Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Over the past several weeks Organic's Emerging Platforms Group has been working with our friends at Drop.io on a location-aware extension of their already awesome file sharing service. Drop.io understands that there are some unmet or poorly met needs that are inadequately addressed by the services and applications most people use to transfer, share, and store large files. Please don't ever email me a 50mb file. I will not be pleased. Anyone who isn't familiar with Drop.io's drop-based approach to sharing - go check it out - then come back and finish reading this.

Here's how it works: The application provides Drop.io users the ability to assign a physical location to any drop. Drops can then be found from a desktop/laptop PC, blackberry, and of course, an iPhone. The cool part - the mobile app - scans your location within a 1 mile radius of your position and returns any drops affixed to a location within that radius. We see this extension as a hybrid location-specific digital content publishing and distribution utility that has the potential to power a variety of interesting use cases.

One real-world example of how this might be used is at a concert. Say a band wants to give out copies of its latest song and other exclusive content to people who attend their concert, they can use Drop.io Location to publish that content to the concert venue, and make it available only to people at that location. We see people using this in a whole host of novel ways and we're looking forward to seeing some inventive applications that we haven't thought of [yet].

If you would like to join the private beta for the iPhone portion of this service you can request entry at: contact@dropio.com

Dan Neumann

Editor's Note: A few weeks back I spoke with Chad Stoller of Drop.io, a friend of Organic and the former Executive Director of our Emerging Platforms group. So make sure to check out that interview to get more of an idea of what Drop.io is all about.