A raft of new features Dropbox unveiled last night herald a new dawn for cloud computing; a more useful dawn in fact. The cloud storage company revealed a new Dropbox for Business that keeps work Dropboxes in one place, a gallery feature called Carousel, and an ambitious quest to tame inboxes.
The new Dropbox for Business is a rebuild of the original business product, but made more versatile to access personal and work Dropboxes from any device.
“We did this to give admins more visibility and control over their company’s data,” said Dropbox’s Ilya Fushman.
“Remote wipe helps protect confidential information, account transfer helps you maintain business continuity, and sharing audit logs let you track how your Dropbox for Business information is being accessed.”
Dropbox also introduced Carousel, a gallery feature for all a user’s photos and videos.
“It combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs up new ones as you take them,” explained Dropbox’s Ramesh Balakrishnan.
“Carousel sorts all these memories by event so you can easily travel back in time to any photo from any date.
“And unlike other mobile galleries, the size of your Carousel isn’t constrained by the space on your phone, which means you can finally have your entire life’s memories in one place.”
Taming the email inbox
At the Dublin Web Summit last October, Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston remarked that the email inbox was in serious need of an overhaul.
“I hate email, it hasn’t really evolved since the 1970s when it was born,” Houston said, adding that some of the functionality in Dropbox’s new Mailbox feature, such as Auto-swipe, heralds a better future for the medium.
Last night, Dropbox announced Mailbox is now available for Android and introduced Auto-swipe, a service that learns from a user’s swipes and snoozes to automate common actions.
“Mute that thread you don’t care about, snooze messages from your friends until after work, and route receipts to a list, automatically. We call this service Auto-swipe,” Dropbox said.
“Mailbox uses Dropbox to sync preferences and Auto-swipe patterns across email accounts and devices. That means you get a seamless experience no matter which device or email account you use. This is part of an ongoing integration of Mailbox into the Dropbox family – we’re working hard to craft magical experiences that are only possible on top of the Dropbox platform.”
The company also revealed it is launching a private beta Mailbox for Mac.
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Dropbox image via Shutterstock
