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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.”

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.

Posted in discussions, Entrepreneurship, OfficeDrop, Press coverage | No Comments »

Thanks!

Monday, March 12th, 2012

Thank you to everyone who attended the OfficeDrop “David vs. Goliath” talk at SXSW this weekend. When we have a copy of the podcast we’ll be sure to link to it from the blog.

Posted in Entrepreneurship | 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 »

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

Posted in cloud computing, Customer Satisfaction, Digital Office, discussions, Document Management, Entrepreneurship, Freshbooks Document Management, Market Research, OfficeDrop, partnerships, Press coverage, Product Features, Small Business | No Comments »

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!

Posted in discussions, Entrepreneurship | No Comments »

Prasad Thammineni Post on Managing Your Company From Home

Monday, September 5th, 2011

Our fearless CEO, Prasad Thammineni, has another great post on tech tools to help you manage your business from home on SmallBizTrends. Why does this matter? Well, he’s recently had a child and has been managing the office from his home office recently!

I don’t think that keeping things going from home would have even been possible a few years ago before the recent technology revolution. Communication tools and collaboration tools are a lot more powerful and affordable than they’ve ever been. Prasad touches on some of the ones we use aggressively here at OfficeDrop to keep things going smoothly.

Posted in cloud computing, Entrepreneurship, Home Office, Press coverage, Small Business | No Comments »

Android From a Mobile Product Manager’s Perspective

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

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!)

Posted in discussions, Entrepreneurship, Market Research, mobile, OfficeDrop, Press coverage, scanning software | No Comments »

OfficeDrop CEO Posts on TechCrunch

Monday, May 16th, 2011

competiting_in_the_cloud OfficeDrop 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!

Posted in cloud computing, Digital Office, discussions, Entrepreneurship, OfficeDrop, partnerships, Press coverage | No Comments »

Small Business Marketing Tip

Friday, February 25th, 2011

Healy Jones, head of marketing at OfficeDrop, has just published an online marketing tip at DIYMarketers.com.

The Tip is on a very common online ad copy that marketers forget to optimize.

marketing mistake

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Small Business | 1 Comment »

Pixability CEO on Business Myths

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

Bettina Hein, CEO of Boston area Pixability, was just quoted on CNN in a piece on Business Myths. Pixability was OfficeDrop’s collaborator on the popular Guy Kawasaki “The Macintosh Way” book scanning video:

For the CNN piece, Bettina says:

Despite regular team meetings, Bettina Hein, CEO of Pixability, a Cambridge, Mass., company that helps customers market themselves on video, was the last to find out that an instructional video added to the company’s site had saved her team 135 hours of customer-service time, worth $8,000 to $10,000 a month. No one thought to mention it to her. “Only in a casual conversation did it emerge,” she says. She’s now rushing to create 60 more. Had she known, she would have launched the new ones sooner and saved even more money.

Check out the rest of the good advice in the CNN article here: http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/18/smallbusiness/business_myths.fortune/index.htm

Posted in document scanning service, eBook, Entrepreneurship | No Comments »