Today must be a very good day for Dropbox, as two companies have just announced that they have joined forces with the cloud storage service company: Loom, a photo storage startup in London, as well as Hackpad, a document collaboration service.
Loom is a photo storage service that a popular alternative to Apple’s iCloud Photo Stream. It allow users to automatically upload images and videos from multiple sources into a single area, making them accessible anywhere be it on mobile or on desktop. Sounds good? Unfortunately, following the Dropbox acquisition announcement, Loom also announced that they will be fully migrating over to Dropbox and will no longer be accepting new users. Existing users can continue to use Loom until 16 May 2014 before having to export their entire library out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjurta5K26A
If you are a Loom user, you can seamlessly export your data directly to Dropbox (obviously) with no interruption in service. If you’re not comfortable having everything stored in Dropbox, you can also request a zip file of your entire library. If you switch over to Carousel, the brand new photo storage app by Dropbox, you will get to enjoy the same amount of free space that you had on Loom on Dropbox, forever. Paid users will receive the same quota on Carousel/Dropbox for free, for an entire year.
I’ve just discovered Loom, and if this acquisition means that Dropbox will be enhancing its photo storage service to what Loom is offering, this is definitely something to look forward to. Visit Loom’s blog to find out more about the acquisition.
Now that Dropbox is done with its photo storage (for now at least), it looks like they would like to work on documents too with the acquisition of Hackpad, a document collaboration service. Hackpad also just announced that the company has been acquired by the cloud storage service. Fortunately, unlike Loom, everything in Hackpad will remain as it is and can still be accessed for new and existing users.
Hackpad allow users to take collaborative notes, share data and files, and use comments to share your thoughts in real-time or asynchronously, you know, similar to what Google is offering on Google Docs. Visit Hackpad for more information.
So Dropbox users, it looks like your favorite cloud storage service is about to get a whole lot better. If only they were slightly more affordable compared to the rest of the cloud players out there like Google.
