Is PC presence enough to help Box.net prevail?

The race for mind and market share among cloud storage providers continued with today’s news that some Hewlett-Packard PCs will come with an easy on-ramp to Box’s cloud storage service. But as cloud-storage startups court mobile-device toting business users, how effective can a PC partnership really be?

With this latest deal, business users buying the HP Compaq 6200 or 6005 Pro Series or 8200 Elite Series PCs get a free Box account with 10GB of cloud storage.

That gives Box entry into the SMB and enterprise business accounts targeted by these HP PC models. But, at the same time Box competitors like Dropbox seem to have progressed beyond the PC to hotter-selling mobile devices. Last month Dropbox announced $ 250 million in funding to fuel its effort to integrate its technology into phones, cars, and other devices.

Palo Alto, CA.-based Box is trying to nurture an ecosystem of developers and other partners to validate its cloud offering. Last month, it formally announced its Box Innovation Network,  aka “/bin,” and $ 2 million in funding to encourage developers to build on Box APIs.

In October, Box CEO Aaron Levie previewed the network, saying that the company already had significant third-party support.

“Our platform is already used by a couple thousand developers with 150 apps …. we want to expand that. We want it to be dead simple to share and collaborate around your stored data … there is far too little innovation oriented towards enterprise software.”