Checkout the recent article on VentureBeat by me, Healy Jones – marketing person here at OfficeDrop. I discuss the successful pricing change we had last year.
Checkout the recent article on VentureBeat by me, Healy Jones – marketing person here at OfficeDrop. I discuss the successful pricing change we had last year.
OfficeDrop’s customer, Unique Cleaning Services, was interviewed by the New York Times Small Business Section about how they use OfficeDrop to decrease the their company’s dependence on paper.
Willie "Toney" Sellers, Jr., President, Unique Cleaning Services
Willie “Toney” Sellers, Jr., President of Unique Cleaning (and Wayne Goodman, his CFO) spoke with David Freedman of the Times. With an operation distributed around 13 states and Puerto Rico, Unique Cleaning needed help managing all the paper generated from employee travel, customer invoices and vendor paperwork. Here is part of the article; click the link below to see the full piece:
Mr. Sellers operates Unique Cleaning Service, a janitorial and maintenance firm based in Marietta, Ga. With about 50 employees servicing nearly 200 commercial and government client sites spread across 13 southern states and Puerto Rico, one of the company’s largest non-salary costs is travel, especially for the firm’s four constantly on-the-road quality-control inspectors. “We were having a lot of trouble tracking and finding receipts,” said Mr. Sellers. “If the I.R.S. challenged us, we’d be spending a lot of time digging through papers.”
The company first looked into buying scanners and special software designed to make it easy to organize scanned receipts, like the NeatReceipts offerings you may have seen at airports. But while that sort of solution seems appealing for a modest flow of paper receipts, Mr. Sellers feared it would be insufficient for the torrent his employees were generating. He pictured employees sitting around for hours feeding receipts into scanners and leaving the company with a mess of online documents.
Turns out, though, you can outsource your paper problems. A company called OfficeDrop lets you ship your boxes of paper receipts and other documents to them, and they’ll scan the mess and make it all available online as organized, searchable documents. Unique Cleaners now uses OfficeDrop for all of its receipts, as well as for all of its customer and vendor paperwork. “We try to get everyone to deal with us by e-mail, but not everyone is set up that way,” Mr. Sellers said. In fact, even when orders, invoices and other transactions do come via e-mail, the company forwards them to OfficeDrop, so it can add them to the scanned documents to provide a single, integrated, organized view of all documents. Mr. Sellers doesn’t even want the papers back for archival storage — he just has OfficeDrop shred them.
Unique Cleaning pays OfficeDrop about $100 a month, and Mr. Sellers figures he’s freed up his office’s administrative assistant from having to spend a chunk of her day dealing with paper, making it a good deal in his eyes for that reason alone. The bigger payoff might actually come from avoiding potential audit, order and invoice problems related to misplaced paper, but it can be hard to judge what cost to assign to that risk. Perhaps it’s enough to say that if you’re concerned about it, you probably should do something about it.
CAMBRIDGE, MA – April 1, 2011 - Today, paper-haters everywhere celebrated as OfficeDrop raised $1 million in funding from White Owl Capital. Leaving analysts and pundits stunned, OfficeDrop declined a $6 billion offer from Google and opted to “keep it real” by taking the $1 million and running.
Google offered to pay OfficeDrop $6 billion in $1 and $5 bills, which wasn’t OK with CEO Prasad Thammineni.
“As tempting as it might seem to ‘make it rain’ with $1s and $5s all over Cambridge, that much paper goes against everything we stand for as a company,” said Thammineni.
OfficeDrop will use the $1 million to scan in paper money that they receive from their customers through their mail-in scanning service. Customers will simply mail cash to OfficeDrop’s headquarters, and the company will convert the cash to “OfficeDrop bucks” which can be redeemed in the cloud.
“Call it an IOU for the cloud-based business,” said Thammineni. “Every cent’s accounted for. They’re as good as cash.”
April Fool’s. But we really did raise $1 million from White Owl. For the real story, check out this release on our website.
ScanDrop Mac was recently mentioned in a large Brazilian technology blog called BR-Mac. While we are not all that great at Portuguese, we are pretty sure that it’s a positive review of our Mac scanner software!
Google Translate gives us a few of the following tidbits from the piece:
“The Scandrop is smart enough to offer at the time of scanning, access to resources useful storage medium selected – for example, if Evernote is selected, you can choose to fill tags and a note about the content, enabling better find it in subsequent searches. However, if you are storing a local disk, or the Dropbox will only be able to choose the file name and destination folder, and is satisfied
But it’s time to really scan every document that shines Scandrop, reaching a usability feature I always appreciate: he’s not in the path.
After pressing the scan button in the application, it displays a simplified interface for this operation, with few options and other visible and hidden pre-selected default values that I fully comply.
…
I use ScanDrop and am enjoying it…”
OK, so Google translate may not be giving our Mac ScanDrop the full glory of this piece, so if you read Portuguese click here to see the rest of the piece on ScanDrop!
