It's been barely a week since Dropbox launched its photo app Carousel and to give the service a flip, the cloud storage company has acquired Loom, which is also a photo sharing app, as well as the collaborative tool Hackpad.
Hackpad is anticipated to fuel the growth of Dropbox's internal collaboration tools.
"Today, we are proud to announce that Hackpad has been acquired by Dropbox! Hackpad will continue to be supported for both existing and new customers, and we'll continue to work closely with the innovative teams that choose to make Hackpad their home. We hope that you will continue to use Hackpad and reach out to us with your feedback and suggestions," notes Hackpad.
With the acquisition of Loom and Hackpad, it seems that Dropbox is looking to spread its wings beyond cloud storage. Loom offers its users close to 5GB of free storage and will bolster Dropbox's photo management efforts.
"We have some exciting news that we wanted to share with you. Loom is now officially part of Dropbox, and we couldn't be happier to join forces! We've been working hard to create a photo management solution for people just like us. People who have too many photos in too many places, taking up space, collecting dust on our phones, our computers and our external hard drives," says Loom's co-founder Jan Senderek in a blog post.
With Loom becoming an integral part of the Dropbox family, the service, Senderek reveals will aid in "creating a home for all of your photos and videos, seamlessly organized, while still keeping them at your fingertips."
So why has Dropbox acquired Loom when it already has Carousel at its disposal? While both Carousel and Loom are similar in many ways, the former lacks plenty of features found in the latter. Moreover, Loom has better sharing features with social networking sites when compared to Carousel.
The acquisition of Loom by Dropbox means that the former will shut down its current services within a month. Loom has disallowed any new users from signing-up and is set to close down officially on May 16. Loom's user base will be transferred to the Carousel app within this time frame.
"We know this is a big deal. This decision was made with great care. We have worked hard on our product and feel that our vision aligns perfectly with Dropbox's vision for Carousel. Dropbox has invested the past seven years focusing on building a secure home for your files. And now with Carousel comes a home for your photos and videos as well," adds Senderek.
Loom users have the option of migrating their photos to Dropbox and free users will get an "equal amount of free space" on the latter. As for paid users, they too will get paid cloud storage space on Dropbox that will be free for one year. Users can also ask for a .zip file, which will have all their albums/images that were uploaded to Loom.
