Recently, the cloud-storage startup Box went public in a closely watched IPO. Not only was the launch of interest to investors, but also to other tech companies. “
The success of Box’s IPO isn’t important just for the company’s shareholders, buy for other tech companies – especially those in the enterprise market – planning on going public in coming months,” writes Kevin Kelleher at TIME.
One reason to be optimistic, according to Kelleher, is CEO Aaron Levie, who sees Box as not only a storage solution but, more importantly, as a collaboration solution. And this is the future of business services. Dropbox, Microsoft, Evernote, Oracle, HP and others are eyeing a piece of the huge business collaboration pie.
International Data Corp. (IDC) refers to this as the “3rd Platform,” the IT industry’s “emerging platform for growth and innovation built on the technology pillars of mobile computing, cloud services, big data and analytics, and social networking.” In fact, IDC predicts two-thirds of global competitive strategies will require 3rd Platform strategies by 2016. Data stored on a server isn’t as useful, however, as data shared between servers and to mobile devices. There are unlimited possibilities with open APIs, allowing access to different data sources.
For photo personalization projects, collaboration can also be a key driver for growth. That’s why our HTML5-based projects are shareable and editable. Not only can Mediaclip access cloud-stored images on popular services like Facebook and Instagram, but users can share their photo projects privately with friends, who can then create their own versions.