Archive for the ‘iPad’ Category

How I Manage It: Scott Orn: VC & Social Impact Co-Founder

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
scott orn

Scott Orn

He’s Principal at venture capital firm Lighthouse Capital by day. Co-founder of the social impact organization Ben’s Friends by night. How does Scott Orn manage it all?

Well, OfficeDrop can’t take all the credit for Scott’s rockstar status, but we can take partial credit for his ultra-organized workflow.

“Juggling Ben’s Friends around our day jobs is a huge challenge, but keeping paper documents stored in the cloud where they can be easily searched and shared with others is an important part of staying organized,” said Scott.

Here are a few examples of how he uses OfficeDrop.

VCs travel. A lot. Scott likes using OfficeDrop’s iPhone app while he’s on the road to help manage his expenses. OfficeDrop for iPhone turns your phone’s camera into a scanner to the cloud. You can capture documents and tag, file and search them within OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet.

“It’s really simple to take a photo of the receipts I accumulate on a business trip and file them directly into my expenses folder for the month,” said Scott. “I can share the folder with anyone who needs access to it, like our finance and administration teams. It saves a lot of time at the end of the month when I scrambling to get expenses filed and I never have to worry about expenses falling through the cracks and not getting reimbursed.”

And, remember, this VC also moonlights as a social impact leader. He’s the co-founder of Ben’s Friends, an organization that builds communities for patients that have rare diseases.

“Many people with rare diseases don’t have a network of folks who understand exactly what they’re going through,” said Scott. “We started Ben’s Friends to serve people who have no other options. It’s amazing how much love and support people get through our communities. It’s a life changing group to be a part of – for me and the patients. ”

Scott processes the hundreds of donations Ben’s Friends receives throughout the year, along with getting donors the appropriate receipts and perks. Donors are constantly mailing checks – which is a good thing! – but managing it all can be overwhelming.

“Since our group is a lean, 100 percent volunteer-run organization, it’s critical we handle the donations as they come in,” said Scott. “I can’t tell you how important it’s been for me to just search my OfficeDrop account on my iPad so I can find out things like how many donations came in during the month of November, who sent in the donations and what perks we need to send them. These are the kinds of things you don’t remember off the top of your head, but can be crucial when you need a quick answer.”

Cheers, Scott! We’re proud to have you among the OfficeDrop elite! To learn more about Scott’s network of patient support groups, Ben’s Friends, visit: www.bensfriends.org.

iPhone Scanning

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

Scanning from your iPhone is very easy with the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF scanner app!

Here is a quick video that explains how to take your very first scan with your iPhone.

iPhone Scanner App Video – How to Scan with Your iPhone Using OfficeDrop

With OfficeDrop’s iPhone app, users can snap a photo of a paper document and scan it directly to the cloud.  Once an item is scanned, users can browse the document, apply labels, search text using OfficeDrop’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, share and access documents from anywhere with OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet.  Also available for iPad and Android, OfficeDrop now provides service to a full portfolio of mobile devices for users.  The app can now be downloaded through iTunes Store.

Use the OfficeDrop iPhone app to capture and share documents on the road.  For example, an insurance agent responding to accident claims in the field can immediately take pictures of registrations, drivers’ licenses and contracts and have them upload as text searchable PDF documents within minutes.  The agent can also take pictures of damages as well as the scene of the accident and submit those photos to folders for his team at the office to access immediately.  This scenario works both ways, as the agent has the option to access their entire OfficeDrop filing cabinet on the road with their iPhone by uploading files from their computer onto their OfficeDrop account. With OfficeDrop’s search on the iPhone, any file is easy to find and available in an instant from anywhere.

Updated iPhone App

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

The OfficeDrop iPhone app was recently updated; it fixes a few bugs and is more iOS 5 compliant. You can download the updated app from iTunes here.

If you are using the iPhone app for your small business we want to know! We are actively looking for customer case studies. Reporters are often asking us for customer references, and we’ve succeeded in getting our clients mentioned in publications like the New York Times! Let us know if you like the app and we’ll find a way to feature your business. Leave a comment below and we’ll be in touch.

OfficeDrop iPad App Review

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

Brooks, the document scanning and going paperless expert over at DocumentSnap, recently reviewed OfficeDrop’s iPad app. He gave the app a solid run through, pointed out a few items he’d like improved and did a great job taking screenshots of the various OfficeDrop iPad app features in action. You can read the review, called “Exploring the OfficeDrop iPad App” here.

