Started originally as a ridesharing service, then pivoting to become a document uploading and reading service, Scribd now has 100 million registered users, with 90 million monthly active users. That makes it probably the biggest effort of its kind, but leveraging that size hasn’t always been easy.
Scribd, TechCrunch has learned, is at a crossroads in mobile — a crossroads that almost saw the company sell its iOS mobile news aggregation app, Float, to Yahoo.
When Float launched in July 2011, it was off to a good start: 150 partners at signup, including biggies like the AP; with that number eventually growing to 200. It has also regularly made the top-15 rankings for reading and news apps on the App Store, and in the last three months has seen the number of active enaged users of the app go up 30 percent month over month. → Read More
It’s a big day for online document sharing and social reading site Scribd. Today at Fortune’s Brianstorm conference, CEO Trip Adler will be revealing a major initiate that introduces a suite of new products and an entirely new brand: meet Float.
Float is Scribd’s first iPhone application. It’s also an entirely new web app, and there will be additional mobile applications coming later this year. It’s part Instapaper, part RSS reader — and it also ties in nicely with your social graph to make it easy to consume all the links your friends are sharing. And Scribd has lined up 150 publisher partners to help get the app off to a running start.
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Last May, document sharing hub Scribd launched one of its biggest features yet: a document reader based entirely in HTML5. Up until then Scribd had presented its documents using a Flash-based viewer called Flash Paper, which worked well but had a few shortcomings — namely that it didn’t work on mobile devices like the iPhone. Scribd’s solution was to use optical character recognition on a document to effectively recreate its fonts in a digital format, then to use HTML5 to style and lay out the document’s content. And it really works.
Today, Scribd is taking the next step on its HTML5 rollout: it’s swapping all of its embedded document widgets that are using Flash over to a new embeddable version of the HTML5 viewer (and new document embeds will be in HTML5). This is important, because Scribd already has 20 million embeds scattered across the web that will be automatically converted to the new viewer (CTO Jared Friedman says this shouldn’t break anything).
The reader will allow document embeds to be read on mobile devices that can’t use Flash, like the iPad and iPhone, and it should generally offer a more native feel in the browser than Flash does. → Read More
Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I’ve been here before . . .
Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we planned all along to start a live platform, and that the Justin.tv show itself was a way of promoting that platform. While this ended up happening, none of it had crossed our minds at the time.
Emmett Shear and I had been working on Kiko, the first Javascript web calendaring application in the Microsoft Outlook style. We prototyped the application in our final year at Yale, went on to raise money from Y Combinator, then continued working on it for over a year.
Then Google Calendar was released—boom—absorbing most of our nascent user base and capturing most of the early adopter mindshare. But to be perfectly honest, Kiko would have failed regardless. We were too easily distracted and hadn’t really thought through the strategic implications of owning a standalone calendaring property (hint: no one wants a calendar without email). A short time later we were burned out and spending most of our time playing Xbox with the Reddit guys in Davis Square—hardly a startup success story. → Read More
It’s funny. When I tell my ‘normal’ friends that I’ve just come from Facebook’s office or need to head down to Google’s campus in Mountain View, they often give me a strange look, as if I’ve just told them I’m about to make a house call to the Easter Bunny. These companies aren’t places inhabited by actual people — they’re nebulous things coursing through the Internet’s series of tubes.
But I can’t blame them. Most of the startup profiles we see in magazines feature a portrait of the founders solemnly gazing into the distance as they plot to change the world with their revolutionary new sharing widget. Sometimes there’s a snapshot of a few desks, each of which is far too neat for anyone to actually have done any work on. There’s got to be a better way. → Read More
Scribd, the document sharing hub that launched as a ‘YouTube For Documents’ and has since added other key features, including an online bookstore and a publisher analytics platform, has raised another big round of funding: it’s just closed a $13 million Series C round led by MLC Investments and SVB Capital, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Kinsey Hills Group. The round brings Scribd’s total funding to over $26 million since it first launched in 2007 — it closed its $9 million Series B in December 2008.
CEO Trip Adler says that the money will primarily be used to expand the team, which is current at around 45 employees. New hires will mostly come on the engineering side, with personnel also being added to Scribd’s business development and sales teams. Adler also says that Scribd has an agressive product roadmap for the next six to twelve months — a key piece of which will be mobile. → Read More
Document sharing hub Scribd has just announced a new feature that will allow publishers on the site to more accurately measure how their content is performing. Dubbed Scribd Stats, they’re likening it to a ‘Google Analytics for Documents’, and it’s an apt description — the product looks quite similar to Google’s popular web analytics product, but it’s obviously been tweaked to suit the documents, presentations, and other files that have been uploaded to Scribd.
CEO Trip Adler says that until now, publishers haven’t really taken advantage of the features that the web affords — they might know how many hits a given document has received, but there’s much more data waiting to be unlocked. That’s where Scribd Stats comes in. After logging in, you’ll see an overview charting your overall document popularity (your aggregate read count, the number of times embedded versions of your docs have been read, etc.). You can also see this broken down on a per-document basis. Graphs look similar to Google Analytics, allowing you to quickly adjust the date range. → Read More
We wrote about Apture Highlights, a new plug-in that brings instantaneous search to content on the web, a few months ago. Today, Apture has scored a pretty significant deal with document-sharing site Scribd to allow users to use Apture Highlights on the tens of millions of public documents on the content platform.
