Docstoc has taken a page out of YouSendIt’s book by releasing a desktop applet for sending documents to others via email without having to worry about size restrictions.

The Windows-only OneClick app enables users to right click on certain file types (Word, PDF, Excel, etc.) and choose to email them via Docstoc. The files will begin uploading to the startup’s servers in the background while an email composition window opens with pre-generated links to them. Recipients simply need to click these links to begin viewing or downloading the files, which can be up to 50mb in size and set as either public or private on Docstoc.

OneClick’s restrictions on file types and sizes mean that it will compete only minimally with more focused online file transfer services. But it does have the advantage of unlimited and indefinite storage, as well as background uploading (there’s no need to wait for uploads to finish before sending your email). At the very least, it’s a clever move to encourage more content contribution to Docstoc. As with Scribd and other UGC destinations, content is king – what else is Google going to index?

See a related announcement by Scribd from just last week that enables onsite previewing of email attachments.

Continuing its push to become a major provider of Webtop software, Adobe is releasing two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Adobe’s Webtop arsenal already includes the recently launched online version of PhotoShop and its online media player, Adobe TV. Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web. “It is our intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past,” says product manager Erik Larson.

Acrobat.com—Online Word Processing, Meetings, and File Sharing

Acrobat.com is a combination of three recently launched online services: Adobe Brio (online meetings), Adobe Buzzword (online word processor), and Adobe Share (online file sharing). Thus with the public beta launch of Acrobat.com, Adobe is taking on Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting—all at the same time.

Buzzword is now integrated into Acrobat.com as the default word processor. (I reviewed Buzzword and Share when they first launched last March). Multiple people can edit a document and leave comments. Tabs along the bottom representing different people show you who has accessed the document most recently and their status (author, reviewer, etc.). It paginates documents, supports all kinds of fonts, and lets you create the closest equivalent to a PDF that is possible online.

All the documents on Acrobat.com are organized in what up until now has been Adobe Share. The document and file-sharing service now offers five gigabytes of free storage, and lets you embed documents in a widget on other sites across the Web. (I’ve put an Adobe PDF widget at the bottom of this post). This last feature should worry startups like Scribd and DocStoc, which are based entirely on the ability to upload and share documents in a similar fashion.

Finally, my favorite part, Acrobat.com includes Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee. Anyone with a Mac is going to love this. Whenever I get a virtual demo, I prefer to do it through Adobe Connect because WebEx and GoTo Meeting sometimes don’t work with my Mac. And Adobe’s Flash viewer simply looks better.

Acrobat 9—Now With Flash

At the same time Adobe is launching Acrobat.com, it is releasing Acrobat 9—a major upgrade to one of its anchor desktop apps. The big news here is that for the first time, Adobe’s PDF-creating desktop software will support Flash. So people can now create documents with embedded Flash movies from YouTube, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex framework—the same programming tool they use to create Web applications.

PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents. Best of all, they no longer take forever to load. The next step is for Adobe to make it easy to turn any PDF into a Web page, and vice versa.

Docstoc, the professional document repository and community, has raised $3.25 Million in Series B funding. The round was led by Rustic Canyon Partners, and brings their total funding to over $4 Million.

Docstoc serves as a repository for professional documents, featuring forms, templates, and a variety of other material. Its flash-based viewer can be embedded into other pages, allowing documents to be viewed on external sites without needing an outside reader like Acrobat or Word.

The company is also introducing a Content Partnership Program (CPP) that will allow content providers to place their own ads around their documents, and to collect any revenue they accrue. The program is free of charge, but applicants will be screened for quality. Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar says that the program is designed to improve the amount of high-quality content on the site while establishing ties with valuable partners.

Docstoc raised $750k in Series A funding last November in a round led by Scott Walchek, Brett Brewer, Matt Coffin, Robin Richards, and Crosscut Ventures. Their primary competitor is Scribd, launched March 2007, which features a similar embeddable document viewer and a large collection of content. Scribd has raised over $4 Million to date.

Docstoc Series B Funding Press Release – Get more documents

Woodlands, Texas based startup Insightory is setting its goals high, with the aim to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge.

