum of 16GB of free space (both referrer and referee). If you are a pro/paid user, your maximum referral limit is 32GB of free space.
The Cloud storage Google Drive has been an on-again, off-again rumor for years.
Today, GigaOm’s Om Malik says Google Drive will release to the public in the first week in April.
I am told the big day is sometime during the first week of April 2012…Google is going to offer 1 Gb of storage space for free, but will charge for more storage. The market leader Dropbox currently offers 2 Gb for free. Google’s product will come with a local client and the web interface will look much like the Google Docs interface. Interestingly, it will launch for Google Apps customers and will be domain specific as well. Google has also built an API for third party apps with this service so folks can store content from other apps in the Google drive. My sources are impressed, so far with what they have seen.
This could be the last piece of the Cloud puzzle. Expand
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An update to the Dropbox for Android client issued yesterday allows users to automatically save every photograph taken with a phone’s camera to their Dropbox in full resolution. A new setting to Turn on Camera Upload also lets you upload existing photos and videos over wireless or both wireless and cellular networks.
In case of the latter, Dropbox will not upload large videos using a data plan; although, you can override the preference in settings. Your photos and clips save in a private folder on your Dropbox called Camera Uploads. The company said people wishing to test the new feature would get an extra 3GB of free storage for a total of 5GB.
It is important to note that you will not get an extra 3GB at once but rather your storage limit will gradually increase as photos and videos upload with the new feature. For example, your first automatic upload scores 500MB of free extra storage. The company is also testing new Windows and Mac clients that can also automatically upload photos found on digital cameras, smartphones, tablets, or SD card connected to your machine.
Once your photos and videos automatically upload to Dropbox, you will be able to view them using a new web interface. The updated Dropbox for Android client is now available for download in Android Market. The company also confirmed iOS users will soon get the Camera Upload feature through a forthcoming update.
It is worth mentioning that Google had a similar feature in the Google+ for Android client, and Apple tackled this issue with Photo Stream—an iCloud feature that automatically syncs photos (but not videos) across Macs, PCs and iOS devices.
Google Drive has been rumored to launch for quite awhile as a competitor to the popular Dropbox. Google Drive will be a file locker for users to store files accessible from anywhere. Think Google Docs, but for files. Tonight, Wall Street Journal said Google would be launching Google Drive in the coming weeks or months, citing people familiar with the matter.
Google will most likely also release a Google Drive Android app. Users will be able to quickly grab the files they upload through the web and grab them for use on their phones.
WSJ said Google Drive will run for free, but it will cost more money as more data is used like Google Docs. We will keep you updated as the launch draws closer.
From some slides of an internal presentation given by Google, it appears that where there is now Google Docs, there will soon be ‘Google Drive’. Most of the functionality, like uploading files of any type, of the mythical Google Drive now lies in Docs Hopefully, with this upcoming rebrand, Google allows more storage (let me buy it) and also has some utilities like backing up the home folder on Windows or Mac. Seriously, what better way to get users to adopt your system than to offer to sych your files to the cloud.
Oh, now that we have all of your files, you might as well get a Chomebook.
It is no secret that HTC is doubling down on software. One example: Recently, their chairwoman Cher Wang contemplated an operating system of their own. HTC also has Sense, an Android user interface skin, and the company has expanded into a cloud-based delivery service for music, television shows and Hollywood entertainment on the go. The latest addition to their arsenal includes cloud-storage service Dropbox, which teamed up with the Taiwanese handset maker to offer folks with select HTC smartphones a bonus three gigabytes of free storage. This is on top of the two gigabytes free storage Dropbox has always had in store for new sign-ups, resulting in five gigabytes of free storage for HTC handset owners. Plus, convincing five friends to sign up for a Dropbox account raises the free limit to a maximum of ten gigabytes of free cloud storage.
Given Dropbox’s popularity, many people will no doubt take advantage of this promotion. Using Dropbox, users can effortlessly sync their files across desktop and mobile devices, regardless of the platform. The service takes care of file system differences between the platforms, resolving conflicts and keeping platform-specific file meta data intact. This promotion is valid from October, Pocket-lint reports. It requires a new HTC handset with the Sense 3.5 software or later, which currently includes only the Rhyme and Sensation XE smartphones.
As of April 2011, more than 25 million people saved a cool 200 million files daily on Dropbox. Eagle-eyed readers could observe that computer maker Hewlett-Packard used to bundle its PlayBook tablet with a 50GB of free cloud storage on Box.net, until they shuttered webOS.
Wired‘s got some good news for Amazon, Google, Dropbox and anyone else who stores music in the Cloud. The practice is legal and doesn’t infringe on record company rights. Additionally, Cloud companies need not store multiple copies of the same song, so long as each users file is the exact same copy, including MD5 hash (same bit rates, album art, etc).
In a complicated federal court decision Monday (see Threat Level’s write-up), a New York federal court judge ruled that the practice was legal — but only insofar as the single storage method is done for exactly unique copies. So for instance, all people who bought “Stairway to Heaven” as an MP3 from Amazon would have the exact same file (as determined by an MD5 Hash) and MP3tunes could just store a single copy.
However, the ruling makes clear that if MP3tunes scanned a customer’s music collection and found “Stairway to Heaven” ripped from a CD with a slightly different file size, the company could not simply substitute a master copy. Instead, that customer would have to upload the file.
The decision also said that allowing “sideloading” of songs was legal. That was the feature of MP3tunes that let users add songs they’d found on webpages, such as music blogs, directly to their online locker.