As we wrote in August, ‘Apture Highlights’ plugs the “search leak” that is taking place with content on the web. The feature allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window. The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content. → Read More
A few days ago Law professor Eric Goldman wrote a vehement blog post entitled, “Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist” denouncing the recently enacted paywalls around documents older than two months on the popular document sharing site.
“[Scribd's] value proposition always has been open access to the documents–freely shared with everyone and indexed in the search engines. The paywall destroys that value proposition. They’ve taken the documents that I wanted to freely share with the public (many of them public documents like court rulings and filings) and made them inaccessible.” → Read More
Reading isn’t a particularly social activity, but talking about reading and sharing books, articles, and other documents is highly social. Book clubs are so popular because people identify with other people who share the same reading interests. Document-sharing site Scribd wants to become the place on the Web where a million reading clubs flourish . With a redesign rolling out later today, it will now start calling itself a “Social Network For Reading.”
Scribd is already is seeing traffic to its site double every six weeks from social sharing through Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and email. Documents are shared, liked, or commented on 10 million times a month now, and CEO Trip Adler expects that to multiply with the redesign. The two main changes to the site is a cleaner home page with a reading feed and a personal book shelf with all your documents (screenshots below). → Read More
The World Economic Forum has announced its list of 31 Technology Pioneers for 2011. The Technology Pioneers are its list of up-and-coming startups. Last year’s list included Twitter, Playfish, and Boston Power. The year before, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove were named.
Joining the pantheon this year are foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, greentech is equally strong on the list, particularly with smartgrid companies such as OPower and Tendril. Below is the full list of infotech companies that made it, with links to their Crunchbase profiles for more information: → Read More
Minutes ago, San Francisco federal judge Vaughn Walker struck down the infamous Proposition 8, a measure that banned same-sex marriage in California. Twitter and Facebook are abuzz with the news (as you’d expect), but one other site is also seeing an immense amount of traffic from it: document sharing hub Scribd.
The final ruling was uploaded to Scribd by Good As You and received over 50,000 hits “in a matter of minutes” according to Scribd Senior Director of Communications Michelle Laird — it’s up to over 125,000 reads as of this writing. CEO Trip Adler says, “a typical viral document gets 100,000 reads in 24 hours, this document has over 100,000 reads in about 24 minutes.” → Read More
You could call it the perfect storm.
Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.
Although the number of unique visitors still stands at roughly 50 million per month, those users are spending significantly more time perusing documents and sharing with friends. Brief video with Adler ahead. → Read More
We reported recently that online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages, another win for Apple in its battle against Flash. Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Scribd CEO and co-founder Jared Friedman, is announcing that the startup has moved much of its content, including tens of millions of books, magazines, newspapers, presentations, research and more, to the HTML5 format.
Friedman has told us that he believes HTML5 improves the reading experience, by allowing any document to become a Web page. “The possibilities are endless,” Friedman said in a statement. And the HTML5 format is able to bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages. A new bookmark feature will help you keep your place in especially long documents. Scribd’s documents will be especially iPad friendly. Instead of downloading a book from Apple’s iBooks store or Amazon’s Kindle app, you can see if an electronic version is on Scribd and read it in your browser. → Read More
Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages. Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser (see screenshots), but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages.
Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.” → Read More
Document-sharing site Scribd launched three years ago with the idea of making PDFs and other text-documents more Web-friendly. Now three years later, the site stores more than 10 million documents, which in turn have been embedded more than 10 million times across the Web. Scribd says it reaches more than 50 million people a month worldwide (Quantcast).
To celebrate its birthday, Scribd just rolled out a redesign with a new Zune-brown logo, much faster document search (to support 1.4 million searches a day), and other small new features such as the addition of collections. It lets you explore by category or trending documents. → Read More
Independent book publisher Author Solutions today announced a distribution deal with social publishing startup Scribd. Under the terms of said agreement, all new ASI titles published through the AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris will be made available for purchase through the Scribd website.
In addition, a portion of its backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be put up for sale on Scribd, although there was no indication of exactly how many books that represents. → Read More
Scribd, a site that lets users and publishers upload and share documents, has a new board member. David Sacks, the founder of Geni and Yammer (and former COO of PayPal), joins the company as a director as of today.
Scribd had 8.1 million unique worldwide visitors in November 2009 (Comscore). They’ve raised $12.8 million in three funding rounds. Sacks is already an investor in the company. → 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
Book publishers are increasingly embracing digital books, and not just on Amazon’s Kindle. Today, John Wiley and Sons, Barnes and Noble imprint Sterling Publishing, Chronicle Books, and the University of Chicago Press announced they will join a total of 150 publishers to offer ebooks in the Scribd Store. Wiley is the venerable publisher of the For Dummies series of books as well as Frommer’s travel guides and CliffsNotes.
Scribd lets people embed and share documents in a Flash viewer, but has been partnering with publishers since March to also sell downloadable digital versions of their books. Other publishers already on board include Simon & Schuster and O’Reilly Media. The ebooks are downloadable as a PDF, and excerpts can be shared through the Scribd reader. → Read More
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