Meet The Team Putting Dropbox On Your Phone Dropbox’s strategic partnerships team, filled with a batch of former Googlers and other policy experts, is tasked with embedding Dropbox into new mobile devices. Now the company is finding its way into Sony’s new phones. Dropboxs mobile partnerships team, including head Christine Moon. Dropbox When Dropbox was looking to grow by getting its software pre-installed on new mobile devices, it turned to somebody who knew all about the fusion of hardware and software: It hired Christine Moon, the Googler who helped write the companys playbook for its Nexus smartphones. Moon, who joined Dropbox in 2013, heads up the team in charge of integrating Dropbox software into new devices including flagship phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and the HTC One. Formerly part of Googles Nexus project that developed the first line of Google-branded mobile devices, Moon now spends her time making Dropbox an integral part of new devices. For Dropbox, the challenge is critical. The company has yet to become a dominating part of the mobile app ecosystem, and both Google and Apple are working to lock users into their own online storage and synchronization services. Just as Google recognized the looming switch to mobile in the mid-2000s and went all-in on Android, Dropbox now needs to become an indispensable part of the mobile world. Luckily, Moon remembers the early days of Android—and its explosive growth—from a very inside perspective. Android was something people had never heard of before, she said. This was very early, I worked very closely with [Android founder] Andy Rubin. The team was a little startup and I saw it scale. I think about Dropbox where Google was in 2004, expanding into new markets. Its that inflection point when youre expanding outside of the U.S. Her team recently scored its latest victory: Dropbox will soon be integrated in Sonys newest smartphones, including the Xperia Z3, Moon told BuzzFeed News in an interview. Sony has only a 3.1% share of the overall smartphone market as of the second quarter, according to IDC, but the latest deal gives Dropbox a stronger foothold in many major global Android smartphone manufacturers, including Samsung and HTC. With Dropbox coming baked into millions of new top-of-the-line handsets sold every quarter, the company also has a chance at converting all those new owners into Dropbox subscribers. The partnerships come as Dropbox works to keep growing its user base, which rose from 200 million to 300 million monthly active users in the 18 months to May 2014. Part of that is simple organic growth, and most of its user base is overseas, with 70% of Dropboxs users outside of the United States. Android is the dominant emerging-market smartphone platform, and partnerships with top Android phone makers can give Dropbox an immense global footprint. So far, its global growth came with a very small personnel footprint — it was only this month that the company hired people to manage its operations in Australia and Japan, for example. But emerging-market growth wont be easy. Going into 2015, the company has a large and dedicated user base but has had to slash its prices to continue to contend with larger incumbents like Apple and Google. Dropbox will have to prove that the layer of software that sits on top of otherwise dumb storage — which includes sharing tools, intelligent synchronization and deeper integration with new devices as they come out — are valuable enough to get customers to pay the company every month. Paying for a mobile utility app is a tough proposition even in the United States, let alone the emerging economies where low-cost Android handset sales are booming. Dropbox But getting the software pre-installed on phones is a good start, and one that requires extensive negotiations with handset makers all around the world. Moon, who studied political science and has a background in technology mergers and acquisitions from her time at JP Morgan, likens it to helping a company like Samsung tell the story of the device by enhancing its core capabilities with Dropbox. In the engineering-dominated Silicon Valley, Moons background sticks out — but its a skill set a company like Dropbox needs to navigate complex relationships with companies like Samsung and Sony. Moon has only been at the company for roughly a year, but during that time,its staff doubled. It was an informal coffee meeting with former Google colleagues at Dropboxs headquarters in 2013 that eventually led her to join the company. The Xooglers at the meeting, as they colloquially refer to themselves as, included former deputy general counsel Ramsey Homsany, longtime software engineer Guido Van Rossum and Marc Leibowitz, who was also on Googles strategic partnerships team. Moon is often spotted on her laptop riding the San Francisco Bay Area Caltrain, surrounded by other Dropbox employees, like the companys product lead Chen Li Wang or Gentry Underwood, the founder of Mailbox, a mobile email client that Dropbox acquired for around $100 million. All of them live in Palo Alto, but telecommute to the office even as they are commuting to the companys sprawling campus near AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco giants. Dropboxs partnerships — including its new one with Sony — aim to go beyond pre-loading the application. Moon works with Samsung and other partners to give those manufacturers access to special functions that allow a deeper level of integration. For example, a Samsung user can automatically save a photo to Dropbox from the phones gallery app. What we want to do is do more of that, she said. The added value is having Dropbox integrated in a smart way. This device (a Samsung Galaxy Note 3) comes with an application that tracks my steps. What if over time because Im prone to diabetes I want to track it over many years? What if it had a cloud component? Those are the things that we think about, what is the added value we can bring? You can see more of those integrations going forward, coming with many different partners. Integrating across a portfolio of Android devices, too, has its benefits even among the community using iPhones and iPads. Dropbox bills itself as a cross-platform service, or as Moon calls it, the connective tissue between devices. While it might not find the same deep integration on iPhones as it does with Android devices, securing a dominant share in the Android market lends itself to being persistent among Android users switching to iPhone, and Android phone owners that also have iOS devices. View Entire List ›
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 17:40:26 +0000
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