Archive for the ‘discussions’ Category

Fun Wall Street Journal Article with OfficeDrop

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

OfficeDrop iPad lover & cloud computing expert (and CEO) Prasad Thammineni was highly featured in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in an article on the Steve Jobs Biography. The article starts with, “Prasad Thammineni, the chief executive of a file-sharing start-up called OfficeDrop in Cambridge, Mass., was no fan of Steve Jobs after Apple took a long time adding one of the company’s apps to its iTunes Store. But as he read the hefty biography “Steve Jobs,” the 42-year-old Mr. Thammineni found himself buying into many of the Apple co-founder’s management ideas.”

officedrop in wall street journal

Appearing on the first page of the Management section of the WSJ, the article is a lot of fun. It highlights many of the take-aways that other CEOs have gleamed from the Jobs biography, including things like mastering communication among the team, motivating employees, and seeking perfection.

Thankfully, Prasad does not take the Steve Jobs emulation to the extreme highlighted by some of the CEOs in the article! It’s a fun read and worth checking out.

The Cloud Makes All Services Frenemies

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

An important business philosophy that we have here at OfficeDrop is the concept of “Frenemies” – we will work with other services that would historically have been considered competition if it makes sense for our customers. It means that we value our customers’ workflow and actively look to integrate our cloud filing system with other online, cloud and SaaS services that our customers are using. Our customers are small businesses who want to move to a “digital office” and away from having their different work processes silo’ed into particular, proprietary applications.

What’s a Frenemy (or Frienemy, depending on how you spell it)?

We believe that the cloud has changed the way software will be used. Old, desktop software that wrote special, unique and proprietary files and that trapped your data are out. Remember when a file could only be opened by the program that created it? Well, in the cloud all the smart providers have open APIs, which means your data can now be pushed (securely, of course!) from one application to another – making it easier for you to get your work done. This means that our service may have to work with other online storage companies, or companies that have overlapping features. Should we be competing with these companies and avoid integrating with them?

No.

We can only survive if our clients WANT to use our service. They can get their data out at any time, so we need to offer the best paper-focused, searchable storage service we can – and let customers use other best in class services in conjunction with ours – like our FreshBooks document management integration. We’ve got an open API, and if someone who might be close in features wants to connect with our service they are very much able to create a tight integration with the OfficeDrop service.

OfficeDrop Articles on the Frenemy Concept

Prasad wrote about how competing in the cloud is making companies frenemies in TechCrunch. Today he penned one on “Building a Business Around Frienemies” for FastCompany.

Frienemies

Prasad Posts Again

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Our CEO, Prasad Thammineni, once again has a great post on a well known publication. This time it’s on Fast Company and is on the topic of “Startup CEOs as Celebrities.”

Of course, Prasad isn’t a celebrity (yet!). But he’s got some great points on why having celeb CEOs in the startup world is a good thing.

The basic idea is that anything that encourages innovation and gets young people interested in becoming entrepreneurs is a great this.

Check out his post below!

Android From a Mobile Product Manager’s Perspective

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
android eclair

Android Eclair - yet another dessert named OS by Android

Anand Rajaram, an OfficeDrop co-founder and our chief product officer, just wrote a piece for Techrepublic called “10 Things I Hate About Android.” Of course, not to be totally negative on Android, the subtitle is “and some work arounds that help.”

OfficeDrop has now released a series of mobile apps on different platforms – our iPhone PDF app, iPad App, Android Scanner App, and the PaperPort Anywhere iOS and Android apps. Anand has led the charge on all of these mobile applications. It was a lot of work! And he also has gotten a pretty deep view into the development and marketing side of these different mobile platforms.

Android is now the leading smartphone mobile application, selling more units than RIM or Apple. But it’s still got a long way to go before it’s an app developers paradise. There are some great signs that Google is taking the problems with the platform seriously, such as getting handset makers and carriers to agree to more frequent OS updates. And Google is pouring resources into the operating system as well.

But there are significant issues with Android. Anand goes into his top 10 in this article. This includes things that are nightmares for developers and QA people, like the software and hardware fragmentation, security issues, and the problem of getting found in Google Android marketplace (fyi, here is OfficeDrop’s Android app in the Google Android Marketplace! Now you can find it!)

 

 

iCloud and OfficeDrop

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

This is going to be big!

The team here at OfficeDrop was glued to the live updates on Apple’s new iOS and iCloud… and we got pretty excited.

While some pundits have been claiming that iCloud will kill existing document sync, access, collaboration and sharing startups, we think otherwise. OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, was quoted in Macworld and conveyed our excitement about the new announcement. From the Macworld article:

Prasad Thammineni, OfficeDrop’s CEO, said he saw opportunity. Apple’s new service, he said, isn’t necessarily oriented toward business-sized customers—but it could educate those customers about the advantages of cloud storage and expand his company’s market.