OfficeDrop iPad App Review Highlights

The review starts off by talking about how you get your documents into the iPad app – and he mentions not only the scanning feature, but also using advanced features like sending and opening email attachments in the app and more. Finally, he gets into the search and organizing features that have made OfficeDrop popular.

News on OfficeDrop’s growth

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Today OfficeDrop published a press release talking about our tremendous growth recently. 2011 is on track to be a banner year for us, and we are truly grateful to our customers for making this happen!

The press release:

OfficeDrop Announces 9x Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth

OfficeDrop CEO: “Now we’re cookin’ with gas!”

Cambridge, MA — November 3, 2011 — This ain’t your momma’s momentum release. OfficeDrop’s been growing like gangbusters since the switch from a mail-in scanning service to a scan-your-own-way-to-the-cloud app powerhouse last year. We’re talking 50 percent month-over-month user growth for the past quarter! Not to mention being on track for 9x revenue growth in 2011 vs 2010.

“But, how’d they do it,” you ask?

Let’s kick it back to the beginning. It all started with this thing called the interwebz. And it was good. Field of Dreams style they built it and people came. Our CEO Prasad Thammineni said, “Why don’t small businesses store, search, and share their paper documents on this interwebz? In the cloud. Dig it!”

[Just kidding.] Here’s the real deal:

A Major Shift in Strategy

OfficeDrop used to be a mail-in scanning service. Mail us your paper and we’ll scan it for you. Then the definition of a small business “office” changed altogether. With smartphones and tablets, the office became omnipresent. Like “Friday, Friday” was earlier this year (shout out to our co-founder, Anand Rajaram, who loves Rebecca Black a little too much).

OfficeDrop quickly adapted to the way people were working by building scanner apps for iPad, Android phones and iPhones this year. We redefined the industry by letting people have a scanner in their pocket, everywhere they go.

But we didn’t hate on the office scanner. ScanDrop, our desktop scanner app for Windows and Mac, has been connecting customers to our digital filing cabinet, OfficeDrop Online and other popular cloud services they access most, like Gmail, Google Docs, Evernote and Dropbox. Also we provide document management for the popular FreshBooks invoicing software. It’s super easy. That’s how we roll.

Here’s how our growth stacks up for those of you “numbers people” out there:

  • In 2011, we’ve added 50,000 new customers to our digital filing cabinet…
  • Plus, 40,000 new installs of our ScanDrop desktop scanning app
  • Mobile apps account for 90 percent of our daily new users (wowza!)

Cracking the Small Business Market

“We found that small businesses tend to purchase from companies they trust most,” said our super-smart aforementioned CEO, Thammineni. “Not just the Staples-type stores, but also companies like Nuance, whose PaperPort offering is shipped along with millions of scanners throughout the world. So we started partnering up with these trusted companies to bring their software to the cloud, and co-branding our offerings with theirs.”

Work with awesome companies that small businesses trust, but need to move to the cloud. That’s been our strategy this year in a nutshell. [Strategy: “Help, get me out of this nutshell!” Ugh, sorry. That Austin Powers reference was pretty dated. We need to get out more.]But seriously. Our partners find that we’re able to scale really quickly to meet the scanning, search, sharing and storage demands of millions of users, and bring traditionally very “offline” types of software to the cloud. In English – we can do this stuff really fast and really well.

So, that’s our story. We’re sticking to it. Here’s to another killer year.

About OfficeDrop

OfficeDrop makes it easy for small businesses to scan paper to the cloud and access documents from anywhere, at any time, from any device. OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet lets users sort, search and share documents– giving paper new life and making documents collaborative. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, OfficeDrop was founded in 2007. For more information, visit www.officedrop.com.

Contact:
Erica Orthmann or Kevin Leahy for OfficeDrop
(617) 945-1915
officedrop(at)launchsquad(dot)com

Nominate OfficeDrop for Mashable’s Most Useful Tablet App

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

We’ve had tremendous success with our iPad paper to go app – and we’d love it if you helped us get some industry recognition!

Please nominate OfficeDrop for Most Useful Tablet App in the Mashable Awards. Click here to nominate OfficeDrop!

 most useful tablet app

iOS Feature – Open Email Attachments in OfficeDrop

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

The newest OfficeDrop iPhone and iPad applications are more than just really great iPhone PDF readers. One of the greatest new features is the ability to open an email attachment directly in OfficeDrop using your iOS device.

