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Dropbox Breaks into Business Market

Dropbox, an internet-based file hosting service, has become one of the most promising ventures in Silicon Valley over the last six years.

This week, the startup invited journalists to its China Basin offices for a progress update. According to the company, Dropbox has more than 200 million users with more than 1 billion files saved in Dropbox each day.

“There are more files saved to Dropbox each day than Tweets on Twitter,” said Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO.

Houston also revealed Dropbox’s new target: businesses. He explained that many businesses are already incorporating Dropbox. Last year, more than 400 companies used the service.

“People love that they can work from anywhere. People love they can have their work stuff and personal stuff together for the first time,” he explained.

Many companies have also discovered that their employees rely on Dropbox for their careers. BCBG Max Azria’s Nader Karimi said: “We found out hundreds and hundreds of (employees) were using Dropbox without us having any idea.”

“All of our most important information” was on Dropbox, he added.

Dropbox is introducing a new service to address the concerns of companies like these. Called “Dropbox for Business”, the platform gives company IT administrators new security features such as auditing and compliance tools and the capability to remotely wipe clean certain folders – say, from the account of a departing employee, according to SFGate.com.Each user’s folders are combined in a single account, but organized in two separate “containers”: a personal folder and business folder.

Houston said: “If all this looks pretty simple to use, that’s the point. But under the hood, there has been all this crazy stuff we’ve had to do,” said Houston. “No one has done this before. No one has built a product that both users love and IT loves.”

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