“It’s going to educate consumers to say ‘I want my data to go where I go.’ That will prompt customers and small businesses to say they want to do their data the same way,” Thammineni said. He added: “So for us, we see this as a big positive thing.”

We have reason to be so optimistic about Apple’s iCloud. When Microsoft began their “To the Cloud” campaign in November of 2010, we saw our keyword “cloud” related search traffic double from the previous month. And today, this traffic is up 5x what it was before Microsoft began educating the world about the cloud. (Note that while all search traffic for OfficeDrop has grown in that timeframe, it hasn’t grown anything like cloud related traffic. And there was a very distinct, positive change in the cloud related search traffic growth pre and post Microsoft campaign.)

Apple’s iCloud efforts will help propel cloud usage to the masses (or at least beyond the early adopters.) And since Apple is so laser focused on the consumer, OfficeDrop’s target customer base of small business owners will be left searching for a solution that meets their special needs. According to research that we’ve seen, last year only 11% of small businesses were using cloud based SaaS solutions – up from 8% the year before, but still a tiny percentage. And once you go cloud you are 4x more likely to try another cloud solution. If Apple can pull this off they will be the first baby-step into cloud services that our potential customers need!

Finally, our ScanDrop scanning software app thrives on scanning paper into people’s cloud based accounts, and is really designed for customers who use multiple cloud services. So one more strong cloud offering is quite good for ScanDrop, and will help our Mac ScanDrop scanner software revenue grow.

Mastering the Paperless Office

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

Video From The Mastering The Paperless Office Webinar

OfficeDrop was lucky enough to have had Joshua Zerkel, Professional Organizer to the San Francisco Bay Area, share with us his slides on how to master the paperless office. Josh makes it clear that there will always be some paper in any small businesses’ office, but there are a number of smart steps and affordable technologies you can use to reduce your use of paper.

Mastering the Paperless Office Video

Here is the video from the last session!

OfficeDrop also recently had another great webinar with Josh – Get Organized and Boost Productivity

OfficeDrop CEO Posts on TechCrunch

Monday, May 16th, 2011

competiting_in_the_cloudOfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, recently had a piece published on TechCrunch called “Competing in the Cloud – Let’s be Frenemies.” OfficeDrop was one of the first startups to get into Amazon’s cloud services back in 2007, and we’ve noticed that cloud/SaaS software is very different from the packaged software business model. In particular, open APIs and integrations are really changing the way companies interact with each other. Startups that would once have tried to aggressively compete with larger players are now helping the big platform companies round out their product offerings, and large players who once would have squashed every startup in sight are now helping distribute competitive offerings.

OfficeDrop is really benefiting from these “frenemy” integrations – Google Docs, Evernote, FreshBooks and more have helped grow our business and make for happy customers.

Please check out the post!

Top OfficeDrop Blog Posts of 2010

Friday, February 11th, 2011

Wow, we are already into February 2011 and haven’t yet listed the top blog posts from the OfficeDrop blog from last year!

Obviously some of the posts done in the first part of the year will have the most absolute visits, since they have been around the longest, so the following list is a little bit modified to allow a few of the newest posts from 2010 to make the list.

So here they are:

Top OfficeDrop Blog Posts of 2010

Getting a Custom URL (Username) for your Company Facebook Page – Step by step instructions for setting up a custom URL for your company’s Facebook page.

Top free and low priced sales and marketing SaaS tools for small businesses – Some of the SaaS products that we love for running our own business – this probably deserves an update since we are now using some new and awesome tools!

Scanning Directly to Google Docs – When we introduced ScanDrop we were blown away by the response. At this point way over 10k people are using ScanDrop to scan to Google Docs, Evernote and to OfficeDrop! How great is that?!?!

OfficeDrop Gets Your Paper into Evernote – This is when we announced that you can link all of your OfficeDrop files directly into Evernote, and also when reminded people of our ScanDrop software and how it … gets paper into Evernote!

OfficeDrop Links to Google Docs – A video and text on how to link your OfficeDrop account with you Google Docs account. We think this is the easiest way to get text searchable PDFs into your Google Docs account.

Cloud Computing for Small Businesses: An Introduction – We try to help small business owners understand what cloud computing is, and how it can help them and how they should consider getting started in the cloud.

Emailing Documents Directly into OfficeDrop – Yes, the title says it all – here is how you email documents directly into OfficeDrop. [username]@myofficedrop.com… it’s that simple, but you probably ought to read the blog post to make sure you’ve authorized email addresses to send to your account.

