There are two main startups trying to become the ‘YouTube for documents’, notably Scribd and Docstoc. Newly launched edocr, coming out of the UK, does something similar, but with a twist, reports TechCrunch UK.
Edocr lets you upload your document and then allow people to download, share or embed it via a Flash interface on any website. The twist is that while competitor sites tend to allow any old document to go up, edocr is going to just focus on .doc or .pdf. So no spreadsheets or presentations. This could mean they keep the ‘pool’ of documents relatively untainted by those terrible PowerPoints.
Future plans include special interest groups, and CEO Manoj Ranaweera tells me the site should be able to build connectors to Opentext’s ECM packages, so that public facing documents can be published straight on to edocr.
Since launching 8 months ago, Scribd has raise $3.5 million from Redpoint Ventures. Meanwhile Docstoc, currently in private beta, is going to be geared toward professions.
It remains to be seen how edocr – currently 100% self-funded but with a pretty experienced team – will do, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t have a good chance in this arena.
For more on this see TechCrunch UK.
Many thanks for the coverage Mike. If you wish to find out more about edocr, please visit this link http://www.edoc...cr-introduction
Best regards, Manoj
sounds like scribd without the copyrighted material and excessive porn.
maybe docstoc and edocr can provide a good service sticking to professional & technical documents?
Looks good. If edocr can avoid the spam that plagues scribd, it might just be the next big thing.
scrib is a porn shop. http://www.cent...ocument-network
Porn drives technology though, so it would help any site
edocr, Scribd, Docstoc
This is starting to get on my nerves.
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
ThinkFree Docs trumps all of these crappy sites: http://www.thinkfreedocs.com/
Unable to connect
Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at showfx1.thinkfreedocs.com:8080.
I guess reliability isn’t thinkfree docs’ strong point. Seriously, the infrastructure for these kinds of sites must be interesting. What kind of servers do they run on, do they use Amazon S3 etc. for data storage?
I don’t get why anyone thinks that these sites will remain porn and solicitor free. Currently, either site is free of these due to the fact that they are either still in beta or with a relatively limited user base. I am willing to bet anyone that once they get big, you will start seeing documents where the first 2 or 3 pages of the document are provided and then a big “Click here to purchase this document” will appear. Even for one page documents, this could still happen. Unless these companies start reviewing documents (or provide a reporting mechanism to report improper documents), it is inevitable that this will happen.
Google used to give the best search results, now they give more and more crap as results (top links are always to shopping websites for most of my searches) because people learned how to manipulate their systems. The same will happen with these. To truly provide good results and service, these sites will need to review the documents that are posted up there. This is what sets apart stock photo websites from photo sharing websites. When you submit a photo to a stock website, it is reviewed, graded, and then only posted when it matches or exceeds a specific criteria. If DocStoc and eDocr plan on remaining for the working professional, their service will need to be much more than just stating that they are for the working professionals.
comments about scribd getting growth through porn? whats the problem, sex is big business (ok maybe they could make the 18+ section a little more prominent etc) so scribd have found a potential niche, if you don’t agree with it don’t visit.
docstoc seems to have been overhyped and after seeing the beta there’s not much to get excited over as the social network element is pointless and the blog search is so random and makes no sense at all.
just like youtube theres always room for several big sites, it doesn’t seem like edocr will need much effort to overtake docstoc into second place behind scribd
http://searchdocs.net
Here you can find a global search engine for documents.