Duracell, The Company That Makes Batteries, Wants To Compete With $10 Billion Dropbox

The latest one caught our eye because the company is better known for making batteries: Duracell.

It's standing out from the crowd by combining an old-fashioned hard drive that you would pick up at the store with unlimited cloud storage.

For $20 per month, you'll get a 1 terabyte hard drive and unlimited cloud storage, the company says. Business-tier service starts at $199 and comes with a 2 TB local drive and unlimited cloud storage.

To compare, Dropbox offers 2GB of storage for free. For $10 per month, their "Pro" plan gives you to 100 GB and $15 gets small businesses unlimited storage.

While local storage does have its advantages - Duracell's website claims that using its network drive can make backups "up to 1000x faster" - it's unclear if consumers will be willing to pay for something that from a non-techie perspective looks like a more complex setup than simply having a Dropbox folder on each computer.

Andy Vuong at the Denver Post reports that Duracell plans to entice customers by following the cell phone model: offering the physical drive for free in stores by having users commit to the paid service upfront.

Why would a battery company want to get into the crowded cloud storage market at all? Vuong spoke to Shep Gerrish, director of new-business development for Duracell, says its a way to expand on the company's well-known brand name.

"Duracell Cloud Storage safely and securely stores all the data that is created from the devices that Duracell helps power - digital cameras, camcorders, smartphones, laptops, etc."

Beyond expanding its brand, Duracell has another reason to pursue this new market. Cloud storage is starting to create some huge new companies: just this month, we've learned that Dropbox is currently valued at almost $10 billion and Box is worth about $2 billion and has secretly filed for an IPO,