Box.net may not have the profile of a Dropbox, but this hasn’t stopped the company form quietly building its user base and expanding its reach. The company only recently launched a promotion in conjunction with Apple, and is now adding to that with the announcement of an Innovation Fund.
The Fund, which seeks to reward enterprising talent in the Cloud-storage space, will see $2 million being spent over the next two years. So far the announcement has been received well. A large chunk of that $2 million is expected to facilitate the many partners that currently use and promote the Box.net API—an API that by the way gets over 200 million calls per month.It many ways it’s good to see a tech company rewarding its loyal pool of developers. Box.net would probably not had the reach it now has without such support and this goes to show that there are tangible benefits to be had from ‘opening up’ your platform. Box.net is showing also that cross-competitor accommodation can be a reality where opening up a platform is concerned. One of the company’s first partners under the $2 million Fund is LiveOffice, which runs FileArchive, a cloud-based service for archiving documents from both Box and Dropbox.
Box.net may not be ready to topple Dropbox, but given a few more years—and with this level of growth and innovation—the competition will be well and truly on.
Do you prefer Dropbox over Box.net? Let us know your favourite cloud-storage company in the comments below.
Source: http://www.sitetrail.com/2011/11/22/box.net-gives-out-2-million-worth-of-innovation/