OfficeDrop Scans the Book The Macintosh Way – This is when OfficeDrop digitized Guy Kawasaki’s book, The Macintosh Way.

Marketing Officer to Speak at Customer Development Conference

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

On Tuesday, October 5th, Healy Jones – OfficeDrop’s Vice President of Marketing, will be speaking at the “Customer Development: The Second Decade — with Steve Blank’s co-author Bob Dorf.” The event will start at 6 PM and will be hosted at Microsoft’s NERD Center, One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA.

The event is free (sponsored by General Catalyst, a local venture capital firm.) To register for the customer development event click here.

More about the conference: At Customer Development: The Second Decade, a FutureM event organized by General Catalyst Partners and FastIgnite, Bob Dorf will provide an exclusive peek “under the covers” at some of the many new rules and advancements that Steve, Bob and the ecosystem of thousands of entrepreneur, marketer and investor practitioners have developed over the past several years. The event will feature a keynote by Bob, guest appearances by entrepreneurs and executives who have successfully applied customer development in their businesses and a discussion led by General Catalyst Executive in Residence and FastIgnite CEO Simeon Simeonov.

The main speaker will be Bob Dorf

The March 1999 Fortune magazine raved about The One to One Fieldbook, which Bob Dorf co-authored, saying, “if your company is launching a customer-focused strategy…it sets the agenda.” Bob has advised more than a score of startups on customer development, including Steve Blank’s startup, Epiphany, as well as Broadvision, and Markettools, among others. Entrepreneurial from the age of 12, he personally founded six substantial startups, including—as he puts it—“two homeruns, two base hits, and two solid tax losses.”  Dorf+Stanton Communications, founded at age 22 in his living room, grew from a staff of two—Bob and a St. Bernard—to more than 150, when Bob sold it in 1989. Dorf lives in Stamford with his wife Fran, a serial published novelist. An avid bicyclist and skier, Bob’s proudest startup by far is daughter Rachel, a psychologist who recently made him a grandpa.

Simeon Simeonov, a well known Boston-are CEO/VC, will be the moderator

A parallel entrepreneur and investor, Sim has co-founded several companies, most recently Better Advertising & Thing Labs, and has played a key role in dozens of v1.0s, financings and exits. Through a partnership between FastIgnite and General Catalyst Partners, Sim helps entrepreneurs with big ideas find Product/Market Fit and happy, paying customers while building a team and raising capital along the way. Previously, Sim was a partner at Polaris Venture Partners and chief architect at Allaire and Macromedia (now Adobe). He blogs at blog.simeonov.com, tweets as @simeons and lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, son and an adopted dog named Tye.

Other Speakers

David Cancel, serial entrepreneur and founder of Compete, Lookery, Ghostery and Performable.

Andy Moss, founder and CEO of ESMZone.

Andy Greenawalt, founder and CEO of Perimeter eSecurity and Continuity.net.

Healy Jones, founder of Startable and VP Marketing at OfficeDrop.

Rob May, founder and CEO of Backupify.

ScanDrop Reveals Most Popular Scanner Brands for “Cloud Scanning”

Friday, May 7th, 2010

If you read our recent blog post, you know that OfficeDrop recently released the free scanning software application, ScanDrop, that lets users scan paper directly to Google Docs. ScanDrop is quick to configure, and OfficeDrop has provided brand-specific configuration options and help pages to get users started.

Here’s where it gets interesting: we have some configuration data on which scanners ScanDrop users are connecting to their Google Docs accounts. When we began the ScanDrop project, we did not think about the fact that it would reveal interesting information on how cloud computing users interacted with their paper documents and scanners – but it has. Fujitsu’s ScanSnap has a clear lead amongst cloud computing users, and HP, Canon and Xerox appear to have clear market share leads over the rest of the competition.

Scanner Brand Configuration Page By Total View Percentage:

1. ScanSnap 31.9%
2. HP Scanjet 22.4%
3. Canon LiDE 15.7%
4. Xerox Documate 13.3%
5. Epson 5.2%
6. Fujitsu Fi 4.8%
7. Visioneer 4.3%
8. Kodak 2.4%

We think this data is an intriguing preview as to which scanners are leading the pack in the race for new scanning trends and technology, and hope that you find it interesting. While we don’t believe that our data represents the overall market for mid- and lower priced scanners, we do think that it is quite possibly show which manufacturers are doing well with cloud computing users.

ScanDrop is a free scanner software, available for download in the Google Apps Marketplace, that connects users’ personal scanners and allows them to scan paper directly to the cloud via Google Docs. ScanDrop works on Windows OS computers and is compatible with ScanSnap and TWAIN scanners.

If you liked this post you may also like “What Time of Day People Scan” and “Most Popular Day of Week for Scanning.”

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