RETURN TO HOMEAs you all know I like to think of myself as “virtual”. I have a lovely office in New York with a fabulous view, but I also have a great view from my home office window (2-3 days a week) and I like an Italian or French view every now and then. So, I am always looking for new ways to live and work on the road and feel free from the confines of my office. I write and do research a lot lately and have a great group of interns helping me out with research, editing and just plain kicking me in the butt to keep up. WE have been using Google Docs to work together on copyediting and excel spreadsheets. It is a very cool way to collaborate and keep up with clean docs. But we think we found something that can push my virtual skills a little further and allow me to live in the clouds!
Dropbox is a cloud-based file synch and collaboration tool that allows users to access and manage all of their “stuff” across multiple devices. So, for example, say you have a work computer, a personal computer and an IPhone (We use Blackberry only here, but it works too!). Chances are that you don’t want to have to keep emailing yourself stuff or trying to remember which USB key you need (I have tons of them and once lost one in a Dublin pub which contained the first draft of a book). By saving all of your stuff to your Dropbox folder (which sits on your desktops and is an app on your phone), your updates will synch across all of your devices. It’s just like saving to your My Documents folder, but with the rather significant exception that your Dropbox folder lives on all your devices.
All right, am I explaining this correctly? Watch this video for a really great take on it
In addition to the synchronization capabilities, Dropbox also allows for collaboration by providing a “share” option. Hello interns! With this, you can send your files or links to your folder to anyone from your desktop or mobile phone and they can simply create an account and make their changes to the file. Dropbox provides version history and allows you to revert to older versions if you need to. (Because I keep every draft of my books) And, since so often people end up inadvertently working on the same files, Dropbox solves this by allowing more than one person to work on the file but saving them automatically as different versions, so there is no data lost.
Dropbox offers free user accounts of up to 2GB and regularly offers chances for free additional storage. For example, simply referring someone to Dropbox will add another 250MB of storage to your account. There are also paid accounts available if you want more storage – $10/month for 50GB or $20/month for 100 GB. All mobile apps are free. So check it out for free and then see if you need more space! I did and I do! See you in Cairo!
About Dropbox
Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator. Today, Dropbox is well-funded by Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Amidzad. Since launching publicly in September of 2008, we’ve attracted millions of users and are growing rapidly. We’ve been featured in the New York Times and on TechCrunch, and have won awards from places like PC Magazine and CNET.
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