The service itself joins a growing list of document uploading sites that include Scribd and Docstoc, although the company claims that unlike these services Insightory is more targeted and heavily moderated. The content is aimed at management professionals, professors and graduate students and comes from a variety of sources including users from within the United States and elsewhere.

Insightory believes that companies need a constant supply of management knowledge and that their service can provide this; certainly it does help to get other opinions when in management so the service may find a willing audience.

The service is currently in alpha with a beta version to be launched this month and collaboration and networking tools coming in the first half of 2008. Insightory is holding a Contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to the site with prizes ranging from $100 to $3000, more details here.

Want to share some of those secret company files with the world? Starting today, you can upload them to Docstoc and share them in an embeddable Flash player. Actually, the service is more for standard business documents like leases, employment agreements, non-disclosure agreements, wills and the like.
Docstoc is designed to be a shared repository of commonly used forms and documents. (I embedded the press release of Docstoc’s public launch below in a DocStoc player). Docstoc competes with Scribd and is a TechCrunch40 company.

Today, Docstoc is coming out of its private beta into a public beta. Anyone can now upload and share documents. Already, there are 12,000 documents on the site. There is no limit to how many you can upload, and Docstoc accepts the following file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rft, and .pdf. To encourage people to try out the service, Docstoc is running a contest. Every week in November, the user who uploads the most professional documents (random filler doesn’t count) will get an iPod Touch. To qualify, users must (1) be registered members (join here), (2) upload documents that are publicly shared and (3) the uploaded documents must benefit the community. For a full set of rules click here

Winners will be announced each Sunday at 12:00am PST on the Docstoc blog. Users can see how they are doing in the contest, in real time, by visiting the docsters page and clicking on “most docs this week”

Here is the press release in a Docstoc:

Here are some screen shots:

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.

Session four as follows, including our live notes.

Cake Financial

Cake Financial is a social investment service that lets people track all their investment portfolios in one place. The service allows individual investors to track and analyze their historical performance up to ten years. Users can also view the real-time portfolios and performances of their friends, family and top investors all without disclosing net worths, shares owned, portfolio sizes, etc.

Online investing service that offers social recommendations, without disclosing personal details. “There is nothing fake about Cake!”.

Homepage provides all the information usually found at the brokerage firm, but provides aggregated data from multiple firms.

Cake calculates annual returns across multiple brokers.

Interesting: you can chart your success against others, friend, associates etc.

Tools also allow you to look at trades other Cake members have made, the idea being that you can see what users with better results are investing in.

You can also see who is investing in a stock, eg: you can see everyone who holds Cisco, and then see what they are buying and selling as well.

DocStoc

Docstoc is an online community and professional network around user generated, professional documents. Users can store their own files or documents from anywhere around the internet. The files can be categorized and shared with various levels of read write accessibility. The documents can be searched by categories or by keywords and then previewed online or downloaded. Search results can be filtered by views, downloads, ratings and comments. Learn more about DocStoc.

Interesting introduction: fake customer testimonials from the audience.

A professional document service, comes with comments, profiles etc…

Docs can be found by keyword search, filters which include community filters, category search.

Documents can be previewed via popup and shared.

Includes registration for blogs as well.

Teach The People

Teach The People is a social network built around online education. The site lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set to share it with the Teach The People communities. Users can create individual profiles and contribute content to topics (computer programming, math or “Bob Marley’s Influence on R&B Music” are a few examples). The site encourages quality content by letting users become community creators and by giving users points for rating, referring friends and answering questions. Community creators help create content and run day-to-day community operations. They can charge other users fees for monthly community access, content views or content downloads. They can also share in site advertising revenues.

Starts with intro and rhetorical questions. About bringing learning to the time poor.

The product brings knowledge and people seeking that knowledge together, with the ability to monetize content.

Users get 5gb of storage space for lectures.

There is also an open questions section..Q&A model.

Teach The People is a “community model not a teaching model.”

