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Larry Magid: Dropbox Expands, Aims To Replace Hard Drive

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) — Dropbox announced that it wants to replace your hard drive and is aiming to do so by expanding from an app to an entire platform of services. The company is holding its developers' conference in San Francisco this week.

They're talking about turning Dropbox into something you kind of just ignore that would be sort of be synonymous with the hard drive of your computer, except it would live on their servers in the cloud.

It could automatically save a file in the cloud, which you can do now, to functioning as a way to automatically write apps to Dropbox instead of to your devices memory or storage.

It would also be able to save the state of a game you're playing. For instance, if you're playing a game on your iPhone and you quit and you want to go back and play it on your PC, Dropbox will tell the game exactly where you left off. It uses the cloud for ubiquitous storage.

Technology Report: Dropbox Expands; Aims To Replace Hard Drive

One question is whether or not Wi-Fi access itself is ubiquitous enough for us to rely on the cloud in that capacity.

If you add Wi-Fi to cellular data, the answer is still, no, but we're getting there. You may either have to pay for it or you may have to go out of your way a little bit. So we're not quite there yet, but we're certainly moving in that direction. Dropbox, Google and even Facebook alike are betting on that kind of reliance.

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