Woodlands, Texas based startup Insightory is setting its goals high, with the aim to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge. The service itself joins a growing list of document uploading sites that include Scribd and Docstoc, although the company claims that unlike these services Insightory is more targeted and heavily moderated. The content is aimed at management professionals, professors and graduate students and comes from a variety of sources including users from within the United States and elsewhere. Insightory believes that companies need a constant supply of management knowledge and that their service can provide this; certainly it does help to get other opinions when in management so the service may find a willing audience. The service is currently in alpha with a beta version to be launched this month and collaboration and networking tools coming in the first half of 2008. Insightory is holding a Contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to the site with prizes ranging from $100 to $3000, more details here. CrunchBase Information Docstoc Scribd Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Want to share some of those secret company files with the world? Starting today, you can upload them to Docstoc and share them in an embeddable Flash player. Actually, the service is more for standard business documents like leases, employment agreements, non-disclosure agreements, wills and the like. Docstoc is designed to be a shared repository of commonly used forms and documents. (I embedded the press release of Docstoc’s public launch below in a DocStoc player). Docstoc competes with Scribd and is a TechCrunch40 company. Today, Docstoc is coming out of its private beta into a public beta. Anyone can now upload and share documents. Already, there are 12,000 documents on the site. There is no limit to how many you can upload, and Docstoc accepts the following file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rft, and .pdf. To encourage people to try out the service, Docstoc is running a contest. Every week in November, the user who uploads the most professional documents (random filler doesn’t count) will get an iPod Touch. To qualify, users must (1) be registered members (join here), (2) upload documents that are publicly shared and (3) the uploaded documents must benefit the community. For a full set of rules click here Winners will be announced each Sunday at 12:00am PST on the Docstoc blog. Users can see how they are doing in the contest, in real time, by visiting the docsters page and clicking on “most docs this week” Here is the press release in a Docstoc: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/wrapper.ashx?doc_id=15772&swf_url=http%3A//content1.docstoc.com.s3.amazonaws.com/DocstocGoesLivePressRelease10-30-07.doc.swf&enableFullScreen=1 Here are some screen shots: CrunchBase Information Docstoc Scribd Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Docstoc, a startup aiming to be the YouTube for professional documents, is giving away 1,000 invitations to its private beta to TechCrunch readers. Redeem your invitation by going here and entering “TC40″ into the “invitation ID” field. The first 1,000 readers to do so will get in; dawdlers will need to request an invitation using the form on Docstoc’s homepage. CEO Jason Nazar says that there are currently thousands of free legal and business documents on the site. The company recently raised a round of financing and presented at the TechCrunch40 conference during Session 4: Crowd Sourcing. Check out a four-minute-long tutorial of Docstoc below. → Read More
Session four as follows, including our live notes. Cake Financial Cake Financial is a social investment service that lets people track all their investment portfolios in one place. The service allows individual investors to track and analyze their historical performance up to ten years. Users can also view the real-time portfolios and performances of their friends, family and top investors all without disclosing net worths, shares owned, portfolio sizes, etc. Online investing service that offers social recommendations, without disclosing personal details. “There is nothing fake about Cake!”. Homepage provides all the information usually found at the brokerage firm, but provides aggregated data from multiple firms. Cake calculates annual returns across multiple brokers. Interesting: you can chart your success against others, friend, associates etc. Tools also allow you to look at trades other Cake members have made, the idea being that you can see what users with better results are investing in. You can also see who is investing in a stock, eg: you can see everyone who holds Cisco, and then see what they are buying and selling as well. DocStoc Docstoc is an online community and professional network around user generated, professional documents. Users can store their own files or documents from anywhere around the internet. The files can be categorized and shared with various levels of read write accessibility. The documents can be searched by categories or by keywords and then previewed online or downloaded. Search results can be filtered by views, downloads, ratings and comments. Learn more about DocStoc. Interesting introduction: fake customer testimonials from the audience. A professional document service, comes with comments, profiles etc… Docs can be found by keyword search, filters which include community filters, category search. Documents can be previewed via popup and shared. Includes registration for blogs as well. Teach The People Teach The People is a social network built around online education. The site lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set to share it with the Teach The People communities. Users can create individual profiles and contribute content to topics (computer programming, math or “Bob Marley’s Influence on R&B Music” are a few examples). The site encourages quality content by letting users become community creators and by giving users points for rating, referring friends and answering questions. Community creators help create content and run day-to-day community operations. They can charge other users fees for monthly community access, → Read More
I criticized Los Angeles based startup Docstoc in a post last month for pre-announcing a financing that hadn’t actually closed yet. At the time of that post, where I suggested that they may be counting their chickens before they hatched, they said: We are about to close another substantial round of financing from at least one, if not all, of the following investors 1) one of the co-founders of myspace 2) the angel investors in www.baidu.com and the head of mp3.com that lead the company to its 400M acquisition – at least one of these players will lead our next round, and all three parties may participate. Financing is expected to close by the end of the month. Well, their gamble paid off. They raised a first round of financing from Scott Walchek (investor in Baidu), Brett Brewer (co-founder of MySpace parent Intermix Media) and Robin Richards, the former president of MP3.com. They won’t disclose the size of the financing to me, but they certainly closed on the investors they said they would. The startup itself remains unlaunched for now, but I’ve seen a demo and its got potential. Like Scribd, Docstoc is a sort of YouTube for documents – users can upload just about any document type (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator, and PDF) and display via a Flash interface on any website. But there are key differences, too. Our first post on the company is here. → Read More
Here’s an interesting email that was forwarded to me this morning: Docstoc, a Los Angeles based startup that we wrote about in early July, says they are close to closing a “substantial” round of funding from a number of potential investors. There’s something to that saying that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch, but the fear and caution genes are rarely found in the entrepreneur’s genetic makeup. There was additional information in the email we’re not publishing as it was too sensitive. We did not receive a reply back from the company regarding this. From the video we embedded in our earlier post, Docstop looks to be a competitor to Scribd and allows users to post and discuss documents in various file formats. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait for the launch. We are about to close another substantial round of financing from at least one, if not all, of the following investors 1) one of the co-founders of mysapce 2) the angel investors in www.baidu.com and the head of mp3.com that lead the company to its 400M acquisition – at least one of these players will lead our next round, and all three parties may participate. Financing is expected to close by the end of the month. → Read More
Scribd, dubbed “YouTube for documents” didn’t have the the traditional dip in traffic after its launch, and has continued to grow rapidly after raising nearly $4 million in two rounds of venture capital. I looks like they already have competition, though. I’ve been hearing good things about new startup Docstoc, which is currently in private beta. I haven’t been able to get in and see the service, but others that have are telling me its pretty cool. The video above shows an early interface, which I grabbed from the Docstoc blog. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
