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Archive for the ‘Digital Office’ Category

Online Cloud Storage to Reach $3 Billion This Year

Monday, April 30th, 2012

A while ago IDC predicted that this year, 2012, would be the year that the online storage industry would reach $3 billion. That’s pretty awesome, and the recent entrance of Apple last year and Google this year to the party shows that big companies are starting to take this space seriously.

OfficeDrop continues to have a great year, and although we do feel a little like David vs. a bunch of Goliaths, we are still excited that so many small businesses trust us to be their cloud filing system.

I’ll be giving a talk at the upcoming Business Insider event in NYC on how lean startups can compete in crowded spaces and thrive. Here are a couple of slides which I’ll be using at the talk. Hope to see you there!

Posted in cloud computing, Digital Office, Market Research, OfficeDrop, Online Cloud Storage | No Comments »

PCWorld – OfficeDrop is One of 20 Clever Cloud Apps

Monday, April 9th, 2012

PCWorld has a slideshow showcasing 20 apps that make great use of the cloud – and OfficeDrop is on the list! Click through to the 20th to see an image of the OfficeDrop iPad paper app and read what PCWorld has to say.

The article says:

“Why You Need It: This digital filing system handles any kind of paperwork. Imagine you’re at a business lunch, and you take notes on a napkin. With your iPhone, Android handset, or iPad camera, you can scan your napkin scribbles, a paper contract that someone else at the table needs you to sign, and the receipt for your meal.

OfficeDrop saves them all to the cloud as PDF files that are instantly searchable. While you sit there, you can share everything with your assistant back at the office.”

Check out the PCWorld article now!

Posted in android, Awards, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Management, iPad, iphone, OCR Scanning, OfficeDrop, Paperless, Paperless Champions, Press coverage, Product, Small Business | No Comments »

Cloud Computing Drives Mobile and Vice Versa

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

The press is starting to understand something that we’ve known here for a while at OfficeDrop – Mobile and Cloud Computing go hand in hand. Check out this chart on top reasons for an enterprise to adopt a cloud strategy:

Why Adopt Cloud Computing

Mobile is the top reason enterprises are moving applications to cloud computing platforms.

We’ve seen this here at OfficeDrop, with the success of our mobile applications and the huge engagement we get with our cloud connected mobile apps like the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF app and our Android scanner app. If you don’t have them yet, you should download them now – they are free and come with your OfficeDrop online cloud account – with both the paid or free accounts!

The article says, “With the increasing number and diversity of mobile computing devices, which have much less on-board storage than traditional end-user computing environments, there is a shift toward moving much of the functionality of an app into a centralized environment, like a cloud. This allows storage, computation, data access, security and management to all be handled in a centralized fashion.”

In other words, the cloud and mobile computing go hand in hand, where the mobile device can simply access the large amounts of data stored in the cloud at anytime, from anywhere.

Accessing the Cloud from Mobile Devices Growing

Another great piece of information in the article comes from ABI research, who suggest that “240 million business customers will access cloud-computing services via mobile devices by 2015 and that number could approach a billion.”

The article goes on to talk about the difference between native mobile apps and cloud connected apps – “But applications that run on mobile devices are often limited in functionality and are generally not business-class applications; it’s very rare to find native smartphone apps used as serious front ends for database queries, for instance.

In contrast, mobile cloud computing applications run on servers that reside in the cloud. Application data also lives in the cloud and results are fed back to the mobile device via an over-the-air network such as 3G or 4G. Users access apps and data via the browser on their mobile devices.”

You should visit the Computerworld to read the entire piece here.

Posted in android, Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, iPad, iphone, Market Research, mobile, OfficeDrop | 1 Comment »

Small Business Innovation

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Sparking innovation in a small business isn’t just a matter of sitting around waiting for good ideas to pop into your CEO’s head. Innovation comes from a lot of places, and the right environment can turn all of your employees into idea generators.

