As Google revealed Google Drive, the company's cloud storage service, Dropbox found it has another competitor to deal with, alongside Microsoft's SkyDrive service. Not surprisingly, Dropbox has made some changes to its service, notably offering 5GB of free storage, to stay in contention.

Dropbox unveiled a file-sharing feature where users could link to files regardless of whether the person uses Dropbox or not. The feature supports all file types; previously, users could only send files to Dropbox users.

"Dropbox links allows people to easily view documents, photos and videos in a beautiful full-browser display without any setup. Business presentations, home movies, and even entire folders can be opened and viewed instantly without having to sign in, download anything or open files separately," the company said. The link to the file or folder is created by pressing the "Get link" button. Users can view the links, but not edit, without having to download and open files.

The company also raised the amount of free storage, likely in response to Microsoft offering 25GB of free storage for existing members while Google Drive offered 5GB of free storage. It announced a rise to 5GB of free storage - from 2GB - in 500MB increments. Dropbox also expanded its automated photos and video uploads to work on more devices.

"Now with Dropbox you can automatically upload from just about any camera, tablet, SD card or smartphone - pretty much anything that takes photos or videos. With the newest version for Mac or Windows, you can just plug your camera, phone or SD card into your computer and with a few clicks of the mouse all your photos and videos are in your Dropbox!" it revealed.

The first 500MB will come with the first automatic upload, with more being given as users continue to upload photos and videos until the extra 3GB of storage is reached. Dropbox is also offering various paid-for tiers, even going up to 1000GB for Teams of five users. An extra 200GB of storage is also given if the storage quota is met, which seems to be more than Google Drive offers for now.

(reported by Jonathan Charles, edited by Dave Clark)