HNers,<p>As I posted in another thread, I am looking for the best cloud backup option for a virtual team. I have been a dropbox user for a while, and while I love it - I think that Drew may be missing a HUGE opportunity of not (yet) realizing that dropbox is a potentially game changing platform.<p>Hear me out:<p>I have dropbox on my phone and my machines. I travel for work and incur expenses, gather project/client data, write proposals, share files with team, etc..<p>In one task, expense reports, when I get a receipt, I take a pic of it with my phone and upload to my expenses receipts folder in dropbox to submit.<p>When I want to immediately share proposal drafts, pictures from travel/client sites etc.. I upload the pics or place the files in shared folders with others on my team.<p>This works beautifully, but is very rudimentary as well.<p>The files arrive in their views as expected - but its then no different than flat data.<p>I would like to see DropBox as a platform, where utility apps that take advantage of dead simple file and data transfer.<p>Imagine an app that sat on top of dropbox and connected to it directly which allowed a more elegant data and photo sharing. With the ability to chat among users as well and keep revision control of documents between users.<p>This would work in the following way, lets call them DropChannels:<p>You create a DropChannel by placing a piece of content for sharing and inviting other users to it.<p>I post a pic, and say I want USER1 and USER3 to see it. They are notified of a new Channel and see the pic. They can reply in kind with a message (chat reply, like "Looks good - go ahead" etc), which gets archived into the channel's log file.<p>They can reply with a pic of their own, which ends up in the channels' pics dir.<p>Or they reply with a document, which is viewable in the same way current docs are viewable - but they get placed in the channel's docs folder.<p>Each channel is defined based on a topic, and all activity in that channel is archived in the channels folder which is synced between al lthe users in the channel.<p>The important thing is to allow chatting, collaboration and input from other users.<p>Allow a team to select a channel template, which will include a range of directories or files that can be tracked for a channel. For example, you could have the app have a tab for time tracking, which can be slid over to, data entered and that data is captured in a time tracking file for later billing.<p>Scheduling etc...<p>All based on the dropbox syncing API as a platform...