CrowdSpirit

CrowdSpirit is a crowdsourcing community built around designing electronic products and staying involved throughout their product life cycle. Users submit ideas for innovative electronic products that the community fine tunes and votes on. The best ideas and their product specifications rise to the top where investors provide financing and development partners make prototypes. Once products have been made they are tested by the community and recommended to retailers. Users involved with product creation can earn a share of the product revenue. Typical products will include MP4 players, DVD players, computer peripherals, headphones, etc.

A Q&A community consultation service for problems and ideas that may be possible. Deeper than say Yahoo Answers, focus is on products and prototypes.

Ponoko

Ponoko is a personal manufacturing platform. On Ponoko members can collaboratively create new products and take them through design and prototyping all the way through to production. Ponoko can manage the full production and delivery process or deliver the parts to the creator.

An online toy creating site, make online and “make it real.”

Users are able to add designs, materials, color etc..

Expert panel: Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Rajeev Motwani, and Yossi Vardi

Ron Conway likes Ponoko. Rajeev likes Cake Financial.

2 minutes ago Jason Calacanis said how wonderful the Wifi had become…at it’s been bad ever since, talk about jinxing it.

Yossi Vardi suggests that Cake should also track sexual prowess, to the merriment of the crowd.

Don Dodge likes Cake + Teach the People, asks question to Teach: selling content is a hard ask on the internet, particularly when you don’t know what you’re getting. TtP: they are running background checks on people offering lessons so they can rate the people offering the lessons.

Yossi asked Ron Conway whether he uses Cake (Conway is an investor). Conway says other people handle his money and Yossi asks whether it is his wife. Yossi follows up with “how many of the 162 companies you invest in do you use”…much laughter, Conway says 20%.

Summary: Cake Financial was the strongest idea according to the panel, and correctly so. Ponoko was the most original.

I criticized Los Angeles based startup Docstoc in a post last month for pre-announcing a financing that hadn’t actually closed yet.

At the time of that post, where I suggested that they may be counting their chickens before they hatched, they said:

We are about to close another substantial round of financing from at least one, if not all, of the following investors 1) one of the co-founders of myspace 2) the angel investors in www.baidu.com and the head of mp3.com that lead the company to its 400M acquisition – at least one of these players will lead our next round, and all three parties may participate. Financing is expected to close by the end of the month.

Well, their gamble paid off. They raised a first round of financing from Scott Walchek (investor in Baidu), Brett Brewer (co-founder of MySpace parent Intermix Media) and Robin Richards, the former president of MP3.com. They won’t disclose the size of the financing to me, but they certainly closed on the investors they said they would.

The startup itself remains unlaunched for now, but I’ve seen a demo and its got potential. Like Scribd, Docstoc is a sort of YouTube for documents – users can upload just about any document type (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator, and PDF) and display via a Flash interface on any website. But there are key differences, too. Our first post on the company is here.

Here’s an interesting email that was forwarded to me this morning: Docstoc, a Los Angeles based startup that we wrote about in early July, says they are close to closing a “substantial” round of funding from a number of potential investors. There’s something to that saying that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch, but the fear and caution genes are rarely found in the entrepreneur’s genetic makeup. There was additional information in the email we’re not publishing as it was too sensitive. We did not receive a reply back from the company regarding this.

From the video we embedded in our earlier post, Docstop looks to be a competitor to Scribd and allows users to post and discuss documents in various file formats. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait for the launch.

We are about to close another substantial round of financing from at least one, if not all, of the following investors 1) one of the co-founders of mysapce 2) the angel investors in www.baidu.com and the head of mp3.com that lead the company to its 400M acquisition – at least one of these players will lead our next round, and all three parties may participate. Financing is expected to close by the end of the month.

Scribd, dubbed “YouTube for documents” didn’t have the the traditional dip in traffic after its launch, and has continued to grow rapidly after raising nearly $4 million in two rounds of venture capital.

I looks like they already have competition, though. I’ve been hearing good things about new startup Docstoc, which is currently in private beta. I haven’t been able to get in and see the service, but others that have are telling me its pretty cool. The video above shows an early interface, which I grabbed from the Docstoc blog.