For the last year and a half I am using Dropbox for my personal usage and at my work, with my team. On both accounts I am a premium user and all together I have more than 100GB of space to sync across different platforms.

I access my synced content on the Desktop, Macbook, or iPhone and I can’t imagine working without it. I got used of having everything that matters always with me and up to dated.

I found out about Dropbox through their great promotional system, which I prefer to see as a great "approach" more than a "system". You signup, install and get a certain amount of space. If you invite friends to join Dropbox and they actually do, you get more space and so do they. There is a limit to how much free space you can get and eventually you can purchase more space for a fair price. This is in my eyes the perfect example for a great freemium business model working well for a very useful product. With 96% of nonpaying customers and thousands of people each day who upgrade, the company is already profitable, as shared by Drew Houston, Dropbox's co-founder and chief executive.

Despite being profitable, being considered as tech's hottest startup and promising to sign up many new customers, Dropbox meets competition from start-ups such as Box, and giants like Apple (iCloud), Microsoft (SkyDrive) and Amazon.com. If that is not enough, Google is close to launching its own cloud-storage service called Drive. As reported by Techcrunch, the service is on track for an official launch during April 2012.

Whether it is a result of the competition, or a part of a strategic decision, Dropbox decided to do more of what proved to work for them and recently announced that users will now get more free storage. Users will get now 500MB of storage space for each Dropbox referral (double - instead of 250MB), with a maximum of 32 referrals for 16GB of space.

Personally I think the guys at Dropbox are doing a great job and I cannot agree more with Drew Houston, who said that he doesn't spend much time thinking about the competition. Instead, he said, he focuses on building a team that can fulfill its big ambitions. Dropbox keeps the product stable, simple to use and adds important features which focus on the user experience. For example they just made changes to its web-browser interface, adding drag-and-drop functionality from your folders and desktop.

As addition I think Dropbox has the ultimate advantage over its competitors: It is not a platform related or dependent. Dropbox can be used cross platform, on multiple devices.

Resources: * Forbes * The wall street journal * Engadget * Dropbox