How cooler co-workers communicate

STEP away from the USB stick. Stop filling that shared drive with 100 versions of your document. Oh, and email attachments are over. This company is changing how we work.

STEP away from the USB stick. Stop filling that shared drive with 15.4 confusing versions of your document. Oh, and definitely don’t attach anything to an email, ever again.

A product you’ve probably used already is radically changing how we work, and it comes with mammoth ambitions.

Dropbox has quietly become the coolest company in communication, and eight million Australians are using it, for sharing documents in the office, storing photos and videos or working on group projects.

What’s unique is that it can be used across any application or device, so you can share from an iPhone to a PC and an Android tablet with ease — something other big providers often look to restrict.

Dropbox’s edgy-looking offices in San Francisco rival those of the trendiest tech companies, packed with jeans-clad employees traversing the offices on scooters. Staff come from Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, bringing their knowledge of those platforms to these designer tables.

Employees hang out in areas that look like hipster wine bars. During breaks, they eat fresh, organic food from a tuck shop run by the former head chef of Google, or grab lunch at the sushi bar. They can take home one of 100 Dropbox T-shirt designs, and they meet in rooms with names including “It is what it is” and “Meteor shower”.

The way we communicate at home and at work is radically changing.

We can watch others update one large file in real time.

But it’s a little different to your typical funky Silicon Valley workspace. Where Facebook’s philosophy was “Move fast and break things”, at Dropbox, bosses tell staff to “Move fast, break nothing.” And one of their central values is: “Sweat the details.”

The company has 400 million users worldwide and has made 2.1 billion connections. Now, its big challenge is meeting the needs of vastly different sectors.

“I was in the Himalayas in November with my oldest son, on a fundraising hike,” the company’s Australia and New Zealand country manager Charlie Wood told news.com.au. “We were four days from the road at this tiny village and we had these Dropbox T-shirts. Some kids recognised them. They had no electricity but they knew what this was.

“It turned out their brothers and cousins were Sherpas and had a low-end Android phone from Kathmandu, which they used for photos.”

Dropbox is already big in certain industries: media (Bauer, National Geographic), technology (Yahoo, Gmail) and most recently, retail (BCBG, Absolut), allowing designers in Amsterdam to share files as large as a terabyte with manufacturers in Asia.

In February 2013, it created Dropbox for Business, which demanded that the product be fast, efficient and secure. Now, the company is busy adding new features to fit in with different industries and workflows. These include a badge that shows who is working on a file and allows others in the group to watch them make changes in real-time; enterprise controls for tiered admin roles and a commenting feature.

Where it can’t provide a niche service as well as someone else can, it will integrate — so far with 300,000 different applications, including annotation app Final Draft.

Dropbox rivals Silicon Valley’s trendiest tech firms for cool factor.

The obligatory chill-out room.

It is pioneering a global workplace.

The cloud is increasingly used in education too, so students can collaborate on homework and teachers and lecturers can reach a seminar group or even another university. Connections can be one-to-one, or one to a million.

Perhaps surprisingly, Australia is in the top 15 countries for Dropbox globally, despite its relatively small population. “The reason we came to Australia early is because it’s a good market for technology, with forward-thinking, cloud-first people,” said Mr Wood.

“The internet isn’t always as fast as it could be in Australia, and wireless connection tends to be spotty. We use DeltaSync, so if you make a small change, only that gets passed over the internet.”

Small business is a big market here, too: Sydney photography company Aquabumps is a local client, along with Gelato Messina, email marketing firm Campaign Monitor and LEAP Legal Software.

Even a mining business looking for gold in South Australia uses Dropbox to transfer large data files to the city, which can affect stocks in real-time — all with just an Android phone and a satellite link.

How hipster offices do canteen lunches.

Small businesses get their chance.

Free coffee is a must for those 20-hour days.

Dropbox for Business was introduced in February 2013, and is already in 100,000 paying companies worldwide. The company believes that’s only the beginning.

“If you think about the barriers we have to getting work done, especially across organisational, geographical and device platform boundaries, it can be a real pain in the butt,” Ross Piper, VP of Enterprise Strategy, told news.com.au. “Dropbox has become the platform for bridging all of those gaps.

“Instead of trying to force it from the top down, and say, this is how you collaborate, we’re embracing people and saying, you’re already using it, we’re going to give you business version so you can do that and be safe.

“Once that network is formalised and public you can find other people more easily, it’s a self-aware network.”

We’re operating in a brand-new ecosystem, and, for now at least, Dropbox looks like its independent epicentre. Now delete that attachment.