Dropbox + Cove = <3!

Hey everyone!

Dropbox is growing really fast! The team was at 30 people last March, and today sees us just barely over 100. But words can’t even describe how excited we are about the newest addition to the Dropbox family: the Cove team!

Akhil Wable will add some engineering experience and muscle to the team. Akhil was one of the architects of Facebook’s search system, and built much of their core infrastructure for storing a graph database. You’ve probably used a lot of his work if you’ve used Facebook Share or Notes.

Josh Jenkins provides some much-needed relief to Dropbox’s design team, and was Cove’s sole designer. Josh has the unique distinctions of being the only designer (out of around 20) to pass Cove’s insanely difficult design hiring process.

Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi have been have been amazing advisors and friends to us the past few years, and we’re all thrilled to make the gig official. Aditya and Ruchi both have legendary histories at Facebook (they were around when it was upstairs from a Chinese restaurant), and their experience working on products used by millions of people will prove invaluable at Dropbox. Ruchi will lead operations including growth and recruiting, while Aditya will head Dropbox’s engineering team.

So, what exactly is Cove, and how does it play well with Dropbox? Cove has developed great tools for sharing and indexing your stuff across groups of people. Sound familiar? Seeing as our vision is the same and both teams are driven to build stuff that just works, joining forces is a total no-brainer. It also doesn’t hurt that Cove’s backend infrastructure plays so nicely with Dropbox!

We think that this is the beginning of something really special at Dropbox; and given how gargantuan and ambitious our newest projects are, Cove couldn’t have shown up at a better time. Please help us welcome Cove to the team!

PS – We’re always hiring!

A fresh new Dropbox on the web

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been quietly rolling out a major redesign of the Dropbox website. Today we turned it up to 11, and anyone who signs into dropbox.com will see a simpler, more powerful, and more beautiful web experience. Here’s what we came up with:

A focus on the stuff you care about

One of our main goals was to slim down dropbox.com and focus on the star of the page: your stuff. We’ve put all the tools you need at your fingertips, but only when you need them.

The new action bar at the top of the screen does it all. Think of it as a multi-tool that adjusts to your needs. You can use it to sort your files by name, date, size, and type. Or, if you select a file or folder, the bar will change to let you perform a variety of actions on your selection.

A new right-click menu includes these actions as well.

Better photos experience

We know how much Dropbox users love their photos and videos, but until now it’s been too hard to view your images on the website. We’ve built in a simple and gorgeous photo viewer that lets you use your entire screen to view your pictures or videos.

We’ve also added thumbnails for image and video files (Photoshop and Illustrator too!) so you can get a preview of your stuff without needing to open or download it. This way, you’ll always know what IMG5083.JPG or final2.PSD actually looks like, and which video to share with grandma.

Faster, happier, more productive

It’s way faster and easier to get stuff done using the new site. Our new drag-and-drop makes moving stuff as easy as on your desktop. We’ve also replaced the checkboxes on the page with better multiple file selection (click-dragging works!). And for all you power users out there, we’ve added keyboard shortcuts to make mouseless browsing a breeze — just hit ‘?’ for a full list.

We’ve also leveled up Dropbox search. Not only does it live right in the file browser, but it also instantly fetches results as you type!

This is only the first step — you can expect a lot more cool stuff in the next few months, so stay tuned!

Your photos, simplified (Part 1)

You’ve been there. After a long night out, you left your phone in the cab. Or maybe you went canoeing and sent your camera for a swim. Buying a new one hurts, but the worst part is that all those photos and videos are long gone. Even when nothing bad happens, it’s no fun having to track down photos spread across your computers, your PowerShot, or that old cracked phone.

We’re excited to share a simple new way to help you bring all your photos and videos together in one place. It doesn’t matter what kind of camera or phone you have. And since this one place is in Dropbox, you can have all your photos and videos with you wherever you are. Here’s the scoop:

Starting today for Android, and coming soon for iOS, the Dropbox mobile apps can automatically upload your photos and videos to Dropbox using Wi-Fi or your data plan. They’re all uploaded at original size and full quality, and saved to a private folder in your Dropbox called Camera Uploads where they’re ready to view or share. Here’s a shot of the Android app in action:

Meanwhile, the new version of our Windows and Mac desktop apps can automatically upload from just about any camera, smartphone, tablet, or SD card you connect to your computer. If you’ve got great shots stranded on your Coolpix or piling up on your Canon 5D, all you’ve got to do is plug it in. We’re putting these apps through their final paces now — check here if you want to help get the kinks out!

Once your photos have been automatically uploaded to Dropbox, you’ll be able to check them out using a sneak peek of our new website. The new dropbox.com makes it way more fun and easy to flip through your pictures, where they’ll be as big and beautiful as your screen allows.

We’re really excited about these new features, and we think you’ll like them. To help you get started saving your photos, we’ll give you 500 MB of Dropbox space for your first automatic upload. As you take more photos and videos, you can use this feature to automatically upload up to a total of 3 GB extra for free.

