Interesting post from Dave Winer on Scripting News taking a look at DropBox’s possible business plan, which gives me more worries about using DropBox as the basis for an Electronic Lab Notebook.
That means they have to be looking inside your box to get the data they’re going to aggregate, to get to that astronomical valuation. That’s why they didn’t just go with the enterprise-y user agreements that Microsoft and Amazon use. They don’t want your money. They want the advertisers’ money.
What’s inside your Dropbox says a lot about you. And that, of course, is what Dropbox users (like me) are afraid of.
If that’s the case, you’d have to be very brave to use DropBox for Science that wasn’t already in the public domain… best stick with solutions focused on solving the ELN problem, which have the appropriate technical and business architecture! We’d love to talk to you 🙂
