great new word

How in the world did two software guys in a start-up spend any significant part of $12M in 2 years?

Ditto, though I believe it's been panned by corporate IT security folks as a threat. It's also a really nice end run around Apple's closed ecosystem- you can drop MP3s and videos in there and watch them without ever starting iTunes.

--sp

They had a team of programmers in Sweden on the project for a while, and flew them to SF for meetings. I don't know how much of the 12M they actually spent.

I'm not too paranoid about security. If people get at my Spice sims and vacation pix, I'm not going to pay much ransom. I don't put dangerous stuff there.

My cabin automation system bounces everything through Dropbox files. That was a really easy way to web-ify things. Webcams, temperature logs, control files, even executables are just Dropbox files.

Sounds like the goings-on in the HBO show Silicon Valley.

Online dating is ripe for collapse as well. Hope you don't have anything invested in match.com!

You don't think there is money in sex anymore? ;-)

I'm a cultural illiterate; I never watch TV. Well, maybe Sherlock.

"To continue reading this story, you will need to be a digital subscriber to SFChronicle.com."

Startups fail. That's why big corporations don't do "startup" kind of stuff -- they just wait to see what survives, and buy it.

In the late 90s and early naughties, that was the explicit view of HP's top management. It had the bonus that it would enable the to save all that money they were spending on HP Labs.

Worked out well, didn't it!

I didn't say that it was smart, just that it was done.

It's not that there's no money in sex, it's more of a, uh, supply and demand issue. ; )

Online dating? Invest in antibiotics.

They ruin innovation when they overfund these people.

At my age, it's more the wackadoo you have to worry about, than uh, sexual health issues.

I believe men and women are free to do whatever they want with their life trajectory, to get married or not or whatever. But sadly, one realizes that if a woman is never married and still looking for a husband in her mid to late 30s, there's often a reason for that.

Yeah, we have way too much "innovation" around these days. Too many whacko ideas getting funding. Too many people thinking that millions of kids should be taught to code.

There must be a million iPhone apps by now.

But don't trash Dropbox. It's great to have your working files on a shared drive.

WTF is the big deal, other than the scaling, it is not earth shattering.

They're going gangbusters, not likely to fade anytime soon:

I talked with a guy out in the bay area who coded up a useful little app for the iPhone for managing shopping lists, and has just a couple employees. Last I heard they were pulling almost a million a year in profits.

I guess he's had several offers by people to buy him out, but he won't sell (at least at the offers he's been getting.)

I work on four different computers, three fixed in different places and one laptop. It's great to have all my project files available everywhere, without worrying about memory sticks. The files are resident on and synchronized between computers, so if a machine is offline or Dropbox dies, no files are lost. And Drop is a good place to post public files.

It's a great service. I also used it to do our cabin automation, as an easy way to do remote data acquisition and control. All the web stuff is transparent; create a file on one machine and it magically appears on the rest.

Yeah, it's called synchronization, right? Doesn't that concept pre-date dropbox by a decade or two?

There will be a few winners, as there were in the Dr Koop and Webvan days.

What's ominous for tech is the growing simplify-your-life de-clutter movement. Gopro and Fitbit and silly apps may be saturated.

I was in the Verizon store on Saturday, to change the credit card our phones are billed to. It took almost an hour. The store is jammed with silly junk, like glittery phone cases and weird headphones and literally 40 different phones. Employees outnumbered customers.