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Archive for the ‘Market Research’ Category

More On Tablets Driving Traffic

Friday, May 18th, 2012

Adobe has some research that highlights how important tablets are becoming for driving web traffic (thanks to Mediapost for a great write up on this.) We are seeing this firsthand with the traffic both to the OfficeDrop website and engagement with the OfficeDrop iPad app.

Tablets are really changing the way people and small businesses interact with the internet. If you don’t yet have a tablet… you should get one!

Some great quotes on how tablets are driving a ton of traffic from the MediaPost article:

“The share of Web site traffic on tablets grew more than 300% in the past year”
Tablet share will reach 10% of all traffic by 2014 (that’s it? I bet it will be more!)
“Within one year of the iPad launch in Q2 2010, tablet visits represented 1% of total Web site visits, reaching 4.3% of total visits one year later, up more than 300%.”
“Tablets generated 4.3% of total Web site visits, compared with smartphones at 6.1%, in Q1 2012″

Posted in android, iPad, iphone, Market Research, OfficeDrop | No Comments »

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 »

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 »

Gartner on Cloud Computing

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Gartner is predicting that everyone has a “personal cloud” by 2014. That’s pretty soon, but the idea is very interesting. At OfficeDrop, we see a huge drive toward small businesses using the cloud more and more, and agree with a few of the key themes from Gartner’s thesis (the following are quotes from the piece, followed by our commentary):

Megatrend No. 1: Consumerization — You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: We agree, and are trying to design an app for small businesses that plays off of the styles, experience and friendliness that consumers find with cloud applications. With the power of a business tool.
Megatrend No. 3: “App-ification” — From Applications to Apps: Yup, OfficeDrop is on it with our slew of apps, and more are on the way, like the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF app and our Android scanner app
Megatrend No. 5: The Mobility Shift — Wherever and Whenever You Want: Since most of our usage is now mobile we’ll have to agree!!

Posted in cloud computing, Customer Satisfaction, iPad, iphone, Market Research, mobile, OfficeDrop | 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 »

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 »

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 Co-Founder Anand Rajaram on Site Conversion

Friday, October 15th, 2010

anand-rajaram-mugshot OfficeDrop’s co-founder, Anand Rajaram, has recently written a post on tests we used here at OfficeDrop during our recent site redesign to optimize our conversion rate. The post is found on Performable’s blog here: Optimizing Conversion Rates with Simple Tests.

When we remodeled our site, we took advantage of a large number of online tests to make the site experience better. Anand set up and ran some pretty cutting edge tests that helped us understand what our visitors were looking for, how they interacted with the site and where they got confused/lost the message/didn’t like the navigation. The post I’ve linked to above is the first in a series that he is going to write on how we did this.

Anand mentions a few pretty cool, cutting edge testing tools that we used, including UserTesting, Feedback Army, and FiveSecondTest.

Special thanks to the folks over at Performable for giving us the opportunity to post on their blog. They are a local, Cambridge MA company focused on helping startups turn website visitors into customers, and are a great contributor to the startup scene here in the Boston area.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Market Research, Marketing, Press coverage | No Comments »

OfficeDrop: All About the Cloud

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

At OfficeDrop, we’ve noticed more and more visitors coming to our site who’ve searched for the word “cloud.” But since the cloud has so many meanings to so many people, we’d thought we’d explain how we see small businesses taking advantage of the power of cloud computing to get more out of their paper and digital documents. Our understanding of how businesses use the cloud is rapidly evolving as we grow!

Connecting Cloud Services

More and more, we are seeing the benefits of the cloud in terms of connecting data to other services. Paper no longer has to be stuck in a silo’ed document management service, but can instead be accessed and shared with other software via a cloud filing cabinet. Data can be pushed from one place into another to take advantage of unique technologies – like Evernote’s amazing mobile clients or FreshBooks’ unique invoicing software. (OfficeDrop has recently released an API to allow other software developers to build off of our document scanning service and digital filing system/digital office.) Cloud content management makes this all possible.

Why Cloud Computing Is Great for Small Businesses

Cloud computing is great for small businesses for a number of reasons. As we mentioned in our blog post, “An Introduction to Cloud Computing for Small Business Owners:”

“Cloud computing is a platform for accessing and utilizing your businesses IT via the internet. This means nearly all of your IT resources – your servers, data storage, software/ programs – are hosted on the internet. It used to be that all of your computing would have to be done by your own servers, hardwired to your business. Now that the internet is around, your servers don’t have to be hardwired, and you don’t even need to have your own. Instead, you can rent server space from anywhere in the country from people like Amazon, who have already paid the overhead. Utilizing this system with SaaS, which does the same thing with software, one could theoretically run an entire business from various cyber cafés (if those still exist) without purchasing any of their own personal hardware or software at all.”

We Are Still Learning About the Cloud – From Our Customers!

OfficeDrop continues to learn more and more about how small business owners want to interact with the cloud (and their data!) When we first founded the company 3 years ago (wow, that’s a long time) we thought that web browsers would be the favorite way for users to access their data. But we were wrong. With the success of our downloadable apps, we’ve noticed something pretty amazing: Business owners like to use applications to visit the cloud, not browsers.

Beyond the Cloud Filing Cabinet and OfficeDrop’s Cloud App Strategy

As our cloud scanning software app, ScanDrop, continues to take off and since our iPad “paper to go” app was in the top 10 business ipad applications in itunes, we’ve realized that apps are a great way to interact with the cloud.

OfficeDrop Free App Downloads

And by “realized” we mean that our customers made it clear that they like apps!

Our CEO, Prasad, has been busy training some of our web developers in desktop programming, and our CTO, Vik, has dusted off his Objective-C skills for our Mac versions.

We will have a new way to interact with our cloud digital filing service from the desktop soon for Windows users. And Mac users will soon be able to scan to the cloud just like their PC friends.

We are also busy working on creating workflow specific desktop/cloud solutions for paper intensive industries, starting with accountants and bookkeepers. We just did the first demonstration of our new bookkeeping software, which was very well received, and hope to enroll beta users toward the end of the month. This software will connect the popular QuickBooks software with paper in a number of powerful ways: from the scanner, desktop and cloud. Let us know if you are interested in trying this service!

We are having a ton of fun here at OfficeDrop, helping business owners harness the power of cloud computing. Of course, we haven’t forgotten the importance of actually speaking with customers. Give us a call at 888-674-6493 if you ever want to chat about getting your paper and filing cabinets into the cloud!

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Management, Evernote Document Management, Freshbooks Document Management, iPad, Market Research, OfficeDrop, Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions, partnerships, Product Updates, scandrop, Small Business | 2 Comments »

Archive for the ‘Market Research’ Category

More On Tablets Driving Traffic

Android From a Mobile Product Manager’s Perspective

OfficeDrop Co-Founder Anand Rajaram on Site Conversion

OfficeDrop’s Online Cloud Storage and Document Management Blog

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