We want to give a huge shoutout to our friends on the forums who helped us test these features. Thanks everyone!

To get started with the new Android app, head over to the Market now!

US-EU Safe Harbor Certification

Hi Dropboxers,

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether we adhere to the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework and the US-Swiss Safe Harbor Framework. As of today, we’re happy to say that the answer is “yes.” We’ve certified that we comply with these safe harbors and updated our Privacy Policy accordingly. You can view the changes here.

During this process, we realized we could make our Privacy Policy more clear in several areas:

Referrals/Sharing: Our new Privacy Policy notes that we send out emails when you refer people to Dropbox. It also spells out that we may receive third-party information like email addresses when you share content with others or refer them to Dropbox.

Geo-location Information: In our current Privacy Policy, we let you know that photos you upload to Dropbox might contain location information recorded by your camera. We’ve updated our Privacy Policy to clarify that videos you send us might already have that information in them as well.

Third Party Websites: Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that when you click a link on the Dropbox website and visit a different site, the privacy policy for the other site may govern your activity there.

These changes will take effect on March 15, 2012, but the safe harbor protections are effective today.

Dropbox for Android, 2.0!

We’re really excited to announce version 2.0 of our Android app! It’s completely redesigned and includes a ton of new features!

Some highlights of this release:

• Favorites: Want to make sure a file is always on your phone? Star it for quick offline access.
• Bulk upload: No need to upload files one at a time. Select multiple photos and videos to be uploaded in the background.
• File renaming: Simple as it sounds – files and folders can now be renamed.
• Ice Cream Sandwich support: Optimized for the newest and tastiest Android release yet: Ice Cream Sandwich.
• Single-tap access to actions: All file and folder actions are available from a single tap.
• Lots of others: Improved gallery view, export to (and upload from) local storage, as well as numerous bug fixes and stability improvements

Thanks to all of our forum users who helped us test the build earlier this week.

While you’re waiting, check out the eye candy below!

The Official Dropbox Guide To Getting More Space!

We get asked a lot how to get more space in your Dropbox, and we realized that we’ve never put an official guide together. So here it is! When people start using Dropbox, they start small but often need more and more space over time. We’ve created a bunch of free ways to get more space, but also make it simple to get loads of space really fast.

Take A Tour
For people new to Dropbox, there are a few things you should try out first — we want you to install Dropbox on a bunch of computers, use our sharing features, and more. We’ve put together a list of tasks to get started; and when you finish this quest, you’ll get an extra 250MB free.

Tell Your Friends
A while back, we noticed that most of our growth was from word of mouth: people that love Dropbox tell their friends. We’ve built a way to invite your friends to Dropbox that gives you both extra space (250MB for free)! We’ve made it really easy to email your friends from your address book and post to Twitter or Facebook. We’ve also given you a link to put anywhere on the web. The more people you invite, the more space you get!

Be A Student
The first lines of Dropbox were written back when our cofounder Drew Houston had just graduated from school but forgot his USB key on a bus ride. To commemorate our victory over USB keys, and to make the lives of students even easier, students with a valid school email address get a whopping 500MB for each person they invite to Dropbox. All you need to do is confirm that you’re a student.

Have Fun
We’ve done a bunch of fun challenges and quests where the prize was more space. In January, we had our first DropQuest, which was a scavenger hunt across our site. It was a race to the finish to get some really special prizes, and every person that finished also got a bonus. Last October, Reddit stole our logo, so to say thanks we made a post where the top commenter got a 100GB boost to their Dropbox. We’ve made a fun little quest to make your Dropbox a little more social. A while back when we made an announcement on twitter, we gave a random re-tweeter 100GB to get the word out.

We do this stuff all the time! The best way to keep up with the games is to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

One More Thing
If you ever need even more space, you can always subscribe to Dropbox Pro, available in 50GB or 100GB. Furthermore, referrals double to 500MB (1GB for students) per person you invite! But if you need even more than 100GB, or if you run your own business; you should check out Dropbox for Teams, which is designed specifically for educators, non-profits, and businesses.

Hopefully this gave you a good idea of how to get even more space for your Dropbox! Happy Dropboxing! Ohh, and just for good measure, we’ll pick someone who retweets our tweet about this post and give them a 100GB bonus!

Introducing Dropbox for Teams

Hey everyone!

