dropio

Just how powerful can the data behind a location-based application be? Extremely.

Earlier this month, the second annual Internet Week New York took place, and Dropio founder and certifiable data nerd Sam Lessin crunched a bunch of numbers based on what his contacts on urban navigation and friend-finding service Foursquare were doing. Lessin was working with a group of fewer than 100 contacts, almost all of whom are involved in the tech and new-media industries (this is the scene that birthed Foursquare and its predecessor Dodgeball, after all), and yet it's a fascinating peek at just how much this … Read more

Web storage and collaboration tool Dropio has just put out a useful new way to control who can access files by using Facebook Connect. Called "friend lock," the system uses your list of Facebook friends as a simple directory that you can pick and choose from to create a white list of approved contacts.

Once you've logged in with your Facebook credentials and pick the people who you want to be able to have access, you can fire off invites that show up in their Facebook in-boxes. You can also set it up to publish a note … Read more

Web storage provider and collaboration tool Box.net has launched three new features aimed at giving its business users more customization, and simpler ways to set up collaborative workflow.

The first is tasks, which are action items you can assign to specific files. To start with, the service gives you three actions (approve, update, and review) that can be applied to yourself or someone else. Say, for example, I have an article I'm writing and saving in Box. When I'm done with it, I can assign my boss to either review or approve it. The same goes for … Read more

On Thursday, Web storage provider Dropio took its presentation tool Presentio out of private beta and opened it up to all users. Similar to the recently launched, real-time activity view found in its collaborative storage folders (or "drops" as the service calls them), the new tool gives users a simple set of controls to present those files to others.

It's effectively like watching someone else's screen as they navigate around the storage folder. If they open a file, you see it straight away. If they jump to a certain page in a PDF or PowerPoint presentation, … Read more

When Facebook announced that its news feed would turn into a real-time "stream" of updates and media, it became clear that the Twitter-like model of fast-moving information flow was gaining a real foothold in the dot-com world.

Now, file-sharing service Dropio has opted to turn its "drops"--the pages where people can drag and drop any number of multimedia files and then password-protect them--into streams optimized for collaborative work. If you're working in one of them, it updates instantly for all users.

There's also a new feature, much like in Google Docs, Zoho, and … Read more

Dropio has launched a new applet called Playlistio that allows users to post music to the cloud in just three clicks. According to the company, users can find the file, upload it to the cloud, and stream it anywhere they can find a Web hookup and connect to Dropio. And with the help of the company's new Apple App store application, Droppler, users can even stream their Playlistio songs through their iPhone. The free applet is available now.

Google announced Tuesday that it has launched a new skills qualification program. Dubbed Google Analytics Individual Qualification, the new feature will … Read more

Dropio, a file-sharing start-up that lets you easily toss anything from photos to phone calls in a "drop" (kind of like a virtual storage cabinet), has launched a new look.

The redesign makes the site look a little slicker, and certainly accentuates Dropio's "easy to use" mantra. It's also clearly a consumer-oriented product now--in comparison, the old design looks like a back-end content management system. That's good, because the company hopes to appeal to Luddites as well as techies. (For a business model, Dropio offers premium accounts that get rid of the 100MB … Read more

With AOL-owned Xdrive on the auction block, competing cloud storage providers are scrapping together all sorts of plans to woo these potential paying customers to their services. Two in particular, Dropio and Box.net, have set up simple escape hatches wherein Xdrive users can simply plug in their account credentials and have their data piped over.

There's a catch, though: both services have free storage caps well beneath Xdrive's generous 5GB. In the case of Dropio, that cap is 100MB. To supplement this, the service is offering Xdrive users a special premium drop, which bumps up the cap … Read more