Dropbox Announces Its First Developer Conference, The Invite-Only DBX On July 9th In SF

. Dropbox doesn’t want to be a storage service. It
wants to be the data layer uniting your information on
all apps. To get more apps and enterprises integrated
with its platform, today it announced DBX, the six
year-old startup’s first developer conference. To be
held July 9th at San Francisco, you can request an invite for a $350 ticket to, DBX which could help
Dropbox drive enterprise sales. Dropbox tells me the three focuses of the one-day
conference will be learning about newly launched
features on its platform, giving developers a chance
to meet and get help from Dropbox API engineers and
designers, and highlighting what third-parties have
built on top of Dropbox so far. One thing pretty unique about the conference is that
you can’t buy your way in. You have to request an
invite and wait to hear back if you’re accepted, then
pay the $350 price. The format means it can pick and
choose who is in attendance to maximize impact with
developers and enterprises it wants to add to or keep on its service. Going invite-only is in stark contrast to
other developer conferences like Apple’s WWDC with
open ticket sales which can sell out quickly, leaving
developers with a real need to be there out in the
cold. Developer conferences have become all the rage with
companies in the enterprise — a distinction Dropbox
is chasing. Many think of it more as a consumer-
facing cloud storage service with its magic folder
where you can put files to make them accessible
from anywhere. But Dropbox has spent the last year touting itself as a serious, secure backend for big
operations. In April it renamed Dropbox Teams to Dropbox For
Business, and in February it rolled out a new set of
permissions and visibility controls to serve
hierarchical IT companies. Expect enterprise offerings
to be a big part of DBX. The conference could help
elevate it to the level of respect of enterprise-focused startups like Box and long-standing providers like
Google with its Drive and Microsoft and its SkyDrive. Dropbox hit 100 million users and 1 billion files saved
a day last year, and recently acquired beloved email
management app Mailbox. It’s still committed to the
simplicity consumers need. But if it wants to be a
financial juggernaut as well as a household name, it
needs more enterprise sales. A developer conference with all the wooing that comes with it could win it
those big contracts.