Last week Box.net, best known as a content management, collaboration and file sharing vendor, announced an ambitious venture to build a Box developer network. The new venture is called the Box Innovation Network or /bin for short, and it combines several ideas.

It has a series of high-powered partners including Appcelerator, Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Rackspace, SnapLogic and Twilio. It also aims to build a network of developers who build applications on top of the Box.net platform. /bin will provide resources for these developers including money for partners who want to build custom applications.

Box claims it already has close to 200 million API calls a month involving more than 4,500 developers and partners. Much of this growth is coming from mobile with explosive growth in this area over the last year. Box is also seeing more requests from customers for custom applications built on top of the platform. The idea of the /bin network is to provide a network of developers who can begin to work with Box customers and build these custom applications, and others, to take advantage of the platform via Box's APIs.

Box has seeded the community with $2 million in order to provide financial assistance to developing partners when it's needed. 

It's hard to say if this initiative has any real substance, but it could be a first step towards catapulting Box from application vendor to platform vendor--more akin to Salesforce.com and Force.com. Interestingly enough Salesforce owns one of the project partners, Heroku.

While $2 million might seem like a lot of money, when it comes to building companies, it's not all that much, but if this project provides the impetus to help build a developer community focused on the Box.net platform, it has the potential at least to help make that shift to the platform--and for that reason alone this could be significant.

For more information:
- see the Box announcement

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