Dropbox today announced their newest acquisition, Droptalk a startup that runs an IM service designed to allow users to share links privately via Chrome extensions. The tool is all set to feature as an app on both iOS and Android platforms.
The tool was not publicly available earlier because it was initially launched only in the limited beta version. In addition to its Web-sharing features, Droptalk is integrated to the cloud which allowed users to see files being uploaded to the shared folder by other contacts during a conversation. The primary audience for Droptalk seems to be as a chat service for the workplace, which seems natural given its privacy aspect.
Droptalk does have an interesting appeal with the instant messaging-like interface which according to the company would take mobile messaging by storm along with the cloud storage-component. Find out more about it in the below video.
The company began its quest about a year ago, armed with ex-Facebook and LinkedIn engineers who according to its blog wanted to change the way people communicated and got work done. It had many roadblocks like the “work email” problem which limited the way people exchanged information. According to them it couldn’t be tackled by reinventing the inbox, but by offering tools that would make sharing and communicating easy and less email-like.
The founding members of the company includes Rakesh Mathur and Ash Bhardwaj and as CTO they have Anand Prakash, all of whom are of Indian origin.
Dropbox acquisition of Droptalk does make a lot of sense as Dropbox is known to be one of the largest companies in the cloud computing sphere. By adding a chat element would definitely give it an added boost in the workplace, but could have implications even in the consumer space. Earlier in the year Dropbox had acquired Zulip another company that was providing work place chat solutions. Zulip and Droptalk have a similar framework of allowing its users to communicate apart from email.
