Scribd. Scribd. Scribd press. It's Still Very Early, But Scribd Looks Like A Winner. We reported on the launch of Scribd, the “YouTube For Documents” a little over two weeks ago. The site drew a significant amount of traffic at launch. Unlike most startups, though, that traffic didn’t just vaporize after a day or two. 100,000 or so unique visitors come the site daily. 12,000 documents have been uploaded to 8,600 unique accounts (35% anonymous).
The team says the site’s traffic has been about an even split between U.S. and non-U.S. visitors (and about half of the documents are non-English). One prolific member, Builder (Bill Allin), has 113 documents to his account. One of these, “Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy”, was so popular that it got on Digg and was mentioned on Adam Corolla’s morning show. Scribd is an example of a small startup doing many things right. Copyright holders have been complaining, though. Scribd will be releasing some new features to improve the user experience, including adjustable embed sizing, groups, and private documents. Scribd Banks $3.5 Million from Redpoint. Scribd raises $3.7M, amid lots of interest. San-Francisco-based Scribd, the so-called “YouTube for documents,” has attracted a lot of attention — including plenty of suitors from Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms.
So it comes as no surprise that, shortly after launch, it has raised $3.7 million from Redpoint and original seed investor Kinsey Hills Group. Co-founder Trip Alder wouldn’t disclose precise valuation the investors placed on Scribd, but did say the rumored $17.5 million post-money valuation is just about right. The round closed a few weeks ago, but Trip had waited for the legal work to be done before saying anything. Several top firms were interested, and the high valuation resulted from competitive bids for the deal. Pre-launch, the Y-Combinator graduate had tried to raise significant funds, and though Trip had expected that Y-Combinator would connect him to scores of potential investors, he says, this did not happen. Right now, they have limited competition.
Scribd’s iPaper Plan. Scribd, the San Francisco-based startup that was dubbed the “YouTube of Documents,” has finally become worthy of that sobriquet. While I don’t care much about community around documents, I love the concept of the dead simple sharing of documents. And that’s precisely what this 10-person startup that raised close to $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures has done with its new viewer called iPaper. The company has also introduced an API that will make it easy for others publishers to plug Scribd into their systems. More on that later, but first let’s talk about their new iPaper, which CEO & Co-founder Trip Adler showed me over the weekend.
Like the YouTube video player, the iPaper viewer utilizes Adobe’s Flash technology. Adler says that it took the company about six months to develop this player; it replaces the older player, which was (ironically) based on Macromedia’s Flash Paper technology. Adler says this gives his company a competitive advantage over rivals including Adobe. Scribd Counts 50 Million Readers - mediabistro.com: GalleyCat. Media - Scribd launches online book market.
Scribd Goes Social, Adds News Feeds and Followers. Scribd has quietly become one of the world's most popular websites. The service lets you share documents, presentations, and PDFs online; its embedding feature alone has revolutionized how documents are used and shared. Still, many pieces of Scribd have been a silo; many users search for a document (often finding it via Google), download it, and leave. So how do you keep users engaged with your product? By launching a new wave of social features, of course. That's exactly what Scribd has done. Scribd Gets a Social Media Makeover The changes are immediately apparent, starting with the homepage.
There's also a new navigation system on the left hand side. Profiles have also changed. The entire thing is a social media makeover. While a lot of users will still just drop in, grab documents, and leave, we wouldn't be surprised if user engagement on the site gets a strong boost. Fertile Ground for Startups. Who needs job security? In June 2008, as the recession was moving from bad to worse, Caterina Fake gave up a comfortable, executive-level job at Yahoo!
(YHOO) to launch a company. She left California and set up shop in New York City to co-found Hunch, a Web site that uses the experiences of others to help people make decisions. The 40-year-old, who had co-founded the photo-sharing site Flickr before it was acquired by Yahoo, couldn't resist the idea of creating something new, whatever the economic headwinds.
"The entrepreneurial spirit really thrives in situations of adversity," says Fake. "The world is full of more possibility. " Fake isn't alone in betting on that. "VAST AND UNTAPPED"With that backdrop, BusinessWeek set out to find the world's most intriguing new companies. History shows that great companies are often built during bad times. Entrepreneurs, financiers, and historians point to several other reasons for this phenomenon. Entrepreneurship is also becoming more global. The World's Most Intriguing Startups: Scribd. Scribd Wants to Increase the Number of Books Published Every Year From 300,000 to 3 Million - mediabistro.com: BayNewser. Social Media Newsfeed: Facebook Ads | Twitter Passwords Tim Sohn Facebook redesigns right-side ads to make them similar to News Feed ads.
Twitter says users’ passwords were safe from attack. These stories, and more, in today’s Morning Social Media Newsfeed. Read more Social Media Newsfeed: Twitter Rolling Out Redesign | FarmVille Users Down Tim Sohn on April 9, 2014 8:00 AM Twitter rolling out more photo-centric redesign. Read more Sponsored Post In our Social Media 101 boot camp, you'll determine the social media sites that matter most to you, based on personal and professional goals.
