Dropbox held its very first developer conference, DBX, at the Fort Mason Center earlier this week.

The cloud storage provider is growing up, expanding from just a service to store and share files to a platform that allows “effortless” access to hundreds of millions of Dropbox clients across all location and devices.

Here’s a run down of the initiatives discussed at the event:

Dropbox Platform

The Dropbox platform was designed to be an optimal foundation to connect the world’s apps, devices, and services and now it has been enhanced with a suite of tools that simplifies how developers can build across devices and platforms.

Datastore API

This allows developers to save information, not just files, regarding what a user is doing inside an application.  It can be used to keep track of high scores, allow players of multi-player games to set new goals or targets based on how well their competitors are doing.

Drop-ins

These let developers connect to hundreds of millions of Dropboxes with just a few lines of code.  Drop-ins are categorized into two, the Chooser, which gives people access to the files in their Dropbox from web and mobile apps, and the Saver which makes saving files to Dropbox in as simple as one click.

Drop-ins are already in play in Yahoo! Mail, Shutterstock, and Mailbox.

More integration across the cloud

Speaking of Yahoo! and Mailbox, Dropbox announced that the Yahoo Mail Android app has been integrated with Dropbox.  Now, Yahoo Mail users on Android can sync their Yahoo and Dropbox accounts so they can directly share Dropbox files via the app.

Since its acquisition of Mailbox earlier this year, Dropbox has yet to integrate the two services – until now.  Mailbox is a mobile app that sorts Gmail or Google accounts on your iPhone or iPad.  At DBX, it was announced that Mailbox now supports Dropbox, so if you put a Dropbox link in your email, the file becomes accessible directly within Mailbox, with no need to open an external link to view the file.

But what do these announcements mean for Dropbox and the storage business in general?  Joining Kristin Feledy in this Morning’s NewsDesk is Wikibon  co-founder and CTO David Floyer to share his Breaking Analysis on the impact of Dropbox’s announcement for the industry and if it will be the de facto storage of the industry.

“It’s very difficult to establish platforms.  There are very few of them.  You have the Microsoft and the Intel platform, you now have the IRS platform, you have the Android and ARM platforms.  Those are platforms that have been established,” Floyer explains.  “It’s been difficult to establish them.  There are two real main components, factors, which establish a platform.  The first of which is, obviously it’s got to be ubiquitous, and the second, the more important one, that it almost always comes from the consumer area and then goes to the enterprise area.

“At the moment, in terms of being a platform and being something that can be integrated, it looks like Dropbox has got a very strong lead indeed and it’s gonna be very difficult for the enterprise alternatives to go into this space and establish their APIs as any defacto standard.  Assuming that Dropbox, at the same time extends the capabilities into the enterprise, it’s going to be in the long term very difficult for others to compete.  If you’re looking ahead, then Dropbox looks it is establishing itself well,” Floyer stated.

For more of Floyer’s Breaking Analysis, check out the NewsDesk video below: