Since its launch in 2007, DocStoc has been primarily known for being the place to go to find and share professional documents. Yet, earlier this month, Docstoc went beyond just providing bundles of premium pro documents to producing its very own articles and videos on how to build and run a successful business. In doing so, it launched four iPad apps, Sales Techniques and Training Secrets, Adwords and SEO Secrets, HR & Employment Management Advice, etc. While those may not exactly light your hair on fire, all essential parts of running a small business.
And today it seems that Docstoc is further committed to becoming a resource for small businesses, as it’s launching License123, a research service that aims to help both existing and new businesses discover the permits and licenses they need to be compliant with local, state, and federal law. → Read More
DocStoc, a document sharing site has been focusing on providing bundles of premium professional documents for businesses for some time now. But today, the startup is expanding to producing articles and videos related to starting and running a business, providing more than just form documents for professionals.
Docstoc has launched four iPad apps: Legal and Copyright Small Business Toolkit; Sales Techniques and Training Secrets; Adwords and SEO Secrets; and HR & Employee Management Advice to help businesses streamline operations, sales and more. → Read More
We’ve been tracking Los Angeles-based startup DocStoc for years now, from the company’s roots as a fairly broad document sharing site that competed directly with Scribd to, more recently, a hub that caters more exclusively toward businesses, complete with bundles of premium professional documents available for purchase. And today, the company is taking another step in that direction, with a rebranding of the site that positions it with the tagline, “We Make Every Small Business Better”.
So what exactly does that entail?
CEO Jason Nazar explains that for the last year the company has been building out a repository of professional documents — they have 20 million that were uploaded by users, and plan to have another 10,000 written in-house (or outsourced to contracted professionals) by the end of the year. → Read More
Docstoc, an online document sharing site that caters primarily to small businesses and professionals, is unveiling its first mobile app today with the launch of its iPad app today—Docstoc Premium.
The iPad App, which is free, includes access to documents that are shared on the platform, including both premium and free content. Users have access to over 10,000 business and professional documents, and can also search and download over 20 million library documents. Content includes company business plans, proposal letters, real estate purchase forms, LLC operating agreements, marketing plans,and more. You can also integrate your saved, bookmarked and uploaded documents from the web on the app through your account. → Read More
Docstoc, an online document sharing site that caters primarily to small businesses and professionals, has just added a big dose of new content to its premium Docstore. Through a partnership with digital media distributor Overdrive.com, the site has added a collection of 100,000 books from a smattering of well known publishers as well as 150,000 new ‘professional’ documents, which include research reports, legal forms, and other content you’re probably not going to find sitting at your local bookstore.
Among the publishers that are included as part of the Overdrive.com partnership are McGraw-Hill, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Included in the collection are book series like the ‘For Dummies’ books, Frommer’s travel books, and Microsoft guides. → Read More
Web publishing startup DocStoc is launching a customized document viewer today, allowing anyone to create easily embeddable, branded document viewers. The new feature is open to all DocStoc users and offers the ability to customize the logo, buttons, links, and color of the viewer.
The viewer itself is fairly sleek and resembles DocStoc’s normal document viewers. Users can directly download documents from the viewer and DocStoc will automatically convert any convert historical embeds with Docstoc. For example, all of the documents we’ve embedded with our TechCrunch DocStoc account will now include our branded viewer. → Read More
For web publishing startups like Scribd and DocStoc, premium content is the viable business model to monetize their platforms. For example. Scribd has signed a number of deals with publishers to sell online books to users on the site. Today, DocStoc is officially opening up its premium content channel, called the DocStore, addressing a lightly different sector, with a focus on selling professional documents to businesses and individuals.
DocStoc’s CEO and founder Jason Nazar says the one of the platform’s fastest growing user base segments are small business owners looking for free and paid documents for entrepreneurs, startups and professionals. Documents range from legal documents to real estate contracts to analysis to forms for business models. The DocStore also features documents in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files. The marketplace has been open to select partners since last summer (including TechCrunch), but today will mark its public debut. → Read More
What is the best reading experience on a touchscreen device? As magazines and tablet-makers grapple with this question for larger form factors, Issuu has an answer for touchscreen phones. The Web-based document-viewer just released Issue Mobile for Android phones, and is working on an iPhone app.
