Document Management Blog

Updated iPhone App

November 29th, 2011 by Healy Jones

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.

Posted in iPad, iphone | No Comments »

OfficeDrop in the Boston Business Journal

November 15th, 2011 by Healy Jones

Kyle Alspach had a nice post today on OfficeDrop in the Boston Business Journal and the growth that we are making. It’s great to see important local reporters taking an interest in how our startup is going.

Kyle quotes our CEO, and the article says:

“OfficeDrop has since added apps for the iPad and Android, and allows easy storage and retrieval of the documents in the cloud, he said.

The company, which targets small businesses that must deal with large amounts of paper documents, had started to see traction about a year ago for the service, which has free and paid components, Thammineni said. But a partnership with Burlington’s Nuance to include the OfficeDrop product with printers and scanners has led the company to gain 60,000 registered users, up from 7,000 at the end of 2010, he said.”

Hopefully we can continue this strong growth! We are very excited about the engagement we’ve seen with our product recently and want to thank all of our customers for supporting us during this high growth phase of our company’s life cycle.

Posted in OfficeDrop, Press coverage | No Comments »

Updated OfficeDrop Android App

November 12th, 2011 by Healy Jones

OfficeDrop Android Update Means Faster Speeds, Better Functionality

OfficeDrop’s Android app just got the shot in the arm that users were looking for. The app now boasts faster speeds, which enable quick sharing, searching and sorting of scans from mobile devices. The additional speed, a convenient desktop shortcut, and the ability to search your documents from outside of the app represent an improved cloud computing experience for OfficeDrop users.

How does it work? OfficeDrop’s Android update uses your device’s SD card to instantly cache documents once scanned, making the app faster and more responsive for users. Thumbnails are now stored locally and in the cloud, which means no more waiting for thumbnail images to load before you can start searching, sharing and otherwise working with your docs.

“The reason OfficeDrop users love our Android app is that it simplifies their lives. It keeps their documents constantly at their fingertips and helps them stay ever-connected to the cloud,” explained OfficeDrop CEO and Co-Founder, Prasad Thammineni. “Users wanted faster document access, and that’s exactly what this update delivers. Less waiting and fewer steps means more time is spent being productive.”

Another new feature that speeds up the document management process is the option to search for OfficeDrop documents directly from Android’s Google search bar. Just click the search bar and choose the OfficeDrop icon to instantly find the item you need.

OfficeDrop’s developers understand that it can be a pain to scroll through all of your apps every time you want to open OfficeDrop on your Android. The new update automatically creates a shortcut to OfficeDrop on your home screen, giving you easy access to the files that are important to you.

Try the OfficeDrop Android scanner app today!

Get the app here!

Posted in android, cloud computing, Product, Product Announcements, Product Features, Product Updates | No Comments »

OfficeDrop is a CloudBeat 2011 Finalist!

November 10th, 2011 by Healy Jones

Huge news! OfficeDrop is a CloudBeat 2011 Innovation Showdown finalist! We are one of 10 companies picked to present for the top spot at this year’s upcoming CloudBeat conference in Redwood City November 30th to December 1st! Wow!

You can learn more about the CloudBeat conference and competition and finalists here.

We are really excited about being a finalist because of the large number of companies who entered the competition and the tough criteria upon which they were judged -

Freshness of idea
Potential to disrupt an industry
The success they can potentially drive for their customers

Wish us luck as we travel to California to compete!

Posted in Awards, OfficeDrop | No Comments »

OfficeDrop iPad App Review

November 9th, 2011 by Healy Jones

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.

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Customer Satisfaction, Digital Office, iPad, iphone, OCR Scanning, OfficeDrop, Testimonials | No Comments »

News on OfficeDrop’s growth

November 3rd, 2011 by Healy Jones

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

Posted in cloud computing, iPad, iphone, Marketing, OfficeDrop | No Comments »

Nominate OfficeDrop for Mashable’s Most Useful Tablet App

November 2nd, 2011 by Healy Jones

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!

Posted in iPad | No Comments »

iOS Feature – Open Email Attachments in OfficeDrop

October 26th, 2011 by Healy Jones

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.

Posted in cloud computing, iPad, iphone, OfficeDrop | 1 Comment »

The Cloud Makes All Services Frenemies

October 18th, 2011 by Healy Jones

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 »

iPad App: Ask and You Shall Receive!

October 13th, 2011 by Healy Jones

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!

Posted in Customer Satisfaction, Digital Office, iPad, iphone, mobile | No Comments »