To do this, once you’ve opened the attachment in your iPhone or iPad’s email, click the “Open in OfficeDrop” button – or if that does not appear, hit the little box with the arrow in the top right corner to find the open in OfficeDrop option. (This is the little button that looks like the forward email button.)

Once you’ve opened the document in OfficeDrop, you’ll have the ability to upload it into a specific OfficeDrop folder (and add labels) or set a reminder or rename the file.

This makes organizing attachments on the go even easier! Try it out today.

iPad App: Ask and You Shall Receive!

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

A few months back, we wrote in TechCrunch about how we’re frienemies with a lot of cloud services companies, because they make our apps more useful to our customers. Sure, they could be considered competitors, but we’re all about trying to make our product more functional for users.

Updated OfficeDrop iPad App

That’s why we’re announcing an update to the OfficeDrop iPad app we relaunched just a few weeks ago. A lot of our customers do photo editing on the iPad, which a few weeks back we didn’t support. By popular demand, now we do! PhotoAppLink is an awesome new open source project that does what it’s aptly named to do: link a bunch of photo apps together. For us, this means that we can connect to other super high functioning photo editing apps effective immediately! If you’re an OfficeDrop iPad user, check out all of the apps that you can now link to your account to get a seriously excellent scanning and editing experience. Snap and GyroCropper are a few of our faves for writing notes on your pictures and cropping them, respectively. So if you don’t have it, get the OfficeDrop iPad App in iTunes now!

Another extra-requested feature was support for AirPrint, or Apple’s way to print wirelessly from your iPad. We’re like that extra creepy Genie in Big (Zoltar, in case you were wondering what his name was): your wish is our command. There are a few apps we like that help AirPrint enable any printer out there. Check out FingerPrint and Printopia, which we gave a go last week.

We also made a few cosmetic fixes to make our app look and feel more like the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF app that so many of you love. If you don’t have it, check it out — it’s free!

 

 

OfficeDrop’s iPad App Reviewed by a Customer

Monday, October 10th, 2011

You may remember when William Higgins wrote a piece on OfficeDrop’s ScanDrop software called “Scanning Documents to the Cloud with OfficeDrop.”

Well, he’s taken the time to write up a piece on our improved iPad application!

If you recall, William is a long time OfficeDrop customer who has been featured on the OfficeDrop testimonials page. He is an ECM technologist for a major bank, which means he knows a lot about managing content online.

He goes through the different organizational tools that are available on OfficeDrop iPad application, then talks about uploading and creating files using the iPad app.

Read how to manage documents in the cloud using OfficeDrop’s iPad application here!

OfficeDrop on Makeuseof and More

Friday, September 30th, 2011

 align=OfficeDrop had  great write up on Makeuseof called “How To Use Your iPad / iPhone Camera To Scan Documents To PDF [iPhone & iPad 2]” by Steve Campbell. The article is almost a great case study and goes into detail on how the OfficeDrop iPad app can be used at a conference to scan and store paper.

Here is a quote from the article:

“Picture this. You have a really important meeting at work today, one that you’ve been up most of the night preparing for, creating documents, spreadsheets, and what not. You’ve been tasked with making digital copies of your physical notes to send to your colleagues to help prep them for this meeting, which starts in about two hours. If you were in a hurry and could only bring one thing to this meeting, what would it be?

If it was me, it would be my iPad. As for the documents I had to scan, well, that’s all been taken care of, because I used an iPad app that allowed me to take pictures of each of my documents and turn them into shiny new digital PDFs that I can organize and share with my colleagues at the click of a button. Sound convenient? Prepare to never need to keep a piece of paper ever again.”

Read How MakeUseOf uses OfficeDrop’s iPad 2 App to Scan

Here is some other recent press that we’ve gotten on our iPad app:


September 20, 2011

OfficeDrop Adds iPad Scanning Support

The application also supports taking, cropping and rotating photos that can be sent directly to OfficeDrop, useful for capturing handwritten notes, receipts and business cards on the go. Read About Using OfficeDrop’s iPad App to Scan


September 16, 2011

iPad Document Scanner: OfficeDrop

This free scanner app allows to store files up to 1GB. It is very easy to scan files to PDF using OfficeDrop. Read The Review of OfficeDrop’s iPad 2 Scanner App

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