Issuu Mobile is a mobile document reader which gives you access all the magazines, books, and documents uploaded to Issuu. Millions of public documents have been uploaded, just like on Scribd or DocStoc, and you can view your own private documents in your own account as well. The Android app shows featured content and addresses the small screen size with a new EasyRead feature. You just scratch a portion of the text and it pops up in a magnified view. You can also subscribe to publishers and news feeds. → Read More
Issuu, the Danish startup battling the likes of Docstoc and Scribd in the professional document publication and sharing space, is today introducing a REST-based API that enables its users to automatically upload and manage publications, bookmarks, and folders under their accounts.
That means developers and designers can henceforth tap into the Issuu platform and services to equip their own applications and websites with the oft-needed functionality of offering document consultation without the need for end users to download the docs or to visit the Issuu website. Issuu already offered two APIs: one for Search (which allows developers to sift through all Issuu publications, comments, and users) and one for its Viewer product. It is now adding a third one for the ‘Upload’ feature, obviously an essential one. → Read More
Sharing confidential documents within a business or between businesses can be risky—you never know who might leak a document or if your document is being shared with other employees. To solve this problem, startup Confidela has launched the beta of WatchDox, a SaaS product that allows a sender to control, restrict and track viewing, printing and forwarding of documents. We have 100 free beta invites here.
The service’s basic functionality is similar to document sharing services like Scribd and DocStoc but with ramped up privacy settings and tracking systems. DocStoc and Scribd also offer the ability to set documents as private, but WatchDox is giving users a few more tools that allow users to control and track documents. → Read More
Edocr, a smaller competitor to other document sharing startups like DocStoc and Scribd, re-launches today with new features and an API, after a long time off-radar.
Eschewing the publisher focus of Issuu, or the broad business focus of DocStoc, the boot-strapped Edocr focuses on corporates and organisations. So for instance, companies can upload all their public-facing documents, whether they be company reports, press releases, guidance documents, you name it. Admittedly the slightly dull-but-necessary focus is not going to set the world alight, but with plenty of enterprises still getting their heads around the basics of blogging, RSS and even social networks like Twitter, edocr is a simple way for companies to share their PDFs without being lumped alongside a pirated copy of a Harry Potter novel.
New features include an improved design, bulk uploading of documents, an API, document categories, better search and the ability to auto-tweet to a Twitter account when new documents get uploaded. The question is, will that be enough to set it apart from the many players in this field? → Read More
Popular document sharing service DocStoc just launched a collections feature, which lets users package documents around a particular topic. DocStoc has already created close to 50 collections, including “Starting a Small Business,” “Advertising Online,” and “Traveling on a Budget,” and is opening up the platform to users to add to existing collections and create their own.
The feature is just another way to organize your documents online and can be a pretty useful tool to manage large amounts of documents that relate to different topics. Competitors Issuu and Scribd both have similar offerings. Scribd’s “Group” feature allows users to organize documents around a theme and tries to connect users to other people who are interested in the same reading and topics. Issuu recently launched a collaborative Groups feature, where people can collect, organize and discuss publications related to any topic. DocStoc’s feature appears to focus more on the organization of documents around a particular theme than connecting users around that theme. → Read More
A year and a half after launching at our first TechCrunch40 conference, document-sharing service Docstoc is taking off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash. The service is growing at a healthy clip, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide).
In order to encourage more activity and higher-quality document uploads, DocStoc is introducing DocCash. The company will be splitting AdSense revenues 50/50 with anyone who uploads documents and wants to opt into the service. Right now the ads only appear on Docstoc pages, but will eventually include Flash ads in DocStoc’s embedded Flash player as well. → Read More
Issuu, a company that lets you upload a PDF or other document and then flip through it easily on a dedicated Webpage or in a small embedded widget, is adding features to its service and site with the aim of becoming a more engaging destination for users. We’re big fans of Issuu—when the company first launched, it was one of the first services of its kind whose interface and functionality didn’t suck. Other popular document sharing services include Docstoc and Scribd.
Issuu says that it’s focusing on adding features to make the the site more of a community for both its free users and enterprise customers. Last year, the startup launched the beta of Issuu Pro, a way for professional publishers to bring their magazines and newspapers to the internet and enhance them with a variety of digital features and the ability to customize the viewing experience. Publications are ad-free (meaning no ads in the viewer from Issuu—any ads in the magazines or documents themselves remain), and publishers were only charged when their content was viewed, with pricing ranging from $1.10 to $19 per 1,000 publication views. → Read More
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.
The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.
I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer. → Read More
Getting people to use your Web app is all about lowering the barriers to entry and making it as dead-simple as possible. The idea of uploading documents to the Web and embedding them YouTube style is still a foreign concept to many people. Docstoc just made that process as easy as sending an email.