Airlines Discover the Efficiency in Using Social For Customer Service Kimberlee Morrison on April 8, 2014 1:15 PM Customers are turning to social media for their customer service needs, and airlines are answering the call. Read more Social Media Newsfeed: Twitter Acquisition | Social Network, Divorce Linked Tim Sohn on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM Twitter buys Android-related startup for undisclosed amount. Read more. Scribd goes mobile, adds sharing to iPhone, Kindle | Web Crawler. Trip Adler, CEO of document-sharing service Scribd.com, could be commended for having an unorthodox presentation style. At a time when companies big and small have gone to great lengths in trying to channel Steve Jobs, Adler is the one thinking different. On Tuesday, as I sat in Scribd's San Francisco offices getting a demo of the company's newest feature--which lets people send digital documents to a handful of portable reading devices with just two mouse clicks--Adler was inking the entire process for me on a whiteboard.
The disconnect of an analog pitch for a company founded entirely on digital documents seemed to go unnoticed. Nevertheless, Adler's eyes lit up when he began to talk about how important a step it was for Scribd, which has long since moved off its "YouTube for documents" mantra into promoting itself as a place for writers to sell books they can't afford to publish and for people to discover others with similar reading interests.
Scribd Turns Three, Gets A New Look And Logo. Book Reviews, Bestselling Books & Publishing Business News | Publishers Weekly. Scribd gets 'Readcasting': Autosharing made easy | Web Crawler. Document-sharing site Scribd has a new trick up its sleeve that will make whatever you're viewing on the site a little more public. That is, if you feel like broadcasting your reading habits to the world. The new feature is called Readcasting, and it's an evolution of the social-sharing options found on most sites. You can set the site to post your reading activity to Facebook and Twitter. That's pretty standard, though. Not standard: once you've set your log-ins for each network, there's an option to have Scribd automatically share what you're reading with others.
The science behind this is fairly simple. You will, for example, not autosend a tweet that you're reading something on the site, until you actually have been scrolling through that document for 15 seconds. Along with Readcasting, the site is also one of the launch partners with Facebook's new open-graph initiative , which was announced Wednesday morning. f8 conference: Scribd's bet on the Facebook effect. The YouTube of publishing shows off its Social Plugins Scribd CEO Trip Adler is betting on the Facebook effect.
His document-sharing startup is one of its launch partners for the company's new Social Plugins, a group of features that will help web publishers take advantage of Facebook's social graph to bring more users to their sites and keep them around longer. Often dubbed the YouTube of publishing, Scribd lets users self-publish text from a master's thesis to a novel. Most of the content is free. More than 10 million documents have been uploaded to the site so far, and 50 million people visit each month. Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″ (Exclusive Screenshots) Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages.
Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser (see screenshots), but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages. Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Documents will simply become very long Web pages. Poor Adobe. HTML5 and The Future of Publishing: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2010 - Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, May 03 - 06, 2010, San Francisco, CA. Scribd: HTML5 revamp led to users spending twice as long on the site.
The document sharing site Scribd has extolled the virtues of its move away from Adobe’s Flash technology, and towards HTML5, earlier this month. Today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, company CTO and cofounder Jared Friedman offered even more insight into how HTML5 is helping to make its product better. Friedman started off by delivering an impressive stat: Users now spend more than twice as long on Scribd as they did two weeks ago, thanks to the HTML5 improvements. As VentureBeat previously noted, the addition of HTML5 allows Scribd to reproduce documents with new font and vector graphics features without turning them into images. Friedman showed off exactly how that will help users: The text is now searchable within your browser, and able to be highlighted for easy copying and pasting.
It may seem strange that such simple features prompt such a strong increase in usage, but it is a big shift in the way documents are displayed on the Web. Virgin/Liquid Comics Free to Download on Scribd - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews. Back in 2006, Sir Richard Branson and self-help author Deepak Chopra joined forces and launched Virgin Comics. Initially based on stories from Indian mythology, the company later expanded with two more lines: Marverick (later renamed Voices) and Director’s Cut. The first line of comics was spearheaded primarily by musicians and actors, while Director’s Cut was, fittingly, handled by film directors. After two years, Virgin Comics closed up shop in New York and was bought out, becoming Liquid Comics and posting a collection of their original Virgin on their Web site. As ICv2.com reports, however, the availability of Virgin/Liquid Comics offerings are now doubly available since they’ve gone live on Scribd in HTML5.
Liquid CEO Sharad Devarajan broke down the effort stating, “The future of comic books is digital and partners like Scribd enable us to potentially reach millions of new readers.” Scribd Ramps Up Migration To HTML5; Scores Partnerships With Forbes Media And Others. We reported recently that online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages, another win for Apple in its battle against Flash. Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Scribd CEO and co-founder Jared Friedman, is announcing that the startup has moved much of its content, including tens of millions of books, magazines, newspapers, presentations, research and more, to the HTML5 format. Friedman has told us that he believes HTML5 improves the reading experience, by allowing any document to become a Web page. “The possibilities are endless,” Friedman said in a statement.
And the HTML5 format is able to bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages. A new bookmark feature will help you keep your place in especially long documents. And Scribd plans to launch an ad revenue-sharing program for select content partners this summer. Scribd’s Decision To Dump Flash Pays Off, User Engagement Triples. You could call it the perfect storm. Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration.
Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months. In early May, Scribd announced its plans to ditch Adobe’s Flash and began the arduous process of converting every document (of its “tens of millions”) to native, HTML5 pages. “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash, “co-founder and CTO, Jared Friedman, told Erick Schonfeld.
Although many documents on the web are still boxed into Flash players, the HTML5 format turns them into rich, interactive web pages.