TechCrunch Spills Dropbox’s Beans Over Zulip Acquisition
Technology news authority TechCrunch has apparently let the cat out of the bag by releasing news of Dropbox’s latest acquisition of the new startup Zulip weeks ahead of the official announcement. This is all despite the fact that neither Dropbox nor Zulip have officially confirmed the news, and even more so, the fact that Zulip had yet to publicly launch.
TechCrunch posted an email sent by Zulip to its customers explaining the situation. The email was casually written with a conspiratorial tone but mentioned a couple of times that the news was intended to be kept confidential. It was opened with “Psst… hey, you! Yeah, you, the one using Zulip. We have some news for you, but you gotta keep it secret. Can you do that? Alright, sweet,” and then reiterated the point at the end of the email stating “Again, please don’t share this news. We intend to announce this publicly in a few weeks, but wanted to give you folks a heads-up since you’ve supported us from the beginning.”
The email then explained about the acquisition, “Here’s the deal: Dropbox is acquiring Zulip. We’re incredibly excited about working with an awesome group of people on a problem with huge scale, at a company that’s as passionate as we are about helping people work together efficiently.”
The overall purpose of the email was to announce the acquisition and then to thank them for the help and support they have received from their user base. No information was provided for what affect the acquisition would have on the current service.
Zulip is a start-up that was founded by an impressive expert team that is comprised of several former Oracle employees including CEO Jeff Arnold as well as Jessica McKellar, Tim Abbott and Waseem Daher. Zulip provides a service which allows users to engage in private conversations and search through past conversations. Additionally, just like Dropbox, it contains drag and drop file sharing as well as other features.
This is by no means Dropboxs’ first acquisition that is designed to give it an edge in the cloud storage industry. In the past two years they have dipped their toes in music streaming (Audiogalaxy), photo organizing (Snapjoy), mobile application development (Endorse) and online trading (Sold).
