Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup [telecom]

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Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

Victoria Barret, Forbes Staff

(This story appears on the Nov. 7, 2011 cover of Forbes.) Here's that rare Steve Jobs story, one that's never been told, about the company that got away. Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple's radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple's file system so that his startup's logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT?team had been able to do that.

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Here's the 300 pound gorilla in the room: _sending_ your data to Dropbox, or any other "cloud" storage facility, means spending a lot on data access fees if you do it from a "smart" phone. Cellular companies, who are the middlemen, are poised to steer that traffic to, and to share profits with, storage companies that kickback some of their fees and/or perform content management that forbids storage of things that the cellular data providers don't like.

Bill Horne Moderator