Dropbox Goes Big In Japan; Partners with Sony Ericsson, Softbank

By Geoff Spick (@Goffee71) May 31, 2011

Dropbox (news, site) gets a leg up in its quest for Japanese marketshare by joining in with major service provider Softbank and phone maker Sony Ericsson.

Name Dropping

Dropbox has made plenty of friends with its easy-to-use and mobile-friendly cloud storage service, but pushing ever onward and upward, the company is looking east to Japan for its next chunk of market share.

This pair of deals means that Dropbox will appear on several phones running on Softbank's network in Japan, and appear on several Sony Ericsson phones that are being sold across the Far East and Europe, including Australia and the U.K. Similar deals with U.S. providers are expected in the coming months.

In the Pipe

With increasing numbers of devices like mobiles, tablets and Google's cloud-based ChromeOS notebooks being sold, the need for files in the cloud is growing at a rapid rate. Dropbox already has apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, but these deals will see a new generation of users wondering what the cute blue icon can do for them out of the box.

Dropbox added Japanese (and French, German and Spanish) support back in April so is well-placed to make use of these deals. There's also an interesting piece on the Dropbox blog about how the service helped out during the recent Japanese tsuami disaster, something else that could help see its value noticed.