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Dropbox acquires app that lets you put emails on "snooze" for $100 million

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K

Korey

Member
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/15/4110532/dropbox-reportedly-paid-around-100-million-for-mailbox

Today Dropbox announced that it has acquired email app Mailbox, just one month after the app hit the market to much critical acclaim. "Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we've decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together," Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood wrote in a blog post. "To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen."

All 14 members of the Mailbox team will join Dropbox, The Wall Street Journal reports. No price tag has yet been attached to the deal, though Mailbox (formerly Orchestra to-do) has $5.3 million in venture capital behind it. Mailbox will continue as a "stand-alone app," while Dropbox will use some of the company's technology to enhance its own features. "The deal came together after the companies started talking about email attachments a few months ago," the WSJ reports.

"Like many of you, when we discovered Mailbox we fell in love-it was simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered," Dropbox CEO Drew Houston wrote in a blog post. "Many have promised to help us with our overflowing inboxes, but the Mailbox team actually delivered... Whether it's your Dropbox or your Mailbox, we want to find ways to simplify your life." Email is among the first of presumably many places where Dropbox might step outside its comfort zone of cloud storage and file-sharing.

One reason Dropbox may have been interested in Mailbox is because people often use Dropbox instead of attaching large files to emails. Gmail recently rolled out a feature that lets users attach files to emails seamlessly using Google Drive, which arguably reduces the usefulness of Dropbox since you have to visit another site to access your files. While there are no signs that Dropbox will announce its own email service, receiving Dropbox attachments inside messages from Mailbox users could be both smart and easy marketing. Or maybe Dropbox is just eager to bring new, design-focused, cloud-centric companies into the fold.
Click to expand...

Earlier this morning the creators of the popular Gmail client Mailbox announced they'd been purchased by Dropbox, but the financial details were a mystery. According to recent reports, however, Dropbox may have paid in the neighborhood of $100 million for the app. GigaOm is reporting that its sources say that Dropbox paid more than $50 million for Orchestra, the company behind Mailbox, with another clarifying that the number was actually much closer to $100 million. Those figures match up with what TechCrunch is hearing as well, with that publication's sources saying the deal was worth nearly $100 million in cash and stock. GigaOm also reports that both Yahoo and Facebook had been talking to the Mailbox team about a possible acquisition deal — though obviously neither emerged as victors. It's still unclear what Dropbox's larger plans for the Mailbox app are, but the company's already teasing potential file attachment integration with Dropbox's own services.
Click to expand...
 
N

Ninja Scooter

Member
Next they will revive The Box.

thebox_promo2_99a.jpg
 
B

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
This is really an app that anyone could have done. We live in some digital gold rush times. I do like the app though.
 
B

border

Member
Yeah -- I don't understand at all.

How can any app or service solve the "I'm getting too many emails!" problem for users?
 
B

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
kittens said:
I still don't get the point of Mailbox.
Click to expand...
It's just a really simple gesture based app to deal with mail as it comes in, and get yourself to inbox zero.

It's not that special, but I think it's a better way to deal with the mail.
 
Maximus.

Maximus.

Member
Jeez thats a lot of money to spend to buy that one company. It is ridiculous the prices companies pay to buy out one app or one small company.
 
C

Cheebo

Banned
Mailbox is without question the best email interface/app/what have you ever made. Worth ever penny of that 100 million.
 
P

Polk

Member
border said:
Yeah -- I don't understand at all.

How can any app or service solve the "I'm getting too many emails!" problem for users?
Click to expand...
private use? I'm not sure. For business with lot of automated emails (newsletters, confirmations, etc) I can somewhat see it.
 
E

Enco

Member
After waiting weeks to get in I'm disappointed.

Email formatting sucks, I can't set it to fetch email and it only supports gmail.
 
D

Dali

Member
Damn what a difference a thread title makes. I've been seeing the original thread for days and just ignored it. Read your thread title and was close to 100% sure it was just a rehash but still clicked right away because I wanted to know more about this application.
 
V

victreeb3l

Member
sounds like a talent acquisition, but also dropbox trying to be more than a cloud storage company.

still like half a million people ahead of me so anything that will get me access faster is welcomed :|
 
davepoobond

davepoobond

you can't put a price on sparks
i dont get what the point of the app is.


also, does this mean they might compete with YouSendIt? YouSendIt is a piece of shit so I'd love for something with the same functionality of that but better with Dropbox.
 
B

bodyboarder

Member
effingvic said:
sounds like a talent acquisition, but also dropbox trying to be more than a cloud storage company.

still like half a million people ahead of me so anything that will get me access faster is welcomed :|
Click to expand...

100 million for 13 people they must be pretty damn talented.
 
A

aku:jiki

Member
I'm confused, why is there a waiting list if it's just a shell app for Gmail?

And why, on their blog, do they brag about how many emails the app has delivered? They're just a shell for Gmail, those millions of emails are Google's numbers...
 
Burger

Burger

Member
aku:jiki said:
I'm confused, why is there a waiting list if it's just a shell app for Gmail?

And why, on their blog, do they brag about how many emails the app has delivered? They're just a shell for Gmail, those millions of emails are Google's numbers...
Click to expand...

They cannot push your mail to you, only Google (if you use Gmail) can do that. This is why Sparrow for iOS sucked, because if you were not in the App you couldn't tell if you had mail or not.

So Mailbox downloads your mail then pushes it to you, or something.
 
D

Dr.Acula

Banned
I watched the lame-ass indie-music outdoorsy hiking hipster iphone video on vimeo -and really, it's a clusterfuck of post-millennial advertisement tropes, but the app looked pretty good actually.

You have your e-mails, and using gestures you can easily assign them to folders or tag certain e-mails to alert you at later specified times, or even suspend e-mail for a period.

I'd like to be able to deactivate my e-mail over dinner w/o having to turn my phone off (so I can start getting e-mails two hours later, and not five hours later when I'm in 'oh shit, I forgot my phone was off' mode), or to have an email realert me on a Monday, etc.

But I want to punch that commercial in the face!

Edit: if this app gets in the way of push e-mail then it's useless.
(Sent from my Blackberry)
(Although I'm pretty sure BB dropped push e-mail recently...)
 
T

Talon

Member
aku:jiki said:
I'm confused, why is there a waiting list if it's just a shell app for Gmail?

And why, on their blog, do they brag about how many emails the app has delivered? They're just a shell for Gmail, those millions of emails are Google's numbers...
Click to expand...
They run the emails through their own servers to enable push as a third party application. That's why they have to scale up slowly.
 
jts

jts

...hate me...
I was really excited for Mailbox but ended up disappointed. It looks slick and everything but I don't like to archive my emails. Searching for specific emails either on Gmail website as on the phone (and other clients) gets trickier.

Also, it's Gmail only.

Mail.app for me please.

Good on them though. Love Dropbox.
 
V

Venfayth

Member
Mailbox made me wait something like 3 weeks just to use the app. I had to wait in a fucking line to use an app.

Then, I tried it, and for someone who actually uses folders and keeps their e-mail tidy already this thing was a step down.

No thanks.
 
T

Talon

Member
My main problem with the Gmail app is that they force a border on the body text, so the font used for the email is unnecessarily small.

Sparrow is (was?) actually the best Gmail client I've used yet, it's just a shame that we'll never get Push.
 
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