Dropbox for Business is an increasingly important part of the company’s revenue stream — there are more than 130, 000 businesses using the service — but there are many more people out there using the company’s more consumer-focused free service and its $9.99 monthly subscription plan. Millions of those users are in fact using their personal Dropbox accounts to get work done, as well — so now Dropbox is going to offer a set of tools to make it a lot easier for individuals and smaller businesses to use Dropbox with a team of co-workers. In fact, that’s the name of the new service that launches tomorrow: Dropbox Teams. Anyone using Dropbox will now have the opportunity to create a team. When you start the process, Dropbox will even suggest users it thinks you should invite based on what documents you share with what people or whether you’re all using the same email address domain. Once your team is set up, everyone will have access to the same shared folder, which Dropbox expects teams will use to share documents that the whole group will need access to. Fortunately, you can also set up sub-groups (like a marketing team, or the specific people involved with a specific project) — that’ll keep everyone on the team from having files they don’t need taking up space in their Dropbox. Dropbox Teams will also give administrators granular control over what different users will have access to — you can limit what files and folders they can see, and you can also decide whether files can be shared or not. Another sharing option is the ability to determine whether folders and files can be shared with people who aren’t on your team. If files are confidential, you can keep them only within your team, but other files will be able to be freely shared with anyone using Dropbox. (Of course, that won’t stop anyone from downloading the file and sharing it via email, but there’s only so much you can expect from a free offering.) The last major feature here is pulled directly from Dropbox for Business. If you happen to have created Dropbox accounts for separate work and personal accounts, Dropbox will let you link them together so you can see them both while logged in, rather than have to log in and out to jump between them. All in all, it’s a pretty generous set of free features: it lets the many people out there already using the popular Dropbox Basic and Pro services for work have more control over how they do that. And it just might help the company sell more Dropbox for Business subscriptions as those small companies start growing up. Source: Dropbox
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Dropbox Teams will offer a host of business features to free users
Slate dissects the strange circumstances that led the price of electricity in Texas to briefly dip not just to zero, but into negative territory, reaching at one point negative $8.52 per megawatt hour. Why? A combination of being an “electricity island” with only weak ties to the surrounding state’s grids; strong wind in a state that’s sprouted thousands of windmills; and infrastructure design that means the only real buyer for most electricity producers’ output is ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. (One of the comments attached to the story notes that Texas is not completely isolated from the national grid, but it’s still markedly isolated.) A slice: Demand fell—at 4 a.m., the amount of electricity needed in the state was about 45 percent lower than the evening peak. The wind was blowing consistently—much later in the day Texas would establish a new instantaneous wind generation record. At 3 a.m., wind was supplying about 30 percent of the state’s electricity, as this daily wind integration report shows. And because the state is an electricity island, all the power produced by the state’s wind farms could only be sold to ERCOT, not grids elsewhere in the country. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
