Docstoc, a startup aiming to be the YouTube for professional documents, is giving away 1,000 invitations to its private beta to TechCrunch readers.
Redeem your invitation by going here and entering “TC40″ into the “invitation ID” field. The first 1,000 readers to do so will get in; dawdlers will need to request an invitation using the form on Docstoc’s homepage.
CEO Jason Nazar says that there are currently thousands of free legal and business documents on the site. The company recently raised a round of financing and presented at the TechCrunch40 conference during Session 4: Crowd Sourcing.
Check out a four-minute-long tutorial of Docstoc below.
I met several of the guys from Docstoc at the TC40 conference. Very nice and helpful. I work for a small start up and had a meeting with a potential investor later in the week. Even though the site was in beta they immeadiatly gave me a password so I coudl refresh myself on some key documents that i needed.
Just wanted to pass on the story
Cool concept!!!
Would just advise them to use a 2nd title for legal documents reflecting which state that document has been used in. For example, putting up an employment agreement with a non-compete clause may work in the state of Washington. However, it would not hold up (or is illegal) in court in California.
disclosure: I’m not a lawyer, but, I did stay in a Holiday Express last night:)
This is awesome, I am heading to sign up page! thanx
Alex, thanks for the comments that’s a great idea, we have something like that in the works where you’ll be able to have more customization and add the state to specific legal docs and forms, stay tuned, you’re feedback is always welcomed. Jas
Have to say, it’s a terrible signup page.. my hyphenated .co.uk domain wasn’t allowed due to a poor email validation regex then it lost my gender/DOB/website/state when i left my phone out and had to enter that lol. ah well finally got in.. going to have a nosey…
Can we copy and paste the doc? or just for reading?
I had the same problem, my hyphenated domain for the e-mail wasn’t allowed. This should be resolved asap as it will just annoy users. Most e-mail validation regex are wrong, takes some research to find a good one.
Hi.Plz send me an invitation.Thank!I want to test it!
Nick, I appreciate the feedback, we are working on fixing the e-mail validation and the other items you pointed out. Please feel free to contact me directly at alons@docstoc.com with any ideas, suggestions and/or issues you might have.
Alon, docstoc cto.
I got mine. Please send out the Yahoo social network one also
Yep, very interesting business model and offering. Find it really useful. When it’s powered by a community, it must be good thing
Maybe introduce a better category structure (using different sub-levels) where people can upload their docs in (similar to, let’s say, the product categories on eBay), this will make the browsing experience much better.
Also, after doing a search, using the tabs ‘most viewed’, ‘most uploaded’, etc, no longer worked for that specific search (this should be part of the features on a specific results page).
But enough about product ideas/suggestions — I really like this and I am sure many people will benefit from sharing professional documents on this platform.
Keep up the good work.
awesome site – though do note that it bugs out in safari…the server farm can’t feed the documents properly into the browser…at least that’s the error i’m seeing…
but why do docs separate from presentations? wouldn’t it make sense to merge it all?
#11 – Techmine: You can get an invite to Mash, Yahoo’s social network, on InviteShare.
We didn’t use InviteShare for these Docstoc invitations, because we don’t have it set up yet for mass distribution from companies themselves.
I’ve been trying to sign up, but keep getting “Please enter a valid email address.” I’ve tried several, but none seem to be acceptable.
Mark: I was referring InviteShare only in my comment. I never got one
from inviteshare.
Hi Dana, sorry to hear you can’t get in. If you’ll e-mail me your information I will make sure to register you. Sorry for the inconvenient.
Alon
alons@docstoc.com
Ya poor execution on the sign up guys. 3X was not the charm. Still not it.
Signup worked fine for me, site’s slow… good luck with the site, seems like a good idea, I’ll be back when it’s done.
Hey guys… I think I just crashed your site. Clicked on legal – got an I/O error message – refreshed the start page – endless timeout.
It still responds to “tracert” pings tho – mb not all is lost yet.