Recently Karl Start and Bill Steward of Avondale Strategic Partners, a business advisory company, posted an article on Inc about reigniting innovation in a business (read it here). It was a great post that focused on getting ideas from the field – customers and employees who spend time with customers. The three principal actions they proposed were:

Get cozy with customers
Empower your team
Execute fast and revise quickly

Excellent ideas and you should read the post. It also reminds us of a post that our CEO & resident cloud computing expert wrote a couple of years about entitled “4 Tips to Spark Innovation in Your Small Business.”

Prasad’s small business innovation ideas

Prasad’s ideas were different, but along the same lines as the executives from Avondale. Prasad said, “Small businesses are the major driver in both job growth and innovation in the United States. But when you are actually running a small business, finding the time to foster innovation can be overwhelmed by cash, economic, resource and time constraints. Here are four tips that I have found that foster innovation at my company and that I believe can be applied to most businesses.”

Encourage all employees to solve company problems
Allow individual employees time to work on a project of their choosing
Provide employees experiences in every aspect of the company
Consult customers for improvements and new ideas

Innovation can happen in a vacuum, but usually it is driven by the right work and team environment. We hope that another way you can generate innovative ideas to grow your small business is by letting the power of cloud computing free up your time and resources so that you can focus on solving problems for your customers.

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, Market Research, Small Business | No Comments »

100000 Users

Monday, February 27th, 2012

OfficeDrop has crossed another key customer milestone – we have over 100,000 users! That’s a lot!

Thanks to everyone who is now using our service! We are excited for what 2012 will bring.

Below is the press release announcing our growth – we had a little fun with it.

OfficeDrop Reaches 100,000 User Mark for Digital Filing Cabinet

The Future’s So Bright, We Gotta Wear Shades

Cambridge, MA — February 27, 2012 – Hey, remember back in November when OfficeDrop hit 50,000 users for our cloud filing cabinet software? We thought that was pretty rad. It was great proof that people like storing their paper in our searchable cloud. Well, it’s only three months later and we’ve doubled those users to 100,000. As Johnny Utah would say, “Woah.”

Luckily, unlike a Keanu Reeves character from the early ‘90s, CEO Prasad Thammineni has something really intelligent to say. “OfficeDrop has found our niche market of small businesses in paper-intensive industries who want to search and store their documents in the cloud. There’s a lot of them out there, and they find that our solution addresses their need to find the documents they need quickly, wherever they may be. Our strategy in 2012 is to expand our reach to even more small business users through strategic OEM partnerships and the continued adoption of our innovative smartphone and tablet apps. Oh, and, “I am an F.B.I AGENT!”

OEM’ing the Cloud & The OfficeDrop Effect

One of the reasons OfficeDrop is able to reach so many small businesses is through OEM partnerships with companies small businesses are already familiar with. Last year, we partnered with Nuance, whose PaperPort software is shipped in the box with bazillions of scanners around the world. Now people can fire up their scanners and automatically connect to OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet technology using PaperPort Anywhere. We’re expecting our growth to accelerate even more in the coming year with a series of new OEM partners. And custom, industry-specific applications of OfficeDrop you’d never expect. No, we can’t tell you everything right now, but hang tight!

So what’s this talk about “The OfficeDrop Effect” you ask? It’s when you’re using OfficeDrop and you don’t even know it. It’s not the rotten kind of secret like when people swap out your restaurant coffee with Columbian Decaf Coffee Crystals and video tape your reaction. Think of it more like this: the companies you trust most are counting on OfficeDrop to build a secure, reliable connection to the cloud.

And if you’re going to South By Southwest, check out OfficeDrop’s session, “When Goliath Tries to Steal Your Lunch Money” on Saturday, March 10 — it’s just for startups like us that are out there “chasing the big wave” and battling big competition. And in our case, learning to play nice with our competition, too.

