Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

We had a fun recently with a video marketing effort, putting on a “webinar” on document backup that was taken over by Mayan doomsdayers. It’s pretty funny, you can read it below and see me attempting to be a comedic actor.

Webinar Taken Over By Mayan Apocalypse Believers

November 26th, 2012 by Healy Jones

OfficeDrop recently got some great press on the most recent update of our Android app. It’s really awesome how device specific blogs can drive lots and lots of new downloads and users. I guess the major takeaway for app developers is that serious updates to apps offer tremendous PR potential. And that PR isn’t dead – if you’re selling apps then you need to use the media to drive new people to your store listings. Anyways, this piece of press was really awesome for spiking new users of OfficeDrop’s Android smartphone scanner app, so I thought I would share it.

Android Central Reviews OfficeDrop’s Updated Android App

Android Central, an authority in the Android app space, just reviewed the most recent update of the OfficeDrop Android app – and we are really happy that they liked it!

You can read the Android Central review of the OfficeDrop Android app here.

From the review: “The premise is simple but has plenty of potential. Whenever you have a document or something important that you’d like to keep electronic record of, you can open the OfficeDrop app and scan in the document, which is then uploaded to your account. With the latest version, document scanning has improved, with proper trimming and improved image quality.”

If you don’t have the updated app yet, you should get it! This app includes major image enhancement improvements + auto-cropping of mobile scans. we’ve just released a major improvement to our Android scanner app. This update actually improves the quality of the photo you take for you scans! So your mobile smartphone scanning just got better, easier and faster, and is part of our commitment to giving you the ability to get the best cloud scanning software possible. And it’s all designed to make using our file search better than ever – from the web or from your mobile device.

Get the OfficeDrop Android App in Google’s Play marketplace by clicking the button below on your Android device.

I’m really excited about the latest OfficeDrop integration. ExpenseMagic, an automatic expense report generation service, has just integrated with OfficeDrop. This integration is going to be particularly useful for me, since I hate creating expense reports. Now I’ll just be able to drag my receipt scans into a magic folder and ExpenseMagic will give me a completed expense report!

The key take away here, from my perspective, is that having an open API (like the OfficeDrop API) allows third parties to make your platform better, while extending their own reach. Plus, cool integrations like this one create tremendous PR opportunities.

ExpenseMagic OfficeDrop Integration Video

Yeah, it was cool enough for me to want to make a video:

Here’s the press release. Looks like we are going to get some great press on this, so hopefully I”ll brag next week about it!!

OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic Team Up to Make Expense Reports Bliss

Scan Receipts to the Cloud and Automatically Generate Expense Reports

August 17, 2012 — Cambridge, MA –Let’s face it. Expense reports aren’t fun for anyone.

There’s got to be a better way! Enter ExpenseMagic. OfficeDrop’s searchable online cloud storage and ExpenseMagic’s ultra simple, automated expense reporting service make a perfect pair. Here’s why:

Many of OfficeDrop’s small business cloud users take pictures of their receipts on-the-go using our iPhone, iPad, Android or desktop scanner apps and save them as searchable PDFs within their OfficeDrop online cloud storage accounts.

Now mobile users can simply snap photos of receipts using any of the OfficeDrop smartphone scanner apps and add them to their ExpenseMagic Upload folder. ExpenseMagic’s team gets to work and generates an expense report that you can view and share from your mobile device or computer.

From the PC it’s even easier: OfficeDrop users can simply drag receipt scans into the ExpenseMagic Upload folder in their OfficeDrop Windows File Sync Client and ExpenseMagic will put an expense report right onto their PC. Check out this video to see a demo.

“OfficeDrop wanted to take the pain out of small business expense reports, and ExpenseMagic was the perfect integration to help us do just that,” said OfficeDrop CEO Prasad Thammineni. “We are really happy that the wizards over at ExpenseMagic were able to use OfficeDrop’s API to create such a value-added feature. Integrations like this make OfficeDrop more than just cloud storage.”

OfficeDrop users can take advantage of ExpenseMagic’s automated expense reporting for the first month for free. More information on pricing plans for ExpenseMagic is outlined here. Learn more about the ExpenseMagic OfficeDrop integrations here and here, and get the ExpenseMagic iPhone app here.

OfficeDrop is a complete cloud solution for small businesses, from digitizing documents for the cloud to storage accounts that are sharable with teams. To learn how OfficeDrop makes digital life simple with its scan-and-capture apps and services, visit www.officedrop.com.

