Prasad Thammineni, OfficeDrop’s CEO, has been a very busy blogger over at SmallBizTrends. We wanted to let you know about some of his recent posts; he usually blogs about technology and innovation, but also has a recent post on insurance.
I’m sure you remember how we changed our name a few months ago, and how we shared the way we came up with the new one. Now, all of that handy name-changing info is hosted on the entrepreneur section of About.com
How to Change Your Company Name on About.com
About.com is an awesome resource to learn about almost anything. The article is part of a set that share the theme of crowdsourcing. Mainly how to effectively use crowdsourcing to the benefit of your company. Since we did a lot of crowdsourcing of employees and customers to change our name, we offered our story to About.com writer, Mitchell York, who was happy to include our input. We were happy to contribute by sharing our knowledge and experience to create a guide for changing your company name, and are honored to be featured on About.com Crowdsourcing was a big help for us in getting this done, and we encourage any business owners to look into crowdsourcing for various business tasks.
Thanks go out to Mitchell York for getting us on there, and for providing great content for entrepreneurs on About.com!
That’s right, OfficeDrop has recently scanned a full print book and converted it to a PDF document that can be viewed and read as an eBook on the Apple iPad. The book is Guy Kawasaki’s The Macintosh Way. Download the book as a text-searchable PDF here: http://freemacway.com/ and you can get the OfficeDrop Paper-to-Go app here.
Here’s the story:
In 1990, Guy Kawasaki published The Macintosh Way. It was a great book that highlighted and outlined the marketing values and techniques of Macintosh back when they were producing and selling the early Mac computers. Sadly, the book went out of print though it had a significant following.
Twenty years later Apple has surpassed Microsoft in value, and Kawasaki’s book is now a way to view the original strategies they employed to get there. After securing the rights to his work, Kawasaki decided to begin distributing his work to his established collection of Twitter followers. The book wasn’t in print anymore, so the only way to do this would be to scan the book and distribute it digitally.
As you might guess, this is where OfficeDrop comes in. Guy approached us with the challenge of turning his print book into an eBook, and we were psyched to attach such an original and exciting project. We scanned the book, organized it in a PDF, and uploaded it to OfficeDrop.
Now, we have our new OfficeDrop iPad app, which lets you open and navigate through scanned pages as you would an eBook on the iPad. With the scanning process complete, Guy Kawasaki was now able to distribute his work digitally, and could even read it on his iPad, the result of the very company his book praised.
The best part - video marketing company, Pixability, took footage of the scanning and conversion process to make a clever video that tells the fascinating story of Guy’s plight from initial problem to finished solution. The video was very well done and is especially entertaining with its feature of various Mac and Apple products that accurately match the chronology of the story.
Continuing our series of educational posts about the various aspects of document scanning, here is some basic information about the way we make your documents text-searchable.
You might already know that every document you have scanned with OfficeDrop gets converted to a text-searchable PDF. The text-searchbility is what lets you search your documents by word or phrase in our system or others. If you’re wondering how we do that, then we have three words for you - Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
OCR for Text Search
OCR is a software that we integrate with every scan. Without it, your scan is just a recording of light as an image. It isn’t until OCR is employed that applications can start “reading” characters and interacting with features like search. You can see why we think OCR is so important considering search is one of the best parts about digital filing. To learn more about OCR and OfficeDrop, see our OCR scanning page.
There are a lot of choices when it comes to digital document format, but our undisputed weapon of choice is the PDF.
OfficeDrop Scans Documents to PDF
The PDF is a universal format, requires no exclusive software to be read, and maintains a consistent layout on any platform. This makes it ideal for sharing because it will view the same way for both parties. Also, since the PDF is so popular, it’s pretty unlikely that a recipient doesn’t already have a program for PDF viewing.
There are plenty of other reasons we think the PDF is an ideal format for digital filing. To learn more about the benefits of the PDF, see our scan to PDF page.
OfficeDrop has teamed up with Professional Organizer, Josh Zerkel, to guide you to a more productive, less paper, digital office. On July 15th we showed you the benefits of going paperless, and where you can get started in the first webinar, Saving Time and Money with your Paperless Office. Now it’s time to take the next step, and learn about the specific tools you can use in webinar 2, Online and Offline Tools to Master Your Paperless Office.
