By Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch – October 15, 2012 at 03:37PM
If you are a college student anywhere in the world, Dropbox just launched an interesting new program, The Great Space Race, which will run for the next eight weeks and allow college students to get up to 25GB of free Dropbox storage for the next two years. To qualify for the extra space, students have to register here with their school email addresses and the more students at each school sign up, the more storage space they will get.
Schools get one point for every student who signs up and two points for everybody who completes the “Get Started” guide. Every student who signs up gets an extra 3 GB for two years by default. After that, they will earn more as their schools pass each of Dropbox’s three pre-set thresholds. Dropbox will set different thresholds for every participating school.
- You must register for Space Race with an eligible school email address (if you have an existing Dropbox account you can still join)!
- If you’ve signed up for Dropbox with a non-school email, no problem! You can verify your school account on the Space Race page.
- Your school gets 1 point for each person who registers for Space Race and installs Dropbox on their computer (if they haven’t already).
- Your school gets 2 more points for each person that goes through the Get Started guide (including you!)
This program is obviously meant to increase Dropbox’s footprint among college students. As companies like Google and Microsoft expand their full-service offerings for schools, which also include large amounts of cloud storage, Dropbox and other independent cloud storage vendors have to up their marketing game in the college market with efforts like this.
As of right now, the top 3 schools on the leaderboard are the National University of Singapore, MIT and Portugal’s Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.