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… → 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. → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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 … → Read More
“Scribd doing 43M revenue this year??” was the subject line of an email sent to me last week, along with a link to this photo, taken in Scribd’s San Francisco offices, showing a list of “important stuff” on a whiteboard. Our tipster must not have read the whole list, though, because I was immediately suspicious.
The items on the list, as best I can read them:
Important Stuff
2009 revenue: $43… → Read More
Scribd, the so-called ‘YouTube for documents’ that’s recently also become an Ebook store, has been seeing a major drop in traffic over the last two months. Since June, the site has lost over 48% of its global traffic, falling from a peak of 58.3 million monthly visitors to 30.1 million less than two months later. These aren’t fuzzy stats, either— Scribd is Quantcast Quantified, which means the… → 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… → Read More
Scribd, the popular document sharing service that’s recently made moves into the Ebook market, has just launched the latest version of iPaper, the site’s online document viewer. Scribd originally debuted iPaper in February 2008, after deciding that the existing Flash Paper viewer developed by Adobe didn’t perform well enough or offer enough features to keep up with the quickly growing… → 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… → 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… → 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 … → Read More
Famed Harry Potter author JK Rowling is taking on Scribd, the free document sharing service that has been likened to a “YouTube for documents”. Rowling and her publisher have discovered that a number of her books were being illegally shared on the site, after being pirated and uploaded by Scribd members. According to The Times, Rowling’s publishers (along with those representing author Ken… → Read More
Online document sharing site Scribd has announced that it has partnered with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications, to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community free of charge. Publishers have begun to add an array of content to Scribd’s library, including… → Read More
Canadian start-up Yourmagz.com launched the closed beta version of its SaaS content distribution platform today. You can sign up to view the site.
The platform – which can be described as a hybrid between social network platform Ning and web document sharing service Scribd – specializes in distributing publishers’ content across various websites, social networks, and mobile devices. So basically… → Read More
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