Author's Posts

Introducing Pixily Annotations: Virtual Sticky notes on paper documents

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

At OfficeDrop we try to retain all the ease and convenience of paper while eliminating the clutter. The snippet view came out of this type of thinking and based on our analyses of how people try to find information by shuffling through a stack of  paper. Today we are happy to announce another goodie that emulates how we currently use paper: the ability to annotate.

You can now add “sticky note” style annotations to any portion of a page, from within the page view of that document. Click on Add Annotation, Drag and drop the region of the page where you would like to add the annotation and type away. In addition to moving and deleting the from the page, you can also hide them all. Try that with sticky notes!

Here is a real-life example of annotations at work. I had to call customer service of our vendors, to dispute an over-billed amount. While I was on hold with the service rep, I logged in to my OfficeDrop account, looked up my account info, gave her all the necessary details, and when she gave me back a confirmation code for the refund, I could make a note of it right there in the document.

Annotations at work

Love it? Want to see more? Tell us and we’ll make it happen.

Brag your bracket

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

How did your bracket do this March? Good, bad or Mad? Either way, you have the chance to keep it forever. Just remember to add your bracket to yourmarch-madness-bracket Scanvelope. You can also send your entire office pool’s bracket. And ofcourse, depending on how well you did, you may choose to brag about it to the world by Embeding an URL of the bracket to your blog, or can have us securely shred it. Your call.

What’s your plan for Earth Hour 2009?

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Tomorrow, March 28, from 8:30 – 9:30 pm local time is Earth Hour. Boston and several neighboring towns are official participants in this year’s Earth hour.

Here are some ideas from my son’s classmates on how they plan on spending the hour without power. What are your plans for Earth Hour 2009? Let us know.

Fingerprinting paper (a.k.a Blank sheets are not really blank)

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Macworld reports that researchers at Princeton University and University College London say they can identify unique information, essentially like a magnifying-glassfingerprint, from any sheet of paper using any reasonably good scanner. Their findings will be presented at the IEEE security conference in May, 2009.

“We’ve found a way to identify documents even when there was nothing additional printed on them,” said Alex Halderman, who was part of the Princeton team. “This is like an invisible serial number printed on every piece of paper ever made.”

Isn’t this exciting? In addition to finding obvious applications such as detecting counterfeited currency notes, there could be other interesting main-stream applications related to legal contracts etc,. too. We are quite intrigued by this technology and its possible applications to our customers.

Our mini birthday

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Today, Feb 19th 2009, marks one year since we launched OfficeDrop in private beta. We launched as an invite-only service, with the goal of testing our Beta Launchdocument viewer and put our scanners to task in terms of handling a variety of documents, be it receipts, invoices, bank statements, kids’ artwork (we didn’t see that coming) or recipes.

Five months (plus a few more iterations, several user-friendly features, a few hundred gallons of coffee, loads of Kashi and a couple of instances of “What were we thinking?”) later, we launched our service. The rest, as they say, is history. And Feb 19, 2008 was our memorable first date (with history).

Paper’s real utility

Friday, February 6th, 2009

I wanted to leave you with a feel-good thought for this weekend. To quote the Teach Paperless blog, “It’s not paper I’m against. I’m against the static idea of knowledge that paper so often represents.” Paper Airplane

Paper seems like such a necessary evil. It is really convenient, and honestly, it is the only “format” that has Sketchbeen around for centuries. And yet, paper is static, it can only belong in one folder at a time, and its contents cannot be searched (or found) easily. It takes up space, eats up trees and I can go on and on.

Wouldn’t we all love to be in a world where paper is used for it is really meant for. To quote the blog again, “…..  to do good stuff with paper. Like making airplanes. And footballs. All kinds of creative things..”

An update regarding Pixily’s impact from the Enom Outage

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

A quick update regarding the critical outage that impacted many websites, including pixily.com.

Enom, the world’s second largest domain name registrar was down for approximately 4 hours until about 6:15 pm EST. This means that browsers were not able to send requests to our servers using the www.pixily.com domain name. Our servers were and are all healthy and running, and your documents, as always, are secure. My apologies if you were impacted because of this, but this was a situation beyond our control.

It is worth pointing out that this outage was not specific to pixily.com and impacted approximately 10 million web sites around the world. To reiterate, your documents and your information are, as always, secure.

Our technology team is already implementing a failover strategy so that we minimize downtime even during such extreme circumstances. So you may rest assured that we continue to work hard to provide secure anytime, anywhere access to your information.

Pixily iPhone Interface: The other side of ubiquitous capture

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

As we work on realizing our dream of ubiquitous capture, we are also making strides towards Ubiquitous Access – The ability to access information anywhere, anytime. Now you can access information on the go, using your iPhone. We are announcing i.pixily.com, an iPhone optimized version of the OfficeDrop app that you love. The iPhone version currently supports the two most needed features that you would need on the go. These are but the start of many more exciting features in this front.

  • Search (Of course! we would be nothing, if we are not about Search, isn’t it?). Like the browser interface, you can search for contents, label or name
  • Browse (You can browse documents by their label)


You can access the iPhone optimized version of OfficeDrop at http://i.pixily.com. And remember to add it to your iPhone home screen using these simple instructions:

  1. Launch Safari on your iPhone and Browse to i.pixily.com
    Enter URL in Safari
  2. Click the Favorites (+) button at the bottom of Safari and then click on the Add to Home screen button
    Click on Favorites button
  3. Click “Add to Home Screen”
    Add to Home Screen
  4. Type “OfficeDrop” as the name for the icon that will appear on your home screen
    Type OfficeDrop
  5. Click the “Add” button
    Click the Add button
  6. You will now see a pixily icon in your home screen.
    Ta-Dah

Schools are trying to save money, time and trees by cutting back on paper.

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Earlier this week, we learnt that hospitals become more efficient when going paperless. Today we are learning about schools. First hospitals, now schools. Talk about making an impact where you most need it.Kid happy about paperless

The Washington Post reports that “Some schools are taking a fresh look at “paperless” activities, meaning pretty much anything involving three-dimensional objects.” The article further reports that “A 5,000-sheet case of copier paper costs about $40. Envision copying 30 to 40 sheets every week for 500 students, and it’s easy to see how costs add up“.

Having some of the local schools in our area as our customers, we are very well familiar with the challenges that schools face and how digitizing academic information (student records, classroom assignments, etc,.) results in saving time, money, space and trees. We are encouraged by this trend.

You can read the complete Post article here.

Paperless hospitals could save 100,000 lives annually

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Reuters reports the results of a interesting study: “patients treated in hospitals that ranked highest in use of health information technology to manage patient records and physician notes were 15 percent less likely to die compared with patients in hospitals that ranked lower.Paperless Hospital

It also further notes that “If these results were to hold for all hospitals in the United States, computerizing notes and records might have the potential to save 100,000 lives annually,” Dr. Neil Poe of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

It is great to see concrete data emerging on this front, and there cannot be a more direct and tangible impact of the benefits of going paperless for any small business.

The entire Reuters article can be found here.

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