Timeline of Dropbox

This is a timeline of online file storage and collaboration service Dropbox.

Full timeline

Year	Month and date	Event type	Details
2005		Competition	Box.com, an online file sharing and content management service for businesses, is launched. It IPOs in March 2014.[1]
2007	June 1	Company	Dropbox is founded by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, as a startup company from the American seed accelerator Y Combinator.[2]
2007	August	Competition	Microsoft launches Windows Live SkyDrive (later OneDrive), which also provides users with free storage.[3]
2007	December	Competition	SpiderOak – an online backup and file hosting service that allows users to access, synchronize and share data using a cloud-based server – is launched.
2008	March	Product	Dropbox creates a 3-minute video demonstration of its technology as it is meant to work, which is posted to Digg.[4] This helped its beta waiting list expand from 5,000 people to 75,000 people literally overnight.[5]
2008	September 11	Product	Dropbox launches to the public, allowing anyone to get 2 GB of free storage. It also announces storage pricing tiers, with 50 GB Dropbox for $9.99/month, or $99.99/year.[6]
2008	November	Funding	Dropbox raises $6 million in Series A round led by Sequoia Capital.[7]
2009	October	Product	Dropbox acquires the dropbox.com domain for $300,000 in cash. [8]
2009	December	Acquisitions	Steve Jobs approaches Drew Houston and suggests that Drew Houston sell Dropbox. Drew Houston cuts the pitch short and says that Dropbox is determined to stay independent.[9]
2010	May	International	Dropbox announces that it has been blocked by the Chinese government.[10][11][12][13][14]
2011	June	Security	TechCrunch reports that all Dropbox accounts could be accessed without password for four hours. This was later widely reported in the mainstream press and caused some doubt about Dropbox's "cloud" technology model.[15] The error was caused by an authentication code update.[16]
2012	February	Acquisitions	Dropbox acquires stealth startup Cove.[17]
2012	April	Product	Dropbox announces a new feature allowing users to automatically upload photographs or videos from camera, tablet, SD card, or smartphone. Users will be given up to 3 GB (initially 5 GB) extra space to accommodate the photographs and videos uploaded in this fashion, but the space is permanently added to the user's allowance and is not restricted to pictures. It is viewed as a move against Google's recently launched Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive.[18]
2012	November 12	Userbase	Dropbox announces it reaches 100 million users.[19]
2012	December	International	Dropbox announces plans to establish its first international office in Dublin, Ireland.[20]
2012	December 19	Acquisitions	Dropbox acquires Snapjoy, which provides a service for aggregating, archiving and viewing all digital photographs taken with cameras, phones, or popular photo applications.
2013	March	Acquisitions	Dropbox acquires Mailbox, a sleek email platform specifically for mobile users.[21]
2013	June 6	Security	The Guardian and The Washington Post publicize confidential documents suggesting Dropbox was being considered for inclusion in the National Security Agency's classified PRISM program of Internet surveillance.[22][23]
2013	November 13	Userbase	Dropbox announces it reaches 200 million users.
2013	November 13	Product	Dropbox announces it will unveil Dropbox for businesses.[24]
2014	February	Team	Dropbox hires Dennis Woodside, who ran Motorola Mobility for Google, as its chief operating officer.[25][26]
2014	April 17	Acquisitions	Dropbox acquires Hackpad, a real-time collaborative text editor.[27][28]
2014	November 4	Competition	Dropbox announces a partnership with Microsoft to integrate Dropbox and Microsoft Office applications on iOS, Android and the Office 365 applications on the web.[29][30][31]
2014	December	Product	Dropbox announces that it will open up its API to business software developers – offering a new set of tools to help integrate Dropbox’s file storage and security features with other business software.[32]
2015	February	Partnerships	Dropbox partners with Vodafone, a British multinational telecommunications company, to offer file storage to Vodafone's 400 million wireless customers.[33]
2015	August 12	Product	Dropbox announces availability of its USB security key which provides two-factor authentication to its services.[34]
2015	October 15	Product	Dropbox rebrands its six-month-old product invite-only beta product Notes as Dropbox Paper, and expands the beta significantly. The product, that facilitates collaborative document editing, is available only on the web at this time.[35][36]
2015	December	Product	Dropbox announces it will shutter its free mobile apps Mailbox and Carousel as it focuses more on paid file storage by businesses.[37]
2016	March	Product, Competition	Dropbox announces that it now stores over 90% of its user data on its own infrastructure stack as it moves away from Amazon S3.[38][39][40]
2016	June 14	Financial	Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announces that the company is free cash flow positive, but is not in a rush to IPO. Commentators note that this does not imply that the company is profitable, since free cash flow does not include a number of expenses.[41]
2016	August 3	Product	Dropbox launches an iPhone and Android version of its document-editing app, Paper, and upgrades it from invite-only beta to open beta.[42]
2016	November 16	Product	As part of its AdminX initiative for Dropbox Business users, Dropbox launches additional features to improve security of business documents and prevent people from accessing them through personal accounts. Admin controls are extended to Dropbox Paper. Also, Dropbox announces an infrastructure expansion in Europe and Asia, to cater to its large non-US audience. As of this date, Dropbox has more than 30 security partnerships across areas such as data loss prevention, enterprise mobility management, identity and access management, data migration, eDiscovery, and analytics.[43][44]

