The cloud is where big businesses such as Amazon and Google are setting their sights on, which is why smaller startups such as Dropbox have to constantly think of new ways to keep their business alive.
Only a few days after Amazon unveiled Zocalo, its own file-sharing and collaboration service, Dropbox announced Streaming Sync. This new feature will allow large files, such as audio and video files, to stream so that users can view the contents of a file even as Dropbox continues to download the rest of it.
Previously, Dropbox's sync method involved two distinct upload and download phases, so users will have to wait for file to finish uploading before they can download it and then wait for the file to finish downloading before they can see. The new infrastructure allows users to view their files much like Netflix subscribers watch a streaming video online.
Streaming Sync is limited to files that have a size of 16MB or larger, as smaller files such as text files are not largely affected by the new technology. Dropbox says its new method of syncing files can give users a minimum of 25% increase in syncing speed, but with the speed can go up to two times faster for bigger file sizes, which means the new Dropbox can shave off a few seconds in syncing smaller files or up to a few minutes in larger files.
In a blog post written by Dropbox engineer Nipunn Koorapati, he compares the sync time for various file sizes with and without streaming sync. A smaller 20MB file syncs in 25 seconds with the old syncing method, but Streaming Sync makes it four seconds faster. For a 500MB file, however, the new feature cuts down syncing from 383 seconds from more than six minutes to just a little less than 5 minutes.
"The improvement approaches 2x as the file's size increases given equal UL/DL (upload/download) bandwidth, but in practice, the speedup is limited by the slower side of the connection," explains Koorapati. "We did a test across two machines with the same network setup, (-1.2 mb/s UL, -5 mb/s/ DL). There is an approximately 25% improvement on sync time."
In addition to Streaming Sync, the updated Dropbox app also includes support for four new languages, Swedish, Danish, Dutch and Thai, and notifications that users can now scroll through. Dropbox also now allows users to create links for sharing the files and accepting other people's files straight from the Dropbox menu.
The new Dropbox is available for download from the Dropbox website.