We know that everyone uses Dropbox differently, and it’s always pretty sweet hearing how different businesses around the world have used Dropbox to help make their lives a bit easier. We’ve listened to their feedback and we’re excited to announce the launch of “Dropbox for Teams“! With Teams, businesses can now enjoy administrative controls, centralized billing, phone support, and tons more space in addition to the Dropbox they know and love. Here are a few examples of how some businesses and organizations out there are transforming how they work and share with Teams:

Work on the Go – Dropbox lets you work online or offline from any smartphone, computer, or tablet.
“We traveled halfway across the globe for the World Championships in Japan, where the US women got gold and men got bronze. Staff there can update something (on Dropbox) at two o’clock in the morning and when someone else gets into work in the morning, the information is all there. Athletes are going to Mexico next week for the Pan-Am games, and another group is going to Poland for their event. At any one time, most of our staff is not in our office. Dropbox makes it easier to share and access the vital information we need.”
Mike Bowman, USA Gymnastics

Collaborate and Share – Dropbox lets you share docs, slides, and large files easily with colleagues and clients.
“(Moving to) Dropbox could be seen as a huge productivity increase. It’s absolutely a time saver. If I leave the office early, I can see what my staff is working on when I get home and don’t have to ask anyone to email me files.”
Danny Beckley, Charleston Symphony Orchestra

Easy Setup and Control – You can get your Team up and running in minutes, and admin controls make setup easy.
“On my first day, I got my computer out of the box, installed Dropbox, and started working right away. I didn’t need IT to come to my desk to set me up.”
Renette Youssef, Tradeshift

Trusted and Dependable – Enjoy dedicated phone support, bank grade encryption, and unlimited version history for all your files.
“I love this product. It’s good to know that my data is safe. I’ve never once lost a file in my Dropbox in the 4 years I’ve been using it. I have 0% worry about this product; I’m 100% confident in knowing my data is there at all times.”
Ryan Connolly, San Jose Boiler Works

Dropbox for Teams is priced at $795 annually for five users, with additional seats available for $125 each. The base plan includes 1,000 GB of storage, and each additional seat comes with 200 GB. That’s a ton of space! To learn more about Teams and what it can do for your business, head to our Teams page. Thanks!

The Dropbox API!

Hey everyone,

We’re really excited to announce the launch of the Dropbox API for mobile and web apps! Even if you have no clue what the Dropbox API does, chances are you’ve already used it — it’s the engine that powers our iPhone and Android apps and thousands of third-party Dropbox-enabled apps. This is our first major update since releasing the API, and we’re stoked to share the improvements we’ve made:

Increased security
You’ll never have to enter your Dropbox account info into a third-party app on version 1. Instead, you’ll approve access using the official Dropbox app on mobile or via the web at dropbox.com.

App folders
Version 1 adds support for apps that can only read or write to a single folder in your Dropbox. You can rename or move this App Folder wherever you want in your Dropbox, and the app will keep working normally.

Search, revisions, and more
We’ve added a lot of new calls to the API to make apps even more powerful. Developers can now build search and sharing right into their apps. Version 1 also exposes the full power of the Dropbox revision system. This includes undeleting files, reverting files to past versions, and not overwriting changes when two people update a file at the same time.

More supported platforms
Version 0 of the API was designed for mobile apps. While they’re still getting plenty of love, we’ve now added better support for web apps! This includes new tutorials, documentation, and SDKs for Python, Ruby, and Java developers.

Our new API is available to developers right now at https://www.dropbox.com/developers, so look forward to these features in your favorite Dropbox-enabled apps in the coming months!

We’ve refreshed the Dropbox mobile website!

It’s been a while (3 years, in fact!) since we last took a look at our mobile web interface — but better late than never! Today, we’re upgrading the mobile website experience for a bunch of devices, including iPhone, Android (2.1+), and Windows Phone 7 , so you can always have your Dropbox on the go. Our intern Cathy has single-handedly revamped the look and feel, added your favorite features from the Dropbox website, and tested thoroughly for a smooth experience. You’re awesome, Cathy! You can visit the new mobile web interface at www.dropbox.com/m

LOOK AND FEEL
For starters, we’ve made the mobile web interface closely resemble what you might find natively on iPhone and Android. This includes borrowing the quickactions behavior from an upcoming update to our Android app (coming soon!), more screen space reserved for your files, and a home screen that lets you hop around the app quickly. Much of what you see here was due to jquerymobile’s style sheet.

NEW FEATURES

• Search: Finally, you can search your Dropbox for that e-book that was such a pain to browse to!
• File quick actions: Whether you are browsing or searching for files, now in addition to downloading a file, there is also a quick action menu dropdown that gives you access to additional things you can do to your files.  For now, that means sharing and deleting.
• Share: We’ll generate a link that helps you quickly share a file or folder with your friends.  Simply copy a link to your device clipboard or email the link on.
• Delete: Got a few minutes to spare? Try out our new delete functionality and clean up your Dropbox.
• Account settings: For easy access to your basic account settings, go to the new account settings tab.
• Internationalization: We now offer our mobile site in 5 different languages: English, Spanish, French, German, and Japanese!

WHAT’S NEXT
In the future, we’ll be adding support for more devices, easier ways to share, referrals, and more actions for your files and folders. Stay tuned! Another round of applause for Cathy’s hard work this summer

As always, if you’d like to apply for an internship or job at Dropbox, check out our jobs page: www.dropbox.com/jobs

Some eye candy:

Schoolbox