Our latest surveys show how the right tools and guidelines make distributed work more effective?and why we?re doubling down on Virtual First. Filed under News Company When Dropbox introduced our Virtual First model in October 2020, the working world was reeling. Employers were scrambling to suddenly adapt to distributed work, and workers were left with zero guidance on best practices in that new paradigm. This inspired us to take a step back and rethink our approach. We saw that the chaos presented an opportunity to design a new working model. Virtual First combines the flexibility of ..read more

Filed under Work Culture Imagine you had as many files as stars in the sky. Some days, maybe that doesn?t feel so hypothetical. Now imagine that those files were about to explode. You can?t hope to save them all?but if you work fast, you can save as much information as possible before they disappear.  In searching for new supernovae, astronomers face that race against the clock all the time.  ?If something has exploded, every day you wait to interrogate that thing further, you lose information because it's constantly evolving,? explains Adam Miller, Assistant Professor of Phys ..read more

Filed under Work Culture I have a degenerative eye disease called keratoconus. It?s a gradual thinning of the cornea, causing blurred vision and light halos as the condition progresses. While I can do most things normally, there are various workarounds I use to help. That includes an app called Be My Eyes. First released in 2015, Be My Eyes connects visually impaired users to sighted volunteers through a video call. Once connected, the volunteer helps guide the user through whatever task they need assistance with. I've used the app to find my gate at airports and navigate small print. O ..read more

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Filed under Customer Stories Ever tried to meet a deadline on a travel day? It?s hard enough to get the information you need when you?re actually in an office. But when your job requires you to fly or drive to remote locations, you have to contend with even more obstacles. In-flight Wi-Fi. Elusive cell signal. Coworkers who live in different time zones.  For filmmaker and photographer Taylor O?Sullivan, whose work has taken her everywhere from the Pyramids of Giza to the Arctic Circle, working on the go is a joy.  In her work shooting documentaries and big-budget productions ..read more

Filed under Customer Stories ?This is where I do all the crazy, mad scientist stuff.? Reuben Vollmer moves out of his camera?s path to show me what?s directly behind him. His Venice Beach, California home office is not the stuff of Dr. Frankenstein?s or Dexter?s laboratories, nor did the haunting notes of a theremin suddenly appear, but I see what he means. Any available space is covered with parts, papers, and prototypes. He then directs my attention to the reason why I called: Spout, the machine he?s invented in the hopes it will ?become the third source of water for humanity.? Spout ..read more

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Filed under Work Culture When Alexandra Samuel started her career in the 1980?s, she followed what was at the time one of the only paths for women seeking white-collar work: secretarial jobs. In high school, her mother had bribed her to learn typing, and Samuel spent her high school and college years churning out correspondence, reports, and memos. ?As I kind of worked my way through these jobs, you know, little bits of things that weren?t secretarial would get thrown into the mix so that by the time I finished college, I actually had a resume that showed I was capable of having a junio ..read more

In March, Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, conducted an experiment. Mollick, who teaches about innovation and entrepreneurship, wondered how much of a business project he could accomplish in half an hour. The goal: use artificial intelligence tools to generate promotional material for the launch of a new educational game. AI would generate all the assets; Mollick would be the guide. He set a timer and got to work.  Bing, Microsoft?s GPT-4 model, gave Mollick information on his product and what his market looked like. It also ..read more

Dropbox Dash is now in open beta, plus AI enhancements, a redesigned web experience with a new plan lineup, an all-in-one video collaboration Studio, and our first Venture partners In 2020, as the pandemic lockdown ushered in a new era of remote work, we upgraded to a Virtual First model in an effort to combine the best of the remote and in-person work experience. But just as we redesigned our operating model, the tools that power this new way of working need an upgrade, too. More than ever, work is fragmented with content and communication scattered across different tools and apps. People s ..read more