Think out of the box, people often say.
A nine-year-old company engaged in cloud file storage and enterprise collaboration exactly did that and even named its company, Box.
Box has announced latest changes and developments in its products in a Box Developers Conference at Fort Mason Center in north San Francisco on Wednesday, and for a single goal, which is to get many developers who can possibly build more on its platform.
"We have an all-new enhanced way to add context to your content, the ability to build really rich applications that go well beyond typical file servers and file-sharing. We want to enable you to build applications that take advantage of far more of the toolkit of Box that we're now building out," said Box chief executive and co-founder Aaron Levie during his speech.
The announcement came with the revelation of the rollout of new tools, including its document app Box View, the Metadata, together with a series of new platform features.
"Box View provides the most elegant content viewing experiences on the web and mobile by taking documents and converting them to HTML so they can be displayed in high fidelity on any device. This is the evolution of the Crocodoc technology that Box acquired last year and provides developers a new rendering service for content that can be used in any application that displays documents," says the company in a blog post.
It discloses that this technology is in use by over 100 businesses such as Producteev by Jive Zendesk, Xero, Oracle, UberConference and Clio.
Meanwhile, Metadata is now in public beta, the company also says.
"Metadata allows developers to add context to their content stored in Box and is part of the Box Content API. Metadata is now built into our mobile SDKs (iOS, Android and Windows) and incorporated in our search engine," explains the company.
The company has also announced the latest content API pricing, as well as mentioned platform customers such as Sungevity, McLarens, Guaranteed Rate, Full Resolution Health, unbelt Rentals, Random House and MediCopy, among others.
Recall that the Box business primarily focuses on providing businesses a place for file storage, for easy access and sharing among partners, employees and customers. These users can tap into the Box platform in two ways. One is through the company's own software, the other is by integrating the platform with mobile and desktop applications using the application programming interfaces (APIs).
More than 35,000 developers' building services are on its platform according to the company. The company also claims having 25 million users to date. It has also recorded a 292 percent year-over-year growth in the usage of third-party Box apps. All these developments can be found in the company's blog.
Nevertheless, it hasn't closed its door to other means of generating revenue from its present business and to even go beyond such footing.
An estimated $250 million of initial public offering will soon be out at the New York Stock Exchange, as the company already filed paperwork on Monday, although Levie didn't speak about this during his keynote address. It plans to raise about $250 million. No word yet on the pricing details of shares to be sold.