And you can get ScanDrop Mac from the Mac App Store.
Tuaw, the popular “unofficial Apple blog” recently reviewed OfficeDrop’s ScanDrop for Mac scanning software – and they liked it!
ScanDrop Mac Review in Tuaw
The author, Chris White, says that “One of the tools I’ve found invaluable for speeding up the scan and filing process is ScanDrop, as it allows me to scan a document and do basic image editing. I can also send a PDF to Evernote with a name, tags, and the appropriate Notebook setup without having to juggle files between multiple applications.” He also notes that ScanDrop can scan documents to Google Docs, Dropbox and your Mac’s local drive.
We are really happy that Tuaw is using our Mac scanner software! Check out the article ScanDrop Comes to Mac!
And you can get Mac ScanDrop in the Mac App Store.
The new Mac ScanDrop version 1.0.3 has been mentioned in a couple of great places recently.
A few minor steps is all it takes to upload an electronic document to cloud storage services to backup, store, synchronize and share your documents. It gets a little tedious when you have a physical document in your hands and you want an electronic copy that’s available on the web and on all of your devices. If you’re a Mac user, ScanDrop can simplify this process by connecting your scanner directly to cloud storage, including Google Docs, Dropbox, and Evernote. Seamlessly scan, preview, rotate, reorder, crop and upload PDFs to your online account.
Lifehacking.nl on ScanDrop Mac:(I’m using Google Translate here; don’t know Dutch all that well!!)
The software works fine after the first test. He instantly recognizes my scanner and the correct size paper. A scanned document can I have some editing (crop rotation) and upload directly to a selected Evernote notebook or a specific folder in my Google Docs… With scan I now drop the possibility of directly to Evernote to scan and send.
Hopefully more great bloggers will pick up on how easy ScanDrop Mac makes it to get files into the cloud!
OfficeDrop was just featured in Costco Connection, the magazine that goes to all of Costco’s membership. OfficeDrop’s kitchen is fueled by Costco, everything from massive bags of peanuts and Hershey Kisses to some sort of tomato soup that Prasad says is quite good.
Here is the article: http://www.costcoconnection.com/connection/201102?pg=24#pg24
We were interviewed by Costco about our real estate tactic to sublease one of the sides of our building to another internet company. OfficeDrop we moved last Feb into a large space in Cambridge, and have our secure document scanning room, a secure document storage room and a separate “corporate” area where the executives and customer service sit. On the other side of our office we have a few extra offices (which have no access to the secure document storage or processing areas – if you have security questions please visit our document scanning and document management security page; only authorized personnel have access to customer documents) and we have subleased one of these to another local startup, Yamli. The Costco piece talks about tips for saving money by sharing space.
OfficeDrop is offering a Mac version of the ScanDrop Scanner Software, for a limited time, for free to Lifehacker readers. You can read Lifehacker’s review of ScanDrop for Mac here.
ScanDrop Scanner Software for the Mac allows Mac users to connect their scanners to the cloud and upload paper to popular cloud storage solutions like Google Docs, Evernote and OfficeDrop’s own cloud filing system.
We intend to release ScanDrop for the Mac in the new Mac App Store soon as a paid app, so this is a chance to get the app for free for a limited time!
OfficeDrop has been on a roll recently, being mentioned in a few great publications! Here are the highlights:
David Einstein, business and technology reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, recommends OfficeDrop as a way to digitize paper documents for record keeping:
Q: I have hundreds of paper documents that I would like to digitize. I don’t need to be able to edit the documents. I’m just interested in record-keeping. Can you recommend a scanning service?
A: You have several options. You can take your documents to Staples and let them do the scanning at a rate of 25 cents per page. That works out to $125 for 500 pages. Or, you could send the documents to a company like OfficeDrop (officedrop.com)…
Scroll down to the last question on the page!
The final part of the New York Time’s three piece case study on OfficeDrop’s security/background checking policy came out on December 8th. This piece was also briefly featured on the Time’s home page!
The case study we published last week chronicled the efforts of OfficeDrop, a start-up that scans sensitive documents for its clients and therefore must ensure that employees are trustworthy.
The article recounted how Prasad Thammineni, OfficeDrop’s chief executive, struggled at first to find the right background-check company and then faced a daunting variety of checks to choose among…
Let’s hope that the rest of December is as good for press coverage as the first couple of weeks have been!
OfficeDrop was featured on BusinessInsider and in the San Francisco Chronicle as one of “The 7 Best Web-Based Options For Managing Your Business Documents!”
Cloud-based file storage services alleviate these problems for little to no cost and offer a ton of storage. The big names like Dropbox and Google Docs are great options, but there are a few startups like OfficeDrop and Syncplicity that have some unique features the big boys don’t have.
OfficeDrop on Business Insider
Copyright © 2010 Pixily. All rights reserved.
