Prasad Thammineni, our CEO, has another post on Small Business Trends. This time the post is about launching products – in particular, launching internet products/services. There has been a lot of talk recently about how a company shouldn’t launch their new stuff, but instead should slow roll it out to the market. At OfficeDrop we’ve had a lot of luck launching products. So Prasad‘s piece is titled “Don’t Be a Launch Hater.”
He talks about how you can re-launch if you fail the first time, using our service as an example: “It’s foolish to think that your launch “coming out party” is your one opportunity for press, your one shot at greatness. People make the assumption that the spark from a launch has to be doused with a firehose if a startup decides to adjust its strategy. Nothing could be further from the truth. We launched several years ago as a mail-in scanning service. This year, we introduced apps that let people scan to the cloud themselves.”
Happy Holidays from the team at OfficeDrop! We hope you have a great end to 2011 and wish you happiness in 2012.
We’ll be closed this weekend and Monday the 26th. We will be back in the office on Tuesday the 27th, but will have reduced staff the 27th and 28th, so we apologize if customer service responses are a little more slow than usual.
OfficeDrop and click.to are excited to announce the newest OfficeDrop API integration – click.to to OfficeDrop!
With click.to, you’ll be able to CTRL+C (⌘+C on a Mac) any file on your desktop and send it directly into OfficeDrop’s cloud filing system. It’s super easy, really fast and a great new workflow for the power OfficeDrop users.
Get click.to to OfficeDrop for free by clicking the following link:
click.to OfficeDrop Video
Here is how the integration works:
Select any file and press CTRL+C (⌘+C on a Mac). The OfficeDrop logo will pop up; simply select it and the file is stored directly in the cloud. Users don’t have to fumble with multiple open windows, dragging and dropping, or leaving their current screen.
Special for OfficeDrop Users
OfficeDrop is the first click.to partner to have folder integration. This means that a user can choose an OfficeDrop cloud folder to upload into at the time of clicking! We are really happy that click.to made us the first to have this integration, and we know it’s important since our customers are very aggressive folder users.
There is a little set up required at first to get click.to to choose a folder. First you’ll have to type in the name of the folder that you want to upload into. If that folder already exists click.to will put the document directly into it; otherwise click.to will create the folder for you and put the file into it. We know this is a little bit of an effort the first time you try to pick a folder, but we appreciate the development effort that the click.to team put into creating the folder integration specifically for OfficeDrop. They intend to refine the folder selection UI in the future.
Setting up click.to to OfficeDrop
Here is a quick video that helps you set up the click.to/OfficeDrop integration.
One of OfficeDrop’s most powerful tools is the document search engine that comes with each OfficeDrop account. You can find words, numbers and phrases within your files – fast!
OfficeDrop’s search is a little different than traditional document search that you may be familiar with, because OfficeDrop looks within your files for the search. This includes doing something other services don’t offer – optical character recognition “OCR”.
OCR and Document Search
OCR (optical character recognition) is the software we use to turn a simple scanned image of your paper into a fully text-searchable digital document. Once OCR is employed, applications can recognize individual characters and effectively “read” the document. OCR is the software that makes it possible to text-search your scanned documents.
Document Phrase Search with OfficeDrop
Many of our clients have thousands of files stored in the OfficeDrop system, so narrowing down the search quickly may seem daunting. Thankfully, with document phrase search, finding the right file quickly becomes a lot more manageable.
Here is how phrase search works. Use quotation marks around a series of words to narrow down your search to words that appear in that specific order. So, if you put “invoice number” in quotes in the search box, the OfficeDrop search would first return results with those words next to each other.
Phrase Search
That’s how easy it is! And phrase search works on your mobile devices as well, so you can use it on the go.
Prasad Thammineni, our CEO & cloud computing expert, recently penned a piece for Fast Company that is basically an appeal to Microsoft to bring Windows back to it’s glory days. The article is playfully titled “Windows Get Your Sexxy Back.”
Prasad is basically asking Windows to get in shape and get with the times. The likes of the Mac, tablets, Android, etc are taking off and Windows is slowly becoming less and less important. We see this every day at OfficeDrop as the percent of users accessing their files from a Windows desktop continues to drop and drop…
Prasad asks Microsoft to do the following to win back share in the PC world:
Build an app store
Boot up faster
Integrate with other MSFT brands that are doing well, like xbox
OfficeDrop was briefly mentioned in an article in the Christian Science Monitor about angel financing. Healy Jones (me) was quoted based on our experience raising capital from angel investors. Check out the article here.
Well, OfficeDrop did not win CloudBeat 2011 Innovation Showdown last week in Redwood City, but we did deliver a nice demo and meet some great people.
Congrats to the winner, Zadara Storage, a provider of virtual private storage arrays in the cloud!
You can read about our demo here on VentureBeat; here is what they wrote about our demo, “OfficeDrop also connects headquarters and workers in the field through file sharing, but it doesn’t end with the ability to share and manage users. Its mobile application allows small businesses to create and share files in the field. The company used the example of a cleaning service. At the end of a job, cleaners would need to fill out a proof of completion sheet, and take a picture of their work for the executives back at head quarters. Using the mobile app, workers can scan the completed sheet and take the picture of their cleaned room, which is created into a file and sent to the file share dashboard.”
The awesome folks over at DreamSimplicity, the SaaS Marketplace, sat down with Prasad and me at the recent CloudBeat Conference in Redwood city last week. Here is a video they shot that includes us running through beta products of where the service is going:
OfficeDrop CEO and me (Healy the marketing guy) will be in Redwood City, CA, on the 30th and 1st attending the CloudBeat 2011. OfficeDrop is a finalist in this year’s cloud startup competition. Will you be there – let us know!
Wish us luck with our presentation and demo. We’ll be talking about how Unique Cleaning uses our service, plus showing off the PaperPort Anywhere mobile apps.
OfficeDrop’s Document Management and Document Scanning Service Blog
OfficeDrop, formerly Pixily, helps small businesses and home offices go paperless and manage their paper and digital documents online. OfficeDrop provides an award-winning online digital filing system & scanner software. In this blog, we’ll discuss cool ways customers are using our service to tame their paper problem and get organized. We hope to share tips and tricks we are learning as we help our clients scan, sync, search and share documents. We’ll also highlight new features in our digital filing system, let you know what the press is saying about us and keep you up to speed with the goings-on at OfficeDrop! Paper. Digital. Anywhere.
