Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by Dropbox Inc, a company based in San Francisco, USA. Among other things, Dropbox offers cloud storage and file synchronization.
Dropbox will give you a free account with a set storage size. If you need more space, that is available for a fee (paid subscription). A paid subscription will also give you access to additional features.
History
Background
As an MIT student, Drew Houston would repeatedly forget his USB flash drive and therefore not have access to material that he needed when he needed it. This made him start dreaming about a solution. There were already solutions available online for users that wished to save things online, but these services were often unsuitable for large files or complicated to use. Some suffered from latency (time delays) and others were simply too riddled with bugs to be useful.
Houston initially began creating something for his own personal use only, but then realized that others might want to use it too. He founded Dropbox Inc in June 2007 and soon secured funding from Y Combinator. Before the year was over, Dropbox would go on to raise an additional 1.2 million USD in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital.
During the early days of Dropbox, a demo video was released and caught the eye of Arash Ferdowsi – another MIT student. He was sufficiently impressed with what he saw to contact Houston, and soon the two were in business together.
Dropbox premiered at the technology conference TechCrunch Disrupt in 2008. Due to trademark disputes, the domain used was getdropbox.com instead of dropbox.com.
2009
Dropbox started using the domain dropbox.com.
2010
By April, Dropbox had 1 million registered users. In September, the number had doubled. In November, there were 3 million registered users.
2011
In July 2011, Dropbox moved their headquarters but remained in San Francisco. The old premises on 760 Market Street where exchanged for Suite 400 on the fourth floor of the China Basin Landing building. This move gave Dropbox 85,600 square feet of space, and there was room for additional expansion later if needed.
Dropbox reached an important milestone in October when user #50 million signed up.
2012
April: It was revealed that Bono and The Edge (of U2 fame) had invested in Dropbox.
July: Dropbox acquired TapEngage, a solution for tablet-optimized advertisin.
September: Facebook and Dropbox worked together to make it easy to share Dropbox files in Facebook Groups.
November: User #100 million signed up!
December: Dropbox acquired Audiogalaxy and Snapjoy. Audiogalaxy was an online storage service for music files and playlists. Snapjoy was an online storage service for photographs.
December: Dropbox set up an office in Dublin, Ireland.
2013
March: Dropbox purchased the popular email app Mailbox. The developers of Mailbox joined Dropbox, who kept Mailbox running as a stand-alone app.
July: Dropbox purchased Endorse, a mobile service for coupons.
November: User #200 million signed-up.
2014
February: Dropbox set up an office in Austin, Texas after receiving a 1.7 million USD performance-based incentives package from the State of Texas and City of Austin.
April: Carousel was announced, a photo and video gallery with automatic saving of photos taken by the users mobile phone.
April: Dropbox bought Loom, a photo-sharing service online. The plan was to integrate it with Dropbox’s Carousel.
April: Dropbox bought Hackpad, a document-sharing service online.
May: Dropbox bought Bubbli, a startup capable of incorporating 3D technology into 2D views in an innovative way.
November: Dropbox announced that they were working with Microsoft to integrate Dropbox and Microsoft Office applications on iOS, Android and the Office 365 applications on the web
2015
January: Dropbox bought CloudOn, a mobile app for document creation and editing. Part of the plan was to let CloudOn’s office in Herzliya, Israel become Dropbox’s first office in the country.
April: Dropbox Notes, a collaborative note-taking service, was launched in beta. It was largely seen as a direct competitor to Google Docs.
June: User #400 million signed up
July: Dropbox bought Clementine, an enterprise communication service.
October: Dropbox announced the eventual launch of Dropbox Paper, the result of their work on Dropbox Notes.
December: Dropbox announced that they were about to close down both Mailbox and Carousel.
2016
March: Dropbox reaches yet another milestone – it now has 500 million registered users!
August: Dropbox Paper entered open in beta. Anyone could now joint to beta test the product. Mobile apps for both Android and iOS were made available.
2016 was also the year when Dropbox moved their headquarters to 333 and 343 Brannan Street in San Francisco.
2017
January: Dropbox Paper finished it beta testing stage and was officially launched. It was described as an online document + collaboration tool + management tool + content hub.
March: Bloomberg reported that Dropbox has secured a 600 million USD credit line and was expected to file for its IPO before the year was over.
April: Dropbox announced that Hackpad was to be closed down on July 19 with all notes being automatically moved to Dropbox Paper.