Previously we’ve covered Dropbox Automator, a sort of IFTTT for Dropbox. (IFTTT, if you haven’t heard, automates tasks to trigger when a particular action has occurred, e.g. if a Facebook profile picture changes, then update a Twitter profile, etc). Like IFTTT, Dropbox Automator is capable of triggering a similar series of actions, based on what kind of files have been added to your Dropbox folders. Now, the startup that makes Dropbox Automator, Wappwolf, has produced Google Drive Automator.
This connects to your Google Drive account and monitors folders of your choice, performing
automated actions you define when new files are dropped in by a user or directly stored by an app. This could be converting a document to PDF, resizing images and uploading them to
Facebook, plus a bunch more actions.
There are a few programs that do syncing between Docs/Drive and other services. The Docs API hasn’t changed, so whoever is doing this for Docs can easily do it for Drive as well. Handily, Wappwolf supports quite a lot more services. (Wappwolf is backed with $1 million by private investors with offices in the SanFrancisco and Vienna).
Wappwolf says Automator has processed 1 million files since it started connecting clouds, like Dropbox, Evernote and Attachments.me. Last month over 170,000 photos were automatically synced between Dropbox and Picasa accounts. That’s over 5,500 photos in one day.
With all of these cloud solutions, Dropbox, Box, GDrive, Evernote etc it’s interesting to see that companies are building additional functionality on top of these and allowing you to share across and sync files across. It’s clear from the numbers that plenty of people are using it, and actually do want something to sit above all these cloud storage solutions.
That’s probably going to create exit opportunities for startups playing in this space.