scribd

Docuter is a free online document host that launched in early January. Like Scribd, Docstoc (which is currently down), and others, it lets you upload documents from your hard drive or a URL. These can be viewed on the site or embedded in Web pages like what I've done below.

Docuter's claim to fame is that it supports "over 200" different types of documents (here's a list). This includes image files, and soon it will include audio and video files. Like Scribd, it lets you upload files of any size, which is nice for uncompressed, … Read more

Document-sharing service Scribd has pulled in $9 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Friday. The round was led by Charles River Ventures with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.

With the new cash, Scribd plans to speed up its product development and hire new employees.

And the first of those hires was announced in conjunction with the funding announcement: George Consagra, who most recently served as chief operating officer of AOL's Bebo, has been hired as president. (Co-founder Trip Adler has the CEO post.)

Scribd's monthly user count is now … Read more

Pixily is a cool scan-by-mail service that launched in early June. Like Shoeboxed, which I checked out last month, Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets. The big difference between the two services is that Pixily is focused less on receipts and finances, and more on day-to-day papers like insurance claims, long cell phone bills (with call lists on them) and little things like birthday cards.

Everything that's scanned goes through optical character recognition (OCR), so you … Read more

File host Docstoc is releasing a solution on Wednesday for sending large attachments to friends, family, and co-workers. Called OneClick (download), the small application must be installed on your machine to enable right-click contextual menus that let you simply click any file on your hard drive and send it either publicly or securely to others.

Once the file's been transferred, you'll get a link to the Docstoc-hosted document inserted into a new e-mail message that your recipient can open and read without needing to install anything.

Like Scribd's solution, which launched last week, OneClick has been designed to entice business and casual users to start simply uploading their documents instead of e-mailing them for the sake of compatibility and size.

Not everyone has Gmail or Office 2007, which offer popular file compatibility. Nor have all users implemented the small software tweak on older versions of Office that will let you read those .Docx files with ease. Instead, solutions like Scribd and Docstoc are taking office software out of the equation entirely.

It's also a pretty simple way to get users uploading more of their documents from a local machine. Instead of having to go through Docstoc's Web uploader (which is simple and easy to use), you can get them uploaded with just two clicks whenever you come across something you'd like to upload.

The small application is PC-only for now, but I'm told a Mac version will be on its way soon. To see a video of the tool in action, click the link below.

… Read more

Document host Scribd has a new service for people afraid of opening attachments. It's simply an e-mail address (iPaper@Scribd.com) you add as a CC recipient on your e-mails. If there are any documents attached, they'll be uploaded to Scribd and hosted for you. Less than a minute later the service sends a second e-mail with a link to that document or documents on Scribd, all of which have been set to private--regardless of whether you or the people who are getting the e-mail have Scridb accounts.

Last week I sat down with Scribd co-founder Trip Adler to chat about this new service and Scribd in general. The last time I wrote about them it was for the dubious Paper-to-iPaper program, which lets people send off their paper documents to be scanned and hosted. I gave it a try and it actually works as advertised--they even send it back free of charge. The whole process took about three weeks, which Alder says will be shortened as the program progresses.

WW: What are users uploading the most of?

Alder: We get a lot of academic papers, school work, study notes, things like that. We get a lot of eBooks and presentations for work and legal documents. We get a lot of slideshows of photos.

WW: What's the average size of what people are uploading?

Alder: It ranges. We have a lot of really long documents that go over 1,000 pages, and a lot of really short ones too. The long stuff tends to be more interesting, it gets a lot more traffic too.

WW: Have you thought about spinning off versions for niche sites, like adult content or something document heavy like the Smoking Gun?

Alder: We've thought it, but we're working with educational institutions and big enterprises, and people can find that stuff somewhere else.

WW: Speaking of which, how is the push to get school to use your service?

Alder: There are institutions using it, we haven't been pushing that hard because it takes forever to contact universities. We talked to Harvard for example, where I went to school, and it's so hard to get the entire organization to use a single tool because it's so segmented into different areas. MIT OpenCourseWare is uploading all their documents. They created an account just to test it out--they don't have that much yet. They're going to upload about 100,000 documents. As we get bigger and get more resources we'll definitely try to get out and talk to more universities and get them to upload content.

WW: Do you have any users who are uploading an outrageous amount of stuff?

Alder: Yeah we have some power users. We had one guy who was uploading 40,000 documents or something. We ended up hiring him and now he's our community manager.

WW: What type of content was it?

… Read more

Calameo is a new service for publishing documents from your computer to the Web. Like Scribd, it's dead simple to use, and will slurp up all sorts of documents of up to 100MB in size. What makes the service noteworthy is that you can take documents online and offline with a click of a button, without removing them entirely--which could be useful to business or education users who want to upload many items, then make them public at a later date.

Of course, the strong suit with any of these document-hosting services is the viewer. Calameo's iteration is … Read more

Yudu Freedom is a new entrant to the world of online document publishing. Like Scribd, it lets you take PDF files from your hard drive and host them online for free. The files can be viewed a little faster than with Adobe's Acrobat reader, and it runs entirely in Flash with that neat page turning effect you might have seen in other document hosting services such as Issuu and Idio.

Yudu promises that any document you upload will be search engine optimized, making it show up in Google, and so on. There's also a built in search tool, … Read more

Update (10:06 AM): The submission process differs from the original plan. If you have the address, please don't send anything there. Please check the updated instructions below. And yes--this is real. Post has been amended from the original to reflect these changes.

We know it's April 1st, but this is 100 percent real. I made James Yu, Senior Product Developer at Scribd swear on his unborn first child that this isn't an April fool's gag. Starting today the document hosting company will take any of your real documents and scan them for you to be … Read more

We've been giving some play to Adobe Acrobat replacements and other PDF tools in the last few weeks, and it's clear people are serious about handling a large variety of document types without having to muck about with the right software or browser extensions.

To that end Scribd, a start-up that's all about documents and how to share them with others, has had a solution of its own using Adobe's FlashPaper and crunching all sorts of documents to fit in it. This morning the company launched its own viewer that not only replaces FlashPaper, but also improves upon its design for both users and publishers.

The new viewer is called iPaper. While the name might bring to mind Apple products of yore, the document viewer is a total Acrobat killer. It's fast, lightweight, and is designed with Web readers in mind. While it may look similar to FlashPaper, there are several key differences that make it much better suited for long documents, photos, and Web videos.

The biggest one being that iPaper has been designed with publishers in mind. The viewer goes hand-in-hand with a new publishing platform that lets Web publishers integrate advertising into documents or media they feel like sharing. There are no preroll or off-to-the-side ads; instead Scribd has worked in Google AdSense text ads that have been put between every few document pages and that slurp up contextual ads based on what's contained the document (example here). It's effective and not annoying.

Secondly, the publishing platform lets site owners integrate iPaper into their sites. There are three basic ways to do it. The first is basic embedding (which existed before iPaper), as well as a tool called QuickSwitch that will automatically convert any linked document into a hosted iPaper player when site owners install a small line of code on their page. For power users, there's also an open API that lets them integrate iPaper and document conversion into the back end of their sites or services.

While I think Adobe will eventually address the bloat that Acrobat has become for Web users, it's up to publishers to take a proactive approach to letting the greatest number of users access content in the same way they read words or watch videos. For that, Flash is definitely a phenomenal go-to. The iPaper document viewer shows promise at unifying document sharing by lowering the barrier to entry for users who simply don't want to deal with the hassle of extra applications.

I've embedded an example of the iPaper viewer after the break. Be sure to play around with the table of contents and zoom controls.… Read more