I couldn’t use Firefox to sign up. Even after I used Explorer to register, I still couldn’t sign in using Firefox. Other than that, things look pretty good. I especially love the implementation of the FlashPaper doc viewer.
yep in with IE. thx mrshl.
Obviously not ready for prime time … guys, even a private beta is a beta round
I played around docstoc for a while and I was wondering what is the difference between scribd and docstoc. For anyone who doesnt know of scribd you can visit this site at http://www.scribd.com
cool, but very buggy. Can’t seem to download the docs to my computer and their search functionality does not work.
Ok their search does work, you have to click on “go” rather than pressing enter (which gives you a “13″ error).
Thanks for the Docstoc invite, TechCrunch.
Site isn’t loading for me.. pretty poor play for a company proclaimed the “YouTube for professional documents”
Isn’t this just a crappy ripoff of Scribd and ThinkfreeDocs?
http://www.thinkfreedocs.com/
docstoc has been very useful to me and i like it. i’ve downloaded several documents for my use. the site does seem a little buggy at times i.e. slow on random occasions, there are some docs which can’t be downloaded giving a 404 error and some docs can’t be printed out properly (i.e. it prints out with black highlights on where the words are, like there is some sort of printing protection on it). saying that, i can’t really complain as it is still in its testing beta stage.
A Youtube for documents?
*YAWN* Next please.
So boring.
Been playing around with the site today, and I like it a lot. It went a little slow at times, but I really like the design and use of categories, very helpful for finding business docs.
No thank you very much!
MSDocCenter Manager 2.213 works just fine, everyone should use it!
youtube for doc? can i get the headline for new york times 20 yrs ago? or I can download the user manual for the 1979 Honda Civic?
or I can just download things in the public domain? What do you expect me to upload there? i have a lot of 1980 Snoopy comics. should I start scanning them now and upload it for you guys?
This is a perfect example of vertical youtubing being applied to smaller and smaller niches.
I’m afraid that this is not as good as scribd – which is much more user friendly and now even allows bulk upload. I like the request a doc feature though. The search is not as good and the stats are pretty much non-existant compared to scribd. It may take a while for this to get enough documents for it to be interesting (if ever).
hey .. docstoc is just a few weeks old.. Scribd has been here for almost an year now.. the volume is bound to differ at this stage.. esp. when the content is community generated..
lets give it sometime and then we can compare..
@MarcT
hey.. scanning an uploading will be a good start..
you can contribute to the creative section on the site with this.
For the other docs you are looking for, you can put a request for them on the site.. probably its just a matter of time.. we just need a few more guys on the site who can scan upload the things they have been collecting for ages..
no offense..
buggy so far
Interesting about the amount of hype / fake comments on the previous TC article which all put down scribd. They all went on about how ‘amazing’ the docstoc interface was, so now the system is live it’s obvious these comments were made up as the interface is nothing new whatsoever and not even good
Buggy, made is .NET, no feeds – what a mess.
Let’s hope the excessive plugging of this on TC doesn’t help it get funding (whatever happened to that last fake press release that docstoc was ‘close’ to getting 10M)
It’s great to hear that docstoc and scribd are doing well and docstoc is opening up to the public. We also have a similar concept but very much business oriented with slightly different business model. We are much behind the other two in terms of roll out, but it would be great to get some early feedback. Have a look at http://www.edocr.com. If you like what you see, do get in touch through “contact us” page so that your company can have a free account. We will also be around at Mashup* Demo on 2nd or FOWA on 3rd in London if anyone fancy a chat. Best regards, Manoj
Hello,
I’d like to receive an invitation but I don’t know how I can do.
Thanks
Léo
Erm, site down. I think you broke it.
We just opened the registration process to public. http://www.edoc...m/user/register Bear with us till we approve the accounts.
Yes, I would agree with a few of you. Docstoc is not as good as scribd. Not enough porn.
It worked fine for me. Guess they have worked out some of the bugs. New start-up what do you expect!
I registered for this, and its a neat Idea, I really don’t know if its something I would find all that useful. We shall see though, I usually give any web app a few weeks to see if it finds a way into my routine.
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