Research in Motion, the Waterloo based mobile giant, is rumored to be looking into acquiring a portion of Dropbox, a popular cloud based file hosting service which enables users to store and share their photos, docs and videos anywhere, according to an ex-RIM employee.
Dropbox is a freemium product, meaning that certain features are free and some features users pay for, such as storage over 2 GB. Currently Dropbox is offered on a wide variety of desktop and mobile platforms like Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry.
In the past several weeks Dropbox has been speaking to investors to raise further funding. The company, which is valued at over $1 billion, has to date only raised $7.2 million in funding and is looking for something between $200 and $300 million, according to Techcrunch.
For RIM, the acquisition on Dropbox makes complete sense. More and more users are dropping their files in the cloud and for business users to be able to have their files available to them anywhere is an important service. However, RIM is valued by their business users due to the secure architecture of their system, which is what Dropbox has been criticized for in the past.
This week RIM started releasing their new flagship Blackberry phones with their new operating system. Reviews are coming in and the overall consensus is very positive. An acquisition of Dropbox would go a long way towards showing Wall Street that RIM is in fact alive and in for a long fight.
Dropbox has over 25 million users, uploading over 200 million files a day.