When Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs mentioned in an interview how especially fulfilling it is to build a product you can’t wait to use yourself. He thought they could make a better phone and, wouldn’t you know it, had another hit on their hands selling millions of phones and creating an all-new platform - and a whole new market - for sophisticated mobile apps. In short, they changed people’s expectations for what you could do on a mobile device.

Today, people are creating all kinds of content on their mobile device. We’re creating mind maps, documents, presentations, audio memos, project plans and rich media content, all on-the-go. It’s really powerful stuff. But once you create this content on your mobile device, where can it go? How do you share it? How can you access content from other places on your mobile device? And as you create more and more content, how do you deal with the fixed amount of space that’s on your phone? We face these challenges as users everyday and we wanted to solve them.

That’s why I’m particularly excited to announce a new developer program called OpenBox Mobile. OpenBox Mobile gives mobile app developers free, easy-to-use tools that will help users make mobile content accessible and sharable to other apps, services, desktops and other people in just one click. We have been working with a number of iPhone app developers behind the scenes, including:

- iThoughts (mind-mapping)
- QuickOffice (document editing)
- iBlueSky (mind-mapping)
- Smart Recorder (audio recorder)
- iRec (audio recorder)
- JotNot (image and document archiving)
- mySticky (notes and to-do’s)
- Readdle (document access)
- Pixelpipe (document access)

We’re pretty lucky to be working with a great bunch of enthusiastic developers that are doing some amazing stuff. For example, you can use iThoughts or iBlueSky to create a brainstorm map, save it straight to Box and make it instantly available to your project team. Or you can take Smart Recorder, record a meeting, save it to Box and automatically share it with a colleague who couldn’t be there. The possibilities go on and on.

Needless to say, this is only the beginning. Starting today, we’re getting this out to mobile app developers everywhere and, together, we really hope to build a whole ecosystem of mobile apps that lets you access, manage and share content across all your apps in lots of productive and creative ways. We know that developers will be able to use OpenBox Mobile in ways we haven’t even imagined, which is truly exciting.

If you’re a mobile app developer and want to see how you can use OpenBox Mobile, visit http://www.box.net/developers/mobile. Here you can learn more about the program, watch some cool video tutorials, link to developer documentation and sign up to get started.

Like Steve Jobs said, it’s fulfilling to build something you can’t wait to use yourself. Now that OpenBox Mobile is out in the world, I can’t wait either.

Update: Check out the snazzy new video on our OpenBox developer programs

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Development News, General commentary, New Features, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.