Crocodoc blog

Crocodoc was recently featured on NBC Bay Area show Press:Here, along with two other awesome startups from Y Combinator and 500 Startups, inDinero and ReadyForZero. Check out the episode below!

Our team has had our sights set on disrupting the PDF editing and document collaboration space for quite some time. Today we’re super excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone in making this vision a reality by launching the world’s first embeddable HTML5 document viewing and collaboration tool.

We’ve had to solve some incredibly difficult technical problems in order to meet our goals for rendering quality and HTML5 conversion speed, but now that Crocodoc runs without the need for Flash or 3rd party software the difference is very noticeable. (See sample document at end of post.)

Better yet, application developers and content providers can now incorporate Crocodoc’s document viewing, commenting, markup and PDF export technology into their own products through our new Partner Program.

Yammer is already taking advantage of this technology and rolling it out to its customers starting today. So, if you’re a Yammer user, you’ll be able to discuss and review documents seamlessly within the Yammer application.

For those interested in reading more about our launch, check out our coverage in:

• TechCrunch
• WebWorkerDaily
• xConomy
• TheNextWeb
• Mashable
• VentureBeat

We’re already working towards our next big milestone. Stay tuned for more for Crocodoc!

- Ryan

Sample document (full-screen version available here):

Hi everyone -

We've been fortunate to get some great coverage today for our announcements about the new version of crocodoc and our recent fundraising.

Here are some links to today's press:

• TechCrunch: Crocodoc Closes Angel Round, Launches Revamped Document Collaboration Tools
• VentureBeat: Revamped document site Crocodoc raises funding
• Xconomy: Crocodoc Raises Cash, Upgrades Web-based Document Review Service
• Mass High Tech: WebNotes launches crocodoc.com after move to Calif.

Moving forward we'll be continuing to improve crocodoc at an aggressive pace.  What would you like to see in the next release of crocodoc?  Let us know!

All the best,
The crocodocs

Feedback and improvements

After spending lots of time talking to our users and analyzing how people are using crocodoc, we’re excited to have released the first of two major updates to our service.  (We normally roll out incremental improvements every week, but this one was longer in the making.)

Click here to see our updated demo page (or upload your own document instantly)

This update focused on streamlining the appearance of documents in crocodoc and providing users with a more powerful, easy to use interface.  As requested, we've also updated several of our document tools to be more useful.  Specifically:

• We’ve overhauled the look and feel of our document viewer
• Drawings and text can now be created in different colors and sizes
• Form-filling is easier than ever, due to improvements in the creation and printing of text box annotations
• Webpage snapshots are more accurate and uploading of Photoshop files is now allowed, enabling new use cases for designers
• Many small bug fixes and improvements have been added in order to make using crocodoc an intuitive and seamless experience

The road ahead

Moving forward, we have big plans for our second major update, and will be completely overhauling our collaborative commenting tools.  We're very excited about the impact these changes will have on the way people use crocodoc to collaborate on documents, designs, forms, and assignments.  Stay tuned for future announcements about these improvements!

And as always, we'd love to hear any and all feedback on our recent changes.  Thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions for this update!

We just released some exciting new features!  They are...

Instant notifications
Want to know when a colleague makes a comment on your document?  Now you can turn on email notifications to receive alerts whenever your documents are changed.

Better sharing
You can now share documents in "read-only" mode so that recipients can see your edits but cannot change them.  You can share documents directly through Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz, or even embed a document directly in your blog or website.

Improved collaboration
We've made it a lot easier to filter comments by author -- just toggle the check box next to each person's name to show or hide their annotations.

Instant API keys
You can now generate an API key instantly through our API page.  We've been improving our API steadily over the past few weeks in an effort to make it as easy and robust as possible.

That's right. Now, instead of just saving your marked-up documents to your computer, you can save them directly to your Google Docs account! crocodoc gets permission to save to your Google Docs account using Google OAuth. So don't worry, you won't have to share your Google password with us.

Also, we'll associate your OAuth authorization with your crocodoc account for even faster exporting. Yet another reason to sign up for a free or Pro crocodoc account!

Happy Spring,
Matt

After an intense coding marathon, the crocodoc team is proud to introduce our newest feature: real-time collaboration! Whenever you and friends or colleagues are marking up the same document at the same time, you'll see each other's changes reflected in near real-time. No more having to refresh the page!

We'll be introducing several more exciting features over the next few days, so be sure to check back in with our blog to stay in the know.

Peace,
Matt

TechCrunch just ran a great article covering a major new release we just launched, and our mission to transform the way that documents are shared and reviewed online.

Here's a quick rundown of the exciting new features that we just made available:

• Freehand drawing tool: Draw circles, arrows, or any other shapes you can think of!
• "Save as PDF" tool: Now you can save your marked up documents as native PDF files!  Your comments and sticky notes will be automatically converted into Adobe Acrobat-friendly analogs, and your new PDF file will look just as good as the original (hopefully better, now that you've marked it up :)
• Additions to our API and embeddable widget.  Let us know if you'd like to request an API key!
• Free accounts: You can now sign up for a free crocodoc account, allowing you to view a list of all documents you've uploaded.  From here you can easily view of delete your files.

As always, please let us know how we can make crocodoc better!  We love to hear your feedback.

Adobe Reader now ranks #1 as the software most frequently exploited by hackers and malware attacks.  You can read the full article from Computerworld here.

Apparently crocodoc isn't just a better way to share and review PDFs in terms of its collaborative abilities and convenience -- it's also safer to use, too.

You can now share documents with others by emailing them directly from crocodoc.  Just enter their email address, add a message, and fire away!