If you have a Docstoc account registered to your email address, all you have to do is send the document you want uploaded as an email attachment to uploads@docstoc.com. It’s the fastest way to upload a document to the Web. I tried it with the press release below. → Read More
DocStoc, the professional document network, has launched a pair of new features that help transition the site from primarily a document sharing platform to a personal document archive as well. The features, dubbed MyDocs and Sync, allow users to quickly upload their files to the web, where they can be quickly accessed from any computer that supports the ubiquitous Flash plugin. → Read More
Docstoc has taken a page out of YouSendIt’s book by releasing a desktop applet for sending documents to others via email without having to worry about size restrictions. The Windows-only OneClick app enables users to right click on certain file types (Word, PDF, Excel, etc.) and choose to email them via Docstoc. The files will begin uploading to the startup’s servers in the background while an email composition window opens with pre-generated links to them. Recipients simply need to click these links to begin viewing or downloading the files, which can be up to 50mb in size and set as either public or private on Docstoc. OneClick’s restrictions on file types and sizes mean that it will compete only minimally with more focused online file transfer services. But it does have the advantage of unlimited and indefinite storage, as well as background uploading (there’s no need to wait for uploads to finish before sending your email). At the very least, it’s a clever move to encourage more content contribution to Docstoc. As with Scribd and other UGC destinations, content is king – what else is Google going to index? See a related announcement by Scribd from just last week that enables onsite previewing of email attachments. CrunchBase Information Docstoc Scribd Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Continuing its push to become a major provider of Webtop software, Adobe is releasing two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Adobe’s Webtop arsenal already includes the recently launched online version of PhotoShop and its online media player, Adobe TV. Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web. “It is our intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past,” says product manager Erik Larson. Acrobat.com—Online Word Processing, Meetings, and File Sharing Acrobat.com is a combination of three recently launched online services: Adobe Brio (online meetings), Adobe Buzzword (online word processor), and Adobe Share (online file sharing). Thus with the public beta launch of Acrobat.com, Adobe is taking on Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting—all at the same time. Buzzword is now integrated into Acrobat.com as the default word processor. (I reviewed Buzzword and Share when they first launched last March). Multiple people can edit a document and leave comments. Tabs along the bottom representing different people show you who has accessed the document most recently and their status (author, reviewer, etc.). It paginates documents, supports all kinds of fonts, and lets you create the closest equivalent to a PDF that is possible online. All the documents on Acrobat.com are organized in what up until now has been Adobe Share. The document and file-sharing service now offers five gigabytes of free storage, and lets you embed documents in a widget on other sites across the Web. (I’ve put an Adobe PDF widget at the bottom of this post). This last feature should worry startups like Scribd and DocStoc, which are based entirely on the ability to upload and share documents in a similar fashion. Finally, my favorite part, Acrobat.com includes Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee. Anyone with a Mac is going to love this. Whenever I get a virtual demo, I prefer to do it through Adobe Connect because WebEx and GoTo Meeting sometimes don’t work with my Mac. And Adobe’s Flash viewer simply looks better. Acrobat 9—Now With Flash At the same time Adobe is launching Acrobat.com, it is releasing Acrobat 9—a major upgrade to one of its anchor desktop → Read More
Docstoc, the professional document repository and community, has raised $3.25 Million in Series B funding. The round was led by Rustic Canyon Partners, and brings their total funding to over $4 Million. Docstoc serves as a repository for professional documents, featuring forms, templates, and a variety of other material. Its flash-based viewer can be embedded into other pages, allowing documents to be viewed on external sites without needing an outside reader like Acrobat or Word. The company is also introducing a Content Partnership Program (CPP) that will allow content providers to place their own ads around their documents, and to collect any revenue they accrue. The program is free of charge, but applicants will be screened for quality. Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar says that the program is designed to improve the amount of high-quality content on the site while establishing ties with valuable partners. Docstoc raised $750k in Series A funding last November in a round led by Scott Walchek, Brett Brewer, Matt Coffin, Robin Richards, and Crosscut Ventures. Their primary competitor is Scribd, launched March 2007, which features a similar embeddable document viewer and a large collection of content. Scribd has raised over $4 Million to date. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/wrapper.ashx?doc_id=529847&swf_url=http%3A//content1.docstoc.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Docstoc+Series+B+Funding+Press+Release.doc.swf&enableFullScreen=1Docstoc Series B Funding Press Release – Get more documents CrunchBase Information Docstoc Scribd Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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