Dropbox has snapped up another stealthy company, and it's not simply because of its name.
Messaging startup Droptalk has announced in a blog post that it is packing up and moving over to Dropbox, which has acquired the one-year-old company for an undisclosed amount.
"We are thrilled to announce that today Droptalk will be joining Dropbox," says the Droptalk team. "About a year ago we set out to end the unnecessary friction around communication and collaboration by killing 'the work email.' The world deserves a better way to do business and an integrated sharing product, which our team rapidly created is the answer."
Droptalk is a part messaging, part cloud storage service available as a beta app for iOS and Android users and as a browser extension for Chrome that allows users to share links via private conversations. This explains the "Talk" part of the name.
The "Drop" part comes from the feature that allows users to link these conversations to cloud storage folders, which all users in the conversation can access directly from the conversations. Whenever one user uploads a new file or updates an existing one, other users can see the updated version right away. Aside from that, Droptalk also lets its users drop images, videos and links to content on the Internet right into the conversation.
Droptalk was founded a year ago by former Facebook and LinkedIn engineers Rakesh Matthur, Ash Bhardwaj and Anand Prakash as an alternative to the cumbersome emails used as the primary means of communication in the workplace. As part of the deal, all three founders along with other Droptalk team members Manveer Chawla and Nirmesh Mehta will be integrated into the Dropbox team.
"As part of our transition to Dropbox, we are no longer accepting new beta signups," says the Droptalk team.
The move is in line with a similar Dropbox acquisition of another stealthy chat startup Zulip. Like Droptalk, Zulip was still in beta when it reached a deal with Dropbox, but it has already developed messaging apps for various platforms, including iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux.
Zulip's messaging application focuses on public and private conversations that are organized into streams to help users find what they are looking for. For instance, a conversation under the stream "Engineering" could have the sub-streams "WebKit bug," "Documentation" and "UI Regression." Zulip also contains standard messaging features, including private group messages, drag-and-drop file uploads and image pasting.
