At least with dropbox there is an actual business and potential to move into new markets (enterprise) with there new features and offerings, the Twitter valuation is just plain stupid. 20 billion!? Are dropbox making money? Or just burning through anything they are making?
Dropbox: We're worth $8 BILLION and we'll sell you a 3 per cent slice
File-sharing and online storage firm Dropbox is looking to raise $250m in additional funding, which would value the company at a level that's astronomical even for a tech firm - $8bn. Dropbox is trying to raise the cash to add to its sales and engineering teams and acquire technology, two people with knowledge of the plans …
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Tuesday 19th November 2013 13:37 GMT theblackhand
Dropbox vs Twitter
The difference is Dropbox has MS/Amazon/Google as potential competitors and nothing particularly unique in their solution (i.e. while they may have better software/features at present there is nothing to stop their larger competitors matching those) and all are in a race to the bottom for cloud storage.
At least Twitter has a large customer base who are likely to pay for a service if Twitter ever manage to figure out how....
Of course, all of this is completely irrelevant come IPO time...
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Tuesday 19th November 2013 15:37 GMT Cliff
$250M to keep the valuation?
Bandwidth etc cost real money, Dropbox gives away a lot of free accounts. Unless their paid accounts also pay for all their free accounts plus business overhead, this $250M is propping up an unsustainable business model. If you think about that, $8Bn sounds even more stupid.
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Tuesday 19th November 2013 19:44 GMT Ed Mozley
Bubbles
The mistakes of the dot com boom are being made again and a lot of people are going to get their fingers burnt. Offering 3 billion for snapchat is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. All these tech companies have gazillions of customers using their platforms because they are free and to convert these numbers to some wacky valuation is a clear indication that no lessons whatsoever have been learned.
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Wednesday 20th November 2013 11:06 GMT Roland6
Re: Someone update me ...
I wouldn't under value the "fancy front end" - basically it is what both Apple and Microsoft have been selling for all these years...
Personally, being a fan of secure personalised FTP style services, I appreciate the convenience of tools/utilities like Dropbox, particularly when they can be readily integrated into other applications and a user's workflow.
The valuation doesn't seem too unreasonable, it only represents circa $40 pa from each of their 175~200M users.
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