Skip to main content

Failing To Find Users, Dropbox Will Shut Down Mailbox In February 2016 And Carousel In March


Dropbox, the file hosting and cloud storage company with 400 million users, has been struggling to hold up its $10 billion valuation in the face of scrutiny from investors and observers, and now it looks like the other shoe is dropping as the company streamlines its business. The company is shutting down Mailbox and Carousel, its email and photo apps. Sources tell us the plan will be to focus on its core product and developing other new productivity tools, such as its still-private collaboration app, Paper.
Mailbox will shut down in Februrary 26, 2016, and Carousel will stop working in March 31. The reason for the month extension on Carousel is in part because of a feature that is being built: an export tool that gives existing Carousel users a way to move conversations and content from existing shared albums into Dropbox. Also it will give time for users to migrate their photos. Mailbox was a client that sat on Gmail so shutting it will not affect your data on the service.
We’d been tipped off to the closures by a source close to the company, and also saw murmurs of Mailbox getting shut down elsewhere, and Dropbox now finally confirmed the news with a blog post with details this morning.
“Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making,” Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi write in the blog post. “It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.”
But even as late as today, Dropbox was sending out messages to users claiming that no decision had been made:
“Thanks for reaching out to us. I understand how frustrating it can be when you aren’t able to receive updates about a product that you feel passionate about using,” said a note sent this morning to a reader. “Mailbox hasn’t been abandoned. It is still being developed while we determine which direction is best. As our developers don’t share there roadmaps with support, I’m unable to share them with you. If there is anything else I can help you with please let me know.”
Even without official confirmation, there were a lot of signs that the products were going the way of the dodo bird.
Mailbox had not been updated since July, and if you dig through Dropbox’s support forums, a lot of questions from frustrated users were going unanswered. Carousel actually had an update a bit more recently, in September, but essentially saw very little development soon after its initial release in 2014.
Neither app, according to App Annie, were seeing anything like sustained popularity beyond their initial releases. Mailbox currently ranks 233 in the “productivity” category in the U.S. iTunes store and is not popular enough to make the general rankings. Carousel is ranked at 271 in the photos category in the same store.
Dropbox started life as a place to store and access files in the cloud, but for years now it has been looking for traction around other services to grow usage — and paying users — on its platform, whose business model is based on offering free storage tiers and upselling people to pay for more space.
As part of that, Dropbox has been making a gradual shift to focus increasingly on sectors that are more likely to pay, such as enterprises. In November, it honed its pitch to business users in an event where it disclosed 150,000 paying business users.
Businesses are a minimum of five individuals, and sometimes many more, but still the proportion out of 400 million users underscores the uphill battle ahead for Dropbox in converting more business users, or building out the business with new customers.
It’s a sad ending for both. When Mailbox first launched in 2013, it was with a huge amount of hype, in part because of the scarcity created by a million-plus people desperate to get off the app’s waiting list, and in part because the app created a simple (and, at the time, unique) interface for reading email (initially on mobile) with gestures to quickly dismiss or archive items in your inbox.
Carousel, meanwhile, was the product of multiple startup acquisitions of promising mobile photo apps. Mailbox co-founder Gentry Underwood has already left Dropbox and Scott Cannon, the other co-founder, is staying on as an advisor for a short period of time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Here Are The First Connected Home Devices For Apple’s HomeKit

Apple’s HomeKit is finally starting to roll out to actual consumers, via the first crop of HomeKit-enabled accessories from third-party manufacturers. This means you’ll soon be able to get your hands on a range of products for the connected home that work with Siri on your iOS device, and that you’ll be able to do so as soon as today, since some of the new HomeKit accessories start shipping now. The accessories in question range from sensors, to lights, to thermostats, to smart outlets, and come from a group of accessory-makers with a trusted reputation in the connected home industry. HomeKit may have taken a while to arrive, but it’s doing so in grand fashion, with a practical lineup to get your home connected to your iOS ecosystem in an essential way. Elgato Eve The  Elgato Eve  is a set of connected wireless sensors that monitor key factors like indoor air quality, temperature, humidity as well as conditions outside, like temperature, humidity and air pre...

How to Run Older Applications in Windows 10

You cannot expect all the vendors to upgrade their programs to make them compatible with Windows and neither would you want to purchase all the applications every time a new version of Windows is out. Nonetheless, the fact still remains the same that not all applications are compatible with the latest operating systems and there are times when many applications do not initialize when you upgrade your PC to a newer version of Windows. To make things easy for you, Windows 10 allows you to run the programs in compatibility mode. Running a program in compatibility mode makes the application think that it is installed on an older, compatible version of Windows, thus the software runs without any flaws. There are two ways you can run a program in compatibility mode: Program Compatibility Troubleshooter – This is a step-by-step wizard that allows you to pick a program that you prefer to use and configures it to run in compatibility mode. Compatibility Tab – This tab can...

Google is using machine learning to teach robots how to grasp random objects

Using your hand to grasp a pen that’s lying on your desk doesn’t exactly feel like a chore, but for robots, that’s still a really hard thing to do. So to teach robots how to better grasp random objects, Google’s research team  dedicated 14 robots to the task . The standard way to solve this problem would be for the robot to survey the environment, create a plan for how to grasp the object, then execute on it. In the real world, though, lots of things can change between formulating that plan and executing on it. Google is now using these robots to train a deep  convolutional neural network  (a technique that’s all the rage in machine learning right now) to help its robots predict the outcome of their grasps based on the camera input and motor commands. It’s basically hand-eye coordination for robots. The team says that it took about 3,000 hours of practice (and 800,000 grasp attempts) before it saw “the beginnings of intelligent reacti...

eGym raises $45M Series C for cloud-connected gym equipment and fitness software

eGym , the Munich-based startup that offers cloud-connected gym equipment and supporting cloud software and app for the fitness training floor, has closed $45 million in Series C funding. The round was led by new investor HPE Growth Capital, while existing investors, including Highland Europe, also participated. The problem that eGym is looking to solve is that, whilst gyms have moved from a bodybuilder market to a mass market in the last 20 years, the technology in gyms lags behind. That’s despite the fact that better use of technology can help to reduce customer churn, the biggest pain-point of both gym operator and gym users. Comprising of an app for both gym user and trainer, combined with the company’s connected strength machines, the eGym Cloud makes it possible for gym members to receive better fitness instruction and an evolving and personalised fitness plan based on data collected as they workout. And by providing a better workout feedback loop, gym goers can get an i...

Amazon Is Giving Away Unlimited Cloud Storage For $5.00

Amid a slew of deep discounts appearing on the web today as a part of the shopping holiday Black Friday, Amazon has introduced one deal that’s sort of a no brainer. The company is  giving away unlimited online storage  on its cloud servers for just five dollars. The normal price for this is $60 per year, so this – 92% off – represents a significant savings. The deal is aimed at promoting  Amazon’s Cloud Drive service  – an online storage site that competes with similar services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive, and more. Cloud Drive allows you to store documents, music, photos, videos and other files in the cloud, which you can access from any web-connected device, including smartphones and tablets by way of Amazon’s Cloud Drive mobile applications. However, be aware that if you’re planning to use the now $5 service primarily for photo backups, you may already have that option enabled. Amazon Prime currently offers free, unlimited pho...