Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Cloud start-ups have thrived because no major Big Tech company beat down their doors. That just changed. It's official: Google announced its new Google Drive service Tuesday—just one day after I wrote about how the Mountain View tech giant was moving into a territory wholly dominated by Box and Dropbox

Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, said no to offers from Google and Apple, and is running one of the world's fastest growing Web start-ups.

Online storage start-up Dropbox raised $250 million for its expansion, one of the largest fundraising rounds in Silicon Valley this year. Online storage start-up Dropbox announced it has raised $250 million for its expansion, one of the largest fundraising rounds in Silicon Valley this year. The investment values the company at $4 billion.

Appsumo, the daily deal site for software, has launched a sweepstakes offering 10 free Dropbox Pro accounts for life. The pro account, valued at $99 a year, includes 50GB of Dropbox cloud storage and the ability to access your files from anywhere and share them with others. Visit Appsumo to read the contest rules and enter for a chance to win the sweepstakes, which ends on October 13

Want your files accessible online, but don't like the idea of not keeping a local copy? These tools let you sync and collaborate, but also give you offline copies and peace of mind. It's not that hard to combine cloud accessibility with just-in-case offline practicality.

At a Boston bus station in early 2007, Drew Houston opened his laptop to finish some work while waiting for his bus. As he turned on his computer, he froze. "I could see my USB drive sitting on my desk at home, which meant I couldn't work," the 28-year-old says.

Xobni, which makes a free Microsoft Outlook plug-in that helps you manage your inbox, has launched the Xobni Gadget Store . If you already have Xobni installed, you can visit the store and download “gadgets” from a variety of services, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

"The cloud" is the biggest and most overused buzzword in the tech industry. You can't turn on the TV today without seeing ads from Microsoft , IBM, or Cisco touting the cloud in some form. Take the following IBM commercial, which attempts to define the lofty concept for consumers: the cloud does email, predicts traffic patterns, lowers energy bills, develops software, understands risk

And it did it all without spending a penny on advertising. Dropbox, the cloud-based file-syncing and file-sharing startup, is clearly one of this year's "it" girls among tech startups. Dropbox has climbed from four million to 25 million users since January 2010.

We always hear about hot startups like Foursquare, Instagram, Foodspotting, or GroupMe. But another startup is making more waves than all of these social media companies combined