Register for Webinar Part Two: Online and Offline Tools to Master Your Paperless Office
Like the last one, this webinar is free, so all you have to do is register here. It’s kicking off on July 29th at 11am PST so hurry and get those registrations in. This is a great opportunity to learn about specific tools that will help you reduce paper, become more efficient, and lower costs.
Also, if you want to see the video from the first webinar you can visit our Digital Office page - the video is on the right!
A current user of ours recently sent an intriguing article about kid’s school documents, so we though’t we would share it with you here on our blog.
There are a lot of different ways paper infiltrates your home or office. The obvious culprits are bills, receipts, pamphlets, flyers, etc. In the article linked above, a woman tracks the influx of paper from a less suspected source, our children.
If you have kids in school, I’m sure you’ve noticed the piles of handouts, assignments, permission slips, worksheets, outlines, and syllabi that they pack up and deliver from class to your home. They seem so innocent, I know, but as a Southborough mother found out earlier this month, these kids are packing thousands of pages throughout one school year.
For the parent trying to reduce paper clutter, your own kids could be your biggest problem - dumping Spiderman backpack-loads of paper on the kitchen counter five days of the week. I remember back in middle school there was at least one handout every class and college wasn’t much better. At least a college student has a dorm to dump paper in, but middle and high schoolers probably don’t have their own filing cabinets in their rooms and so the paper inevitably ends up cluttering your home. It’s not their fault, schools simply distribute paper at an alarmingly unchecked rate.
What To Do With It All?
Kids’ paper flow is essentially the same as the influx of bills and invoices, it’s just delivered on shorter legs. Therefore, document scanning can be just as effective for kid’s documents as it is for mom and dad’s.
With OfficeDrop’s monthly scanning service, the kids can dump their paper directly into an OfficeDrop Scanvelope to be sent off for scanning before pages even hit the kitchen table. If you asked for it to be shredded, you won’t have to see those pages ever again, left to organize and delete the unwanted pages from our convenient online filing system.
Yep, it’s OfficeDrop. Check out our recent feature on Fox 43’s Hampton Roads Show on the episode outlining how to “Tackle paper clutter…with a computer!”
In the video featured below, organizer Amy Volk talks OfficeDrop and even flaunts one of our Scanvelopes. In first few minutes she reviews Neat Receipts scanners and then does a great job describing the benefits of OfficeDrop and comparing the Neat Receipts service to OfficeDrop. (OfficeDrop comes in at minute 3:00)
Thanks, Amy for talking us up and letting us know about the segment!
To see more organization tips from Amy Volk, see her website, Simplified Living.
We’ve got two great ways to learn about document scanning prices. The first is our document scanning price estimator, which will give you an idea of what a scanning project by OfficeDrop would cost. You can visit the estimator:
Or you can visit our new document scanning prices page, which has information on … the prices we charge for scanning your documents! Visit the document scanning prices page.
Lifehacker is known for providing tips and tricks that make you more productive. That’s why we were psyched to see that ScanDrop caught their eye. ScanDrop lets you scan your documents directly to Google Docs or Evernote. Lifehacker thought that was a pretty handy trick, so they gave a quick outline noting ScanDrop’s “seamless uploading…to Google Docs, Evernote, or [OfficeDrop] itself, for free.”
If you’ve been looking for a way to get paper into Google Docs or Evernote, there are few easier ways than ScanDrop. Get to the OfficeDrop page and get the free ScanDrop download now.
OfficeDrop’s Document Management and Document Scanning Service Blog
OfficeDrop, formerly Pixily, helps small businesses and home offices go paperless and manage their paper and digital documents online. OfficeDrop provides document scanning services and an award-winning online digital filing system. In this blog, we’ll discuss cool ways customers are using our service to tame their paper problem and get organized. We hope to share tips and tricks we are learning as we scan, image and digitize documents for our clients. We’ll also highlight new features in our digital filing system, let you know what the press is saying about us and keep you up to speed with the goings-on at OfficeDrop!
