1. Meet the New Dropbox
500M people are registered with Dropbox across 180 countries. It’s one of the most popular cloud storage services, and now Dropbox is finally ready to branch out of this industry and make its service a more collaborative experience. Yesterday, Dropbox announced a new desktop app, ‘the new Dropbox’, a single workspace to organize content, connect tools, and bring everyone together in one place, no matter where you are. As Dropbox puts it, “It’s the Dropbox you know and love, but better.” Some of our favorite features are below:
- Create, access, and share cloud content like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides and Microsoft Office files within Dropbox.
- Create and store shortcuts to any website alongside your content in Dropbox.
- Collaborate with integration tools such as Slack, Zoom, and Atlassian. They’ll work seamlessly with Dropbox to help bring your content into context.
- Shared folders are transformed into rich workspaces. For example, add descriptions to folders to help the team understand more about the work they’re doing, @mention people and assign to-dos so everyone knows what happens next, and keep tabs on the latest progress on shared work in the new team activity feed.
You can test the service out through Dropbox’s early access program. Additional features will be rolled out over the next few weeks.
2. ‘Must Hear TV’ Ads
Do you like ads? We’ll be the first to admit that ad-blockers are installed on some of our devices. It’s not just us, though. A lot of us like to tune them out, especially during commercials, when a game of Candy Crush is much more enticing than the newest beer ad. However, NBCUniversal wants to introduce the ‘must hear TV’ format to tempt viewers to pay attention to ads. We live in a world where we need a phone in one hand a controller to watch TV on the other hand. In order to increase sales revenue for ad companies, they’ve come up with a solution where it would benefit both the ad and the viewer.
“So a travel and leisure brand, for example, could piggyback off a scene coming out of E!’s Keeping Up With The Kardashians, where the famous family is on vacation on a tropical island. As the show enters the commercial break, the screen would remain black and the sound would get quiet,” said Josh Feldman, head of marketing at NBCU.
Implementing an innovation like this can engage viewers who have been accustomed to skipping over commercials or watching content on platforms that don’t have ad breaks.
(Source: AdAge)
3. Square Makes Room for Refugees
In 2009, Twitter founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, founded Square—a company designed to give financial services to people neglected by banks. Square has grown over the years with a goal to help small businesses accept credit card payments. As great as the service has been, Dorsey felt the need to do more. He said, “[nothing] is more important than serving folks like refugees, who are just getting started, in an entirely new culture, entirely new community and an entirely new language in many cases, and just need a little bit of help.” So what exactly did he mean by this? Recently, Square partnered up with The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN), handing out card readers and even waiving transaction fees to refugees aspiring to be entrepreneurs. At a London Tech Week event, Dorsey brought out a refugee entrepreneur who spoke highly about what Square has been able to offer him and his business. He said that Square has helped him serve more customers more quickly. Dorsey believes that people of all backgrounds should participate in the economy and he vows to help everyone—especially those who have suffered hardships—to promote a healthy society.
(Source: Reuters)
