Dropbox takes aim at businesses

Dropbox, the company behind the popular virtual file cabinet, is branching out to small and medium-sized businesses with the new service "Dropbox for Teams."

The San Francisco-based company allows people to access documents, photos and videos from several different places such as laptops, smartphones and computers provided they have downloaded Dropbox on each device.

A certain amount of storage is free though the company charges a user for more capacity.

With Teams, Dropbox will allow a business to let five users access 1,000 gigabytes of storage for $US795 per year.

Each additional user costs $US125, which also comes with an additional 200 gigabyte of storage.

Dropbox launched Teams after realising that 1 million businesses were using its virtual file cabinet already to transfer files and documents, said Sujay Jaswa, vice president of business development at Dropbox.

To entice customers to upgrade to Teams, Dropbox offers such services as centralised billing and phone support.

Dropbox has 45 million users and competes with the likes of Google's Docs, Apple's iCloud and Box.net.

The company recently closed a $US250 million round of funding giving it a valuation of $US4 billion, according to reports.

(Reporting by Jennifer Saba, editing by Bernard Orr)