We’ve been waiting since Doo closed its significant first funding round of $6.8 million at the end of 2011 for it big play to attack the world of collaboration and documents to appear. Big plays like this can take time, but after quite a long two year beta (oh yes) with Mac and Windows apps, today it launched its onslaught onto the world of paper. Specifically the paper you have to deal with all the time, whether you are a business, a student or anyone who has to deal with paper documents daily. The official app has hit the Mac App store as of today and on Windows 8. The iOS and Android mobile apps will follow in the coming weeks.
The idea is that doo will allow business to find any document on their Mac, whether it’s on cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or in their email accounts. doo says their solution does away with the normal folder structure we use to organise things. Instead, it automatically extracts relevant information from each document – like company names, document types, file formats, people, places, sources, dates – and uses it to generate intelligent tags, which then help users find any document very fast.
A selective sync allows users to define which of their documents to manage locally and which to back up and sync to other devices via the optional doo Cloud. So this is marrying up everything you have, whether it be on local drives or cloud services.
However, you don’t need to ditch your existing folder structure. COO Marc Sieberger says “That’s why we implemented the watched-folder concept, which gives users this option. It’s a bridge from the current folder-based organization into a bright tag-based future.”
Co-Founder and CEO Frank Thelen says they are not going after one specify competitor: “Close to our concept is the “OS X Found App” or “iPad Documents App” but they do not have our integrated data intelligence or their own cloud. In the end we want to be for Documents what Skype is for communication, Evernote for notes or Tasks for Wunderlist. There is no real Document platform available yet. To tell you – for instance – that we wanted to kill Dropbox, would just not reflect our thinking. Sorry!”
The startup, out of Bonn, Germany, is funded by Xing.com founder Lars Hinrichs who runs the HackFwd, a pre-seed venture capital company, Target Partners, DuMont Venture and e42 Ventures.