Dropbox Acquires Photo App Bubbli

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has reportedly made a new acquisition in the online photo market with the purchase of Bubbli, a mobile application that allows users to turn captured images into panoramic virtual environments it calls “bubbles”.

The acquisition was announced to Bubbli users in an email sent late on Tuesday, according to a report by TechCrunch. For the time being the Bubbli smartphone application will continue to be available for distribution and users will still be able to distribute the environments they create via social media, according to Bubbli’s email.

Integration

“We’re working on integrating bubbles into Dropbox,” stated founders Ben Newhouse and Terrence McArdle in the message. They said the deal will take Bubbli’s business to a “larger scale”.

Dropbox has acquired photo startups such as Snapjoy and Loom, and launched a photo management service called Carousel in April. While Snapjoy and Loom offered features specifically related to photo storage and organisation across mobile and desktop platforms, Bubbli appears to shift Dropbox’s interest to features that allow users to do more with the photos they take.

In the photo-sharing market Dropbox faces competition from well-entrenched services such as Yahoo’s Flickr.

Dropbox closed a $250 million (£158m) funding round in January that valued the company at $10bn.

Competitor Box filed for a flotation in the US in March, seeking to raise $250m.

Enterprise growth

The majority of Dropbox’s 200 million customers pay nothing to use the service, which can be installed for free onto mobile and PC devices, but individual users can pay a fee of $10 per month to increase the storage available to them, with businesses paying $795 per year for five users and $125 per additional user per year.

The company is now looking to explicitly target the enterprise space, with CEO Drew Houston unveiling the new Dropbox For Business in November 2013. This new service provides several perks for business users, including advanced protection controls, sharing audit logs to track which employees access what files, the ability to transfer and remote wipe files, and the ability to access both work and personal files (via separate tabs) in one linked account.

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