Ok, well here is my chance to brag a little bit. OfficeDrop recently released our updated Android scanner app, and included 7 inch tablet support. Well, we got some great press with this OfficeDrop Android Update. So I’m going to show off some of it here! As a reminder, I firmly believe that a solid PR strategy is imperatitive to any app marketing efforts. Users will need to remember your app’s name, head to the app store and actually type and then download the app. Even better, if you can get a reporter to link directly to the app in the store then the reader could go directly to the listing and get the app right away. Press does work for app marketing; our Android downloads are way, way up.

Anyways, here is the press that our Android app has gotten recently:

OfficeDrop Android App Press Reviews

August 13th, 2012

OfficeDrop – a Top 25 Business App for Android - Network World

July 30th, 2012

OfficeDrop, Escanea y guarda tus documentos en la nube - Lo Nuevo de Hoy

July 24th, 2012

OfficeDrop Review - Android Rundown

July 16th, 2012

OfficeDrop: Turn Your Android Into a Scanner - App for Android

July 16th, 2012

OfficeDrop Android Review - Android Authority

July 11th, 2012

How Mobile Apps are Changing Software - PC World

July 10th, 2012

Scan Your Receipts for Safe Keeping - Lifehacker

July 6th, 2012

OfficeDrop Releases its First Android Tablet App - BSDB Blog

July 6th, 2012

OfficeDrop Android, iOS Cloud Apps Help SMBs Improve Workflow - Mobile Enterprises

July 5th, 2012

Scan Documents From Mobile Devices Faster, Easier with OfficeDrop - CMSWire

If you actually want to get the OfficeDrop Android app, you can get it for free by clicking on the following button from your device:

Action shot of me rocking it out at the BusinessInsider Startup2012 event in NYC in early May. The topic was David vs. Goliath, and how startups can use the lean philosophy to compete with the big competitors in an industry. You can see the original photo of me, Healy Jones, here.

Healy Jones at BusinessInsider Startup2012

Still no video, but if it goes up I’ll link to it.

Adobe has some research that highlights how important tablets are becoming for driving web traffic (thanks to Mediapost for a great write up on this.)  I’ve said it many times, we are seeing this first and foremost with the traffic both to the OfficeDrop website and engagement with the OfficeDrop iPad app.

Some great quotes on how tablets are driving a ton of traffic from the MediaPost article:

• “The share of Web site traffic on tablets grew more than 300% in the past year”
• Tablet share will reach 10% of all traffic by 2014 (that’s it? I bet it will be more!)
• “Within one year of the iPad launch in Q2 2010, tablet visits represented 1% of total Web site visits, reaching 4.3% of total visits one year later, up more than 300%.”
• “Tablets generated 4.3% of total Web site visits, compared with smartphones at 6.1%, in Q1 2012″
• “Approximately 68% of tablets shipped were iPad devices, yet they generated 83% of the combined visits from iPad and Android tablets through December 2011. For every brand Web site visit made with an Android tablet, 2.3 visits were made with an iPad, according to the study.”
• “Apple iPads generate 490% as many Web site visits as Android tablets, although iPad shipments are 210% of Android shipments.”

So, key take aways are that iPad users are more engaged on the web than Android tablets, but still tablets are a huge source of traffic for all sites. Consumers and small businesses are using these devices for a lot, including surfing the web.

However, one place where they are not being used as much – so far – is for buying stuff, “… for transactional visits on retail and travel sites, consumers are between 30% and 60% more likely to purchase using a PC.” I bet that is a UI thing that can be solved with better shopping carts and shopping apps.

Lincoln Murphy, the well known SaaS Marketing guy, got pretty upset at a recent TechCrunch piece on the freemium pricing strategy that posted this weekend. Lincoln says (I’m on his email newsletter list; it’s pretty good): “In a nutshell the Complete Guide to Freemium on TechCrunch is a post by someone who got lucky enough to get their post accepted so he can get a backlink to his site from TechCrunch and where he takes the results of studies and some words from high-profile VCs and weaves it together into a post for the TMZ of the tech industry.”

Ouch. That’s a little harsh. The article isn’t bad at all. The conclusion is 100% great, actually.

What is Freemium?

However, I don’t think it’s the Ultimate Guide to what is a actually a pretty complicated pricing strategy. I happen to disagree with the author’s ideas that a time based free trial = freemium. I can’t tell if my disagreement is a big deal or not – his company, FutureSimple, has a free trial offer, so it’s hard to know how much of the piece is using that as the basis for the post vs. a couple of professors he references. I disagree with the idea that a free trial is freemium so much because OfficeDrop recently made the switch from a free trial to having a free forever plan and we called it “going freemium.”