Posted in cloud computing, Customer Satisfaction, Digital Office, OfficeDrop | No Comments »

Small Businesses are Going Mobile

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Fox New’s Small Business Center has a new piece on how small businesses are going mobile and “cutting the cord” – read it here. This is a trend we’ve seen here at OfficeDrop. Our customers have aggressively navigated to our mobile apps, like the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF app and our Android scanner app.

The Fox article has some interesting facts and figures in it (the following are quotes from the article:

More than four in ten (43 percent) small businesses reported that all their employees use wireless devices or technologies to work away from the office, a nearly 80 percent jump from three years ago.

Tablet computers are now being used by two-thirds (67 percent) of small businesses surveyed, up from 57 percent a year ago.

By the end of the year, about 50 percent of small businesses reported that they expect to have all their employees using wireless technologies to work away from the office.

Almost all (85 percent) of small businesses reported using smartphones for their operations, more than double the usage of five years ago.

Almost a third (30 percent) of small businesses surveyed reported that they use mobile apps for their business to save time, increase productivity and reduce costs.

Half of the small businesses that use them say they could not survive—or it would be a major challenge to survive—without mobile apps, a 31 percent jump over last year.

That’s right! Get your mobile on small businesses!

Posted in android, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Scanners, Entrepreneurship, iPad, iphone, Marketing, OfficeDrop, Small Business | No Comments »

Why Go Paperless?

Monday, February 13th, 2012

A new study by AIIM, which we mentioned previously, has some great charts and information about the key drivers behind businesses’ desires to go paperless. It seems that the most important reason to go paperless has nothing to do with the costs of paper, but instead is focused on the increased productivity that your employees get when going paperless.

Top Reason to Go Paperless

The biggest reason to go paperless, cited by over 50% of companies, is that improved search & sharing of business documents. In other words, it’s easier to find and share digital files vs. paper.

Increased productivity, faster response time to customers are also in the top 5 reasons. In fact, the only reason given in the top 5 for going paperless that had to do with cost savings was focused on saving physical storage space.

Here is a list of the reasons, and you can learn more here & access the study:

Posted in Benefits, Digital Office, Paperless, Paperless Champions | No Comments »

Eliminating Paper Reduces Customer Response Times by 300 Percent

Friday, February 10th, 2012

A new study shows that offices that reduce their use of paper can dramatically increase their ability to respond to customer needs. The study, done by AIIM, finds that “canning and capture can seriously improve customer response times — typically between 2 and 3 times faster, but in many cases 5 and 10 times faster.”

That’s a big deal!

The study also talks about how more and more companies are equipping remote workers with tablets and portable scanning devices to facilitate document scanning. This totally makes sense.

Here is an image from the study, which you can access from the link above. Basically, a large number of companies are scanning documents for archive purposes, but there are a large number of businesses that go beyond the occasional scanning and use digitization for indexing or making documents smarter or easier to find.

At OfficeDrop, we think that cloud capture can really make you more responsive to your client’s needs. In fact, we use our own online cloud storage to store important documents that we access all the time – everything from invoice to legal documents that we chat with our investors about, etc.

Posted in cloud computing, Digital Office, Market Research, OCR Scanning, Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions | No Comments »

New ScanDrop Mac Version

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

The newest version of ScanDrop Mac is out in the Mac App Store.

ScanDrop for Mac and the free ScanDrop Lite let any Mac user integrate scanned paper with digital screenshots to create multi-page, searchable PDFs, and with a single click share them via social networks or store them in services like Evernote, Dropbox, OfficeDrop and Google Docs.

Now, you can scan a page, grab a screenshot, store in the cloud – and socially share via Twitter – all from one place! Once the document is created, users have the option of sharing text-searchable PDFs with an unique link that’s sent directly to email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, Tumblr, and Amazon Wish List, to name a few. Popular online filing services like Google Docs, Evernote and OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet are also supported, allowing users to drop OfficeDrop PDF files into their accounts and share them with anyone, anywhere.

Posted in Digital Office, Document Management, Document Scanners, Evernote Document Management, Google Docs Paper Management, OCR Scanning, scandrop, scanning software | No Comments »