Drop.io was an online

file File or filing may refer to: Mechanical tools and processes * File (tool), a tool used to ''remove'' fine amounts of material from a workpiece ** Filing (metalworking), a material removal process in manufacturing ** Nail file, a tool used to g ...

sharing service. It allowed users to quickly create "drops", which could contain files of any type, and could be accessed via the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

, phone, fax, and widgets. The service did not require users to sign up for an account, and each drop was private unless the creator chose to share it. Drop.io was named one of ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...

'' magazine's 50 Best Websites of 2009, and CNET Webware 100. On October 29, 2010, Drop.io announced that the company had been purchased by Facebook, Inc. and that the service would be shutting down. Sam Lessin, one of the site's founders, would be moving to Facebook. , the site is no longer active; the blog is also down, as of November 2011. As of 2021, http://drop.io redirects to a site owned by Chandler Systems, Inc., an Ohio-based manufacturer of residential and commercial water treatment products.

Products

Drop.io's free product provided 100

megabytes The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes ...

of storage. Users could upgrade to 25

gigabytes The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix ''giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB. This definit ...

of storage for an annual fee. Drop.io additionally offered a business and education-oriented service called Manager, which aimed to replace

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

systems for file sharing.

History

Drop.io was founded by Sam Lessin and Darshan Somashekar in August 2007. The company's offices were originally located in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the List of co ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

; it moved to the "

DUMBO ''Dumbo'' is a 1941 American animated fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. The fourth Disney animated feature film, it is based upon the storyline written by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, a ...

" neighborhood of

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Kings County is the most populous Administrative divisions of New York (state)#County, county in the State of New York, ...

in 2008. Drop.io was nominated for the Technical Achievement Award at the

South By Southwest South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, ...

11th Annual Web Awards in 2007. On June 10, drop.io and

Scribd Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform. The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tik ...

, announced a partnership to offer rich conversion and viewing within private "drops", in an attempt to make it easier for people to share private information online. As of 2008, users can find drop.io on a number of social networking sites, including:

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. Between March 2007 and November 2008, drop.io released a series of feature improvements to their platform including 'inputs' and 'outputs' via various interfaces like phone and fax, a Twitter 'subscription' mode, and a Firefox plugin that allows users to 'drag and drop' files into new or existing 'drops' In September 2008, drop.io released a very simple API which allows other applications to use drop.io's file sharing ability in their own applications. Several early applications were built, including usend.io (a simple file transfer app like senduit or

yousendit Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, is a cloud service that lets users send and receive digitally sign and synchronize files. YouSendIt.com and YouSendIt Inc. were founded in 2004; the company renamed itself Hightail in 2013. The company's early focu ...

Ars Technica ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sc ...

appears to have built the first fully operational third party application on the API. In November 2008, drop.io announced having moved 100% into 'the cloud' having switched away from all owned and rented physical hardware/servers and claimed to be the largest 100% in the cloud application in the world. Also in November 2008, drop.io released a major design overhaul which completely changed the front end of the product, but maintained the core service. In December 2008, drop.io was one of the first services to release a

Facebook Connect The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook. The current Faceboo ...

integration, which allowed users to publish updates of any sort made to any drop directly to their Facebook feed In January 2009, drop.io launched a professional product extension called drop.io manager which allowed users to create templates to pre-customize and brand drops, as well as get detailed reporting about how their drops are being used. In March 2009, drop.io launched playlist.io one in a series of 'applets' which allow for feature customization of drop.io around various use cases Between February 2009 and May 2009, drop.io started integrating real-time features into its file sharing backbone using XMPP. This initially included chat functionality and real-time streaming of files, but expanded in May to include a web-presentation mode. On September 10, 2009, drop.io released ''Attach Large Files'', a pre-installed application for all Yahoo! Mail users. The app allows users to attach an unlimited amount of files up to 100 Mb and was developed entirely o
drop.io's API
with their custom-built JavaScript library.

Funding

In November 2007, drop.io completed a $1.2 million Series A round of financing led by

RRE Ventures RRE Ventures is an American Venture Capital firm based in New York City. The firm primarily invests in seed, series A and series B rounds and focuses on companies operating in the software, internet, communications, aerospace, robotics, 3D printi ...

to support the company's development efforts and infrastructure growth. In March 2008, the company closed $2.7 million in series A-1 financing led by New York venture capital firms DFJ Gotham and RRE Ventures.

People

* Sam Lessin, CEO * Christine Hunsicker, COO * Steven Greenwood, VP of business development * Jacob Robbins, head of development * Lee Azzarello, systems architect

References

External links

Drop.io Blog

Attach Large Files Yahoo! Mail Application
{{DEFAULTSORT:Drop.Io Project management software File hosting Document management systems Cloud storage Meta Platforms acquisitions 2010 mergers and acquisitions