Recently, Dropbox has been on a roll. After snatching up Motorola’s CEO Dennis Woodside, they’ve also expanded their services. In fact, last week they announced their email app was heading to Android – called Mailbox. And also a new gallery app, which is only available on iOS, which sucks. Really wish Dropbox wouldn’t develop for iOS first. In the past 18 months, Dropbox has been buying up all kinds of companies. Including e-readers, photo tools and a Craigslist-style marketplace. Now they’ve just picked up a Cloud Photo Service known as Loom and a collaboration tool called Hackpad. Both are iOS only at this time.
Loom is a cloud photo service available on iOS, it’s a lot like the auto-upload service that Dropbox has, but it seems to be a lot more intuitive than Dropbox’s. They’ve built all kinds of gestures into the app that’s available for iOS and Mac. With it being shut down on May 16th, it looks like we won’t be getting an Android app out of Loom, unfortunately.
As for Hackpad, it’s a group collaboration tool, similar to Basecamp. Teams can use Hackpad to assign tasks, brainstorm on ideas and so much more. The service also has a social component which is pretty interesting actually. Much like Loom, Hackpad is iOS only at this point. But Hackpad won’t be shutting down like Loom is. So if you’re using Hackpad, you don’t have to worry about getting your content out of the service, as it’s going to be around for a while.
It’s likely that Loom will just be swallowed up into Dropbox, and improve their auto-upload feature, while Hackpad will be another service for Dropbox, similar to Mailbox. What will be interesting is to see how Loom integrates with Dropbox. Because it looks like a great app and can bring some really cool things to the app and service. What does everyone think about these acquisitions? Let us know in the comments below.