References

1. "Box, Dropbox and Hightail Pivot to New Business Models". The New York Times. August 24, 2014. Retrieved September 11, 2016.
2. "About Dropbox". Dropbox, Inc. Retrieved June 3, 2013. Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator.
3. "Introducing Windows Live SkyDrive! – Windows Live". Web.archive.org. Archived from the original on December 26, 2009. Retrieved April 20, 2016.CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
4. "Digg – Google Drive killer coming from MIT Startup". Digg. Archived from the original on March 14, 2008. Retrieved April 20, 2016.CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
5. "Finding Your Way as an Entrepreneur [Entire Talk] | Stanford eCorner". Stanford eCorner. Retrieved April 19, 2018.
6. "Dropbox launches to the public!". Retrieved April 20, 2016.
7. "Dropbox". Crunchbase. Retrieved April 20, 2016.
8. Houston, Drew. "(01:15:50 ~ 01:24:20) Clip of #334: Drew Houston — The Billionaire Founder of Dropbox". Listen Notes.
9. Victoria Barret (October 18, 2011). "Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup". Forbes. Retrieved June 5, 2016.
10. "dropbox banned". techwhack. Archived from the original on February 19, 2014. Retrieved April 15, 2010.
11. "dropbox blocked". neowin. Retrieved April 15, 2010.
12. "dropbox blocked". geek.com. Retrieved April 15, 2010.
13. "dropbox blocked". shanghaiist. Retrieved April 15, 2010.
14. "Dropbox Blocked in China". mingtiandi. Retrieved April 15, 2010.
15. "Dropbox's password nightmare highlights cloud risks". CNN. June 22, 2011. Any trust in the cloud is too much trust in the cloud – it's as simple as that
16. "Dropbox confirms security glitch—no password required".
17. "Dropbox May Have Just Acqui-Hired A New CTO – Business Insider". Businessinsider.com. Retrieved June 5, 2016.
18. "Dropbox Gets Automatic Photo Uploads, Offers 3 GB Incentive". TIME. April 27, 2012. Retrieved April 30, 2012.
19. By Victoria Barret, Forbes. "Dropbox Hits 100 Million Users Says Drew Houston." November 11, 2013. December 2, 2013.
20. "Dropbox Picks Dublin for Its Second Office – Liz Gannes – News – AllThingsD". Allthingsd.com. Retrieved April 20, 2016.
21. "Dropbox has acquired Mailbox, TapEngage, Endorse, Foundry Hiring, Sold, Zulip, Readmill, HackPad, Loom". Upstart.bizjournals.com. Retrieved April 27, 2016.
22. Greenwald, Glenn (June 6, 2013). "NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal". The Guardian. London. Retrieved June 7, 2013.
23. Gellman, Barton (June 6, 2013). "Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 7, 2013.
24. "Dropbox Aims at Business". The New York Times. November 13, 2013. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
25. "Dropbox hires first COO amid Google divestiture – Fortune". Fortune.com. Retrieved June 5, 2016.
26. "Dropbox COO Dennis Woodside profile – Business Insider". Businessinsider.com. Retrieved June 5, 2016.
27. Mike Billings (April 17, 2014). "Dropbox Acquires Startups Loom, Hackpad in Push to Expand Services". WSJ.
28. "Hackpad is teaming up with Dropbox!". hackpad.com. Retrieved February 19, 2017.
29. "We're partnering with Microsoft". Dropbox. November 4, 2014.
30. "Dropbox and Microsoft form surprise partnership for Office integration". theverge.com. November 4, 2014.
31. Bass, Dina (November 4, 2014). "Microsoft Teams Up With Dropbox to Target Mobile, Business Users". bloomberg.com.
32. "Dropbox Opens Up to Business Software Developers – Digits". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
33. "Dropbox Taps Vodafone for International Growth – Digits". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
34. "DropBox Adds USB Security Key Protection". Geek Inspector. Retrieved February 19, 2017.
35. "Paper is Dropbox's new vision for how teams can work together". Engadget. October 15, 2015. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
36. Newton, Casey (October 15, 2015). "Hands on with Paper, Dropbox's answer to Google Docs. Slick editing and rich media, but is it enough?". The Verge. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
37. "Dropbox Is Pulling 'Mailbox' and 'Carousel' Apps – Digits". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
38. "Scaling to exabytes and beyond". Retrieved April 27, 2016.
39. Babcock, Charles (June 1, 2016). "How Dropbox Moved 500PB Of Customer Files Off AWS. With 500 petabytes of customer files to manage, Dropbox decided to become a post-cloud company. That meant moving a core operation off AWS. Here's how it was done". InformationWeek. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
40. Metz, Cade (March 14, 2016). "The Epic Story of Dropbox's Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire". Wired Magazine. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
41. Kim, Eugene (June 14, 2016). "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston just shared something Wall Street is really going to like". Business Insider. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
42. Ingraham, Nathan (August 3, 2016). "Paper, Dropbox's answer to Google Docs, now has apps for iOS and Android. The service is now in open beta, too, so give it a shot". Engadget. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
43. Baesman, Rob (November 16, 2016). "Introducing enhancements to AdminX, Paper, and our infrastructure". Dropbox. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
44. Kriel, Collen (November 24, 2016). "Dropbox Business gets additional enterprise security, admin controls, more". Silicon Angle. Retrieved December 9, 2016.