My definition of freemium is that a user will have the opportunity to use the service/software/whatever forever without having to pay for it. It may be a limited plan or limited features, it may be ad supported; whatever. It just means you can use it for as long as you’d like without paying. FreshBooks has a freemium model, but you run out of “free” pretty quickly. You can jump through hoops to keep it free, but most likely you’ll upgrade. A free trial that expires after a set number of days doesn’t meet my definition of freemium.

OfficeDrop’s free plan is driven by our mobile distribution strategy. I write a little bit about why we think apps are taking over here. But you should listen to my conversation with Lincoln – I call it “Healy Jones on Freemium.” Our free plan is a free forever plan, with some upgrade triggers baked in – search limits, storage limits, OCR limits. But it’s a pretty good product for free; we are the only company offering free high quality OCR for scanned images coupled with storage. People seem to like the plan… and they also seem to like to upgrade to paid plans. We like that part for sure!

Lincoln is putting on a webinar on kicking butt with your company’s free trials model. I think he’s got some good stuff, so I’d suggest you register!

Android is growing like crazy but it sill lacks that… je ne sais quoi that the iPhone has.

Oh, wait, I know what it lacks. People who download and use mobile apps, a stable and non-fragmented OS and consistent user experience.

Android Eclair - is this robot holding a piece of poop? Nope, it's just another dessert named OS by Android

Anand Rajaram, an OfficeDrop co-founder and our chief product officer, just wrote a piece for Techrepublic called “10 Things I Hate About Android.” Of course, not to be totally negative on Android, the subtitle is “and some work arounds that help.”

OfficeDrop has now released a series of mobile apps on different platforms – our iPhone PDF app, iPad App, Android Scanner App, and the PaperPort Anywhere iOS and Android apps. Anand has led the charge on all of these mobile applications. It was a lot of work! And he also has gotten a pretty deep view into the development and marketing side of these different mobile platforms.

And let me tell you… Android has some problems brewing. If the platform is going to be a serious contender from a mobile app developer perspective then it’s got a lot of stuff that has to get fixed. Anand goes into his top 10 in this article. This includes things that are nightmares for developers and QA people, like the software and hardware fragmentation, security issues, and the problem of getting found in Google Android marketplace.

Let’s hope that Google is able to address and reduce some of the problems. I think they, as a company, are taking this whole mobile thing quite seriously and I’d expect they make significant headway in improving a lot of these things in the coming year.

Anyway, click on the link above to see what Anand has to say about OfficeDrop’s experience developing on the Android platform. It’s a good read.

I’m pretty excited about a new partnership my company has that just launched. OfficeDrop is working with Nuance’s PaperPort desktop filing system to bring the newest version of PaperPort, PaperPort 14, to the cloud.

The team here at OfficeDrop was able to connect our APIs to PaperPort 14′s desktop client, making it simple to right click any folder from within PaperPort 14 and automatically sync all files to the cloud. If you include the mobile apps we developed this means you can right click a folder and the text search, browse and share the folder and it’s contents from your phone. It’s pretty cool and the tech press seems to be getting it. You can buy PaperPort 14 at paperport.com, where you can also sign up for a free PaperPort Anywhere account. And the mobile apps are here:

• PaperPort Anywhere iPhone and iPad App
• PaperPort Anywhere Android App

Obviously preparing for this was a ton of work, which is why I’ve been totally silent on the blogging front. Hopefully now that we are launched I”ll have time to get back to posting more frequently!

Below is the press release by Nuance talking about PaperPort Anywhere.

Nuance Launches PaperPort Anywhere Cloud Service

Making it Easy for Millions to Organize, Access and Share All of Their Paper and Digital Documents, Anywhere and Anytime

BURLINGTON, Mass., August 2, 2011 — Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, today introduced PaperPort® Anywhere, a new cloud-based service that makes it easy to organize, access and share documents from nearly any PC and mobile device. PaperPort Anywhere lets users manage and access their documents in the cloud using web browsers, as well as using free apps from Nuance for Apple® and Google® Android® mobile devices.

The service uses the market-leading Nuance OmniPage® OCR (optical character recognition) engine to automatically create searchable documents from scanned and camera-captured documents, as well as faxes, making paper content as easy to search and find as digital documents. As a result, users can organize, access and share all of their document content on PaperPort Anywhere.

“There is a reason that recent surveys show over 51% of people still use paper files – it is in large part because current cloud services treat paper content as an afterthought,” said Robert Weideman, vice president and general manager for the Nuance Document Imaging Division. “PaperPort Anywhere goes further than other services by closing the content gap between paper and digital documents – making it easy to scan to the cloud, improving the way users manage both their scanned and digital documents, and by making cloud access easy and convenient.”

PaperPort Anywhere also integrates with the new release of Nuance PaperPort 14 for Windows®, the world’s most popular scanning and document management application for the PC, which was also announced today. PaperPort 14 provides automatic synchronization of Windows folders and files with PaperPort Anywhere. It also adds conversion of scanned and PDF documents into fully formatted word and spreadsheet files that can be edited on Windows, the Macintosh and through cloud services such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. PaperPort 14 provides robust PDF capabilities, including the ability to create PDF from practically any application, and includes PDF-MRC, which creates scanned files that are up to eight times smaller than scanned PDF files without compression.

PaperPort Anywhere is valuable to anyone that works with documents, including the over 20 million registered users of Nuance desktop applications, and users of the more than five million seats of PaperPort that are deployed each year. PaperPort Anywhere includes free apps for Apple iPhone, iPad and Google Android devices, and is free for up to one gigabyte of searchable storage space. PaperPort Anywhere subscription plans include $9.99 per month for 10 gigabytes and $24.99 per month for 50 gigabytes of storage space.

PaperPort Anywhere Key Features and Benefits

PaperPort Anywhere makes it easy to organize, access, and share any document – both paper and digital – anywhere and anytime. Key features and benefits include:

• Organize All Your Documents in the Cloud. PaperPort Anywhere is more than cloud storage – it provides a better way to organize and use your documents. PaperPort Anywhere’s thumbnail and clip views of paper and digital documents are key features that help you quickly organize documents.
• Search and Find both Paper and Digital Documents. PaperPort Anywhere is powered by the Nuance OmniPage OCR engine, which provides the highest levels of accuracy for scanned documents and image PDF files, such as those from fax services. The best OCR means users can find indexed paper documents just as they do Word and spreadsheet files.
• Access and Use, Anywhere and Anytime. PaperPort Anywhere is accessible through any web browser at www.PaperPort.com, the web gateway to PaperPort Anywhere cloud services. Nuance also provides free apps for the Apple iPhone®, iPad® and Google Android devices, and supports Microsoft Windows through PaperPort 14.
• Share and Collaborate. PaperPort Anywhere makes it easy to share links to files stored on the site. The service also supports secure and permission-based emailing of files into PaperPort Anywhere accounts, making it easier than ever to collaborate and share documents with others.
• One Click Scan to Cloud. Only PaperPort Anywhere integrates with PaperPort 14 – the world’s most popular scanning and document management application for the PC. The combination results in unmatched document productivity and convenience.

Pricing and Availability

PaperPort Anywhere with up to one gigabyte of searchable storage is free. PaperPort Anywhere Premium with up to 10 gigabytes of storage is $9.99 per month and $24.99 a month for 50 gigabytes of storage. For additional information on PaperPort Anywhere visit www.PaperPort.com.

About PaperPort Anywhere

PaperPort Anywhere is a new, innovative cloud service from Nuance that makes it easy to scan, organize and share documents – anytime, from anywhere. PaperPort Anywhere is powered by OfficeDrop. It delivers enhanced search-indexing capabilities using Nuance OmniPage OCR.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance Communications, Inc. is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Trademark reference: Nuance, the Nuance logo, and OmniPage and PaperPort are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names referenced herein may be the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Media and Industry Analyst Contact:

Jennifer Shelgren

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Tel: (781) 565-4758

Email: jennifer.shelgren@nuance.com

Interesting research from Flurry again (they were the ones who put out the info that mobile app usage is topping regular web browsing). This time they have data showing that free or “freemium” app titles are generating more revenue than pure paid apps. From a MediaPost summary of the research:

Flurry shows that over the last six months, revenue from free-to-play game apps has overtaken that from paid apps. Among the top 100 grossing games in the App Store as of June, more than two-thirds (65%) of the revenue generated came from freemium games and 35% from paid games.

That’s nearly opposite the situation from six months ago, when paid game apps accounted for 61% of revenue and free titles, 39%. What’s changed since January? Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, pointed out that Apple began counting in-app purchases toward app gross revenues at the end of 2010, reflecting the impact of that sales stream in its ranking of top-grossing titles.

Free apps generating more revenue than pure paid apps

So, this research is focused on games, but OfficeDrop is betting the same will be true for our b2b SaaS app. We switched to a freemium model earlier this week, mainly driven by the feedback we were getting in the app stores. App store people just expect to try stuff for free and don’t like free trials. We can’t get them to read the app description that talks about the free trial period; they just look at stars, download and then leave a nasty review without trying the service. Hopefully this freemium experiment will pay off for us. Initial web signups are promising, but it’s too early to tell!