Tag Archives: DocStoc

DocStoc, the online document sharing and collaboration site, has launched a store where you can purchase premium documents. The store looks to have everything from legal templates to white papers. Their goal is admirable – “to become the iTunes of documents.”

As of right now, the site gets over 8M unique visitors a month, which is an increase of 150% since the beginning of the year. It seems like a good time to launch a new venture. DocStoc has partnered with 12 partners for their launch, including Legal Zoom and the Small Business Forum.  But sales are not limited to their business partners. Got a white paper, research paper, or never-published-novel you want to sell? You can apply to sell your own work in the DocStore.

The biggest fear around this, of course, is that people will sell things to which they don’t own the copyright. To help combat this, DocStoc is offering a 100% money-back guarantee on all paid content. They also have what they call Advanced Copyright Filtering, which prevents documents from the DocStore from being uploaded again anywhere on the DocStoc site. That doesn’t quite remove the worry however. According to Jason Nazar, DocStoc CEO, “In general, users can request to sell their content in the DocStore, but they will have to go through an application/approval process where, among other things, we verify that they have the rights to the content they want to sell.”

Along with the store comes a new document viewer for the premium documents. The new viewer limits how much of the document you can preview. Similar to Amazon’s widget that allows you to “See Inside” a small part of a book, the new viewer whets your appetite for the product.

DocStoc’s primary competitor, Scrib’d, launched their online store back in May and inked a deal with Simon & Schuster in June. As a huge fan of e-books and e-docs, I welcome any and all to the marketplace. I look forward to seeing where DocStoc heads next.

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And in the News-That’s-Not-Twitter stack, we’ve got some interesting stuff. Top of the list is that DocStoc has come rushing out of the Beta gates. DocStoc first launched at the TechCrunch 40 conference in September 2007 and has since raised $4 million from several different investors. With the shedding of the Beta tag, they’ve also added a new look and some new features.

New Look
DocStoc now has a full-time content editor whose sole job is to make the front page look rather awesome and timely. The new page has a blog-type feel to it and includes that day’s featured documents and links to outside news sources.

DocCash

You can now make money from all those documents that you upload. Docstoc has partnered with Google Adsense to create DocCash.  Now when you upload documents to Docstoc, you can share 50/50 in the revenue whenever someone clicks on one of the Google Ads on your documents.  DocStoc allows you to associate your current AdSense account with your DocStoc profile and the DocCash program is completely opt-in.

API Release
And rounding out the new features, DocStoc has now publicly released their API. If you’re a developer, you can now access the data on DocStoc for your apps, including access to the document library, proprietary previewing technology, and search results. Some pretty cool apps could be built. DocStoc sent along a list of some of their partners, which include PR Wire and the intriguing Firefox plug-in MashLogic.

This is all great news for DocStoc. Of course, as document sharing gets more popular, they’ll run into the same copyright issues as everything else. I read a NY Times article the other day where several famous sci-fi authors were upset at finding their works on Scrib’d, a similar document sharing service. Hopefully that full-time content editor can also police the copyrights. It will be interesting to see where that road takes us in the next few years.

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by Michelle Lentz

Yesterday, DocStoc debuted a new feature called DocShots. Interactive pop-ups have been popular, one way or another, for a few years now. DocShots takes that one step further.

Link to any document on DocStoc, instead of embedding it, and it will preview in a pop-up window. This free service converts any posted document on your website or blog into a hover-able link that enables instant online document preview. With DocShots, there are no heavy downloads or disruptive wait times.

The pop-up window size is customizable and you have access to many of the standard DocStoc features within the pop-up.

This is technology similar to Snap Shots, where you can hover over a link and view a preview of the external site. It’s easy enough to add DocShots to your site – it’s a snippet of HTML code you drop into your master page or template. You only need to add it once and it will convert your relevant links forever after. You can get your own DocShots code or watch a rather informative YouTube video (also embedded below).

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Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel, Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

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by Michelle Lentz

DocStoc, the online community that lets you share professional documents, is celebrating it’s one year birthday today. In honor of their birthday, they’ve added a new feature that makes DocStoc even easier to use.

You can now upload documents to your docstoc account just by sending an email. All you need to do is email uploads@docstoc.com with the attached document. You’ll receive an e-mail confirmation with a link to the newly uploaded document, at which point you can edit tags, titles, or just grab the embed code for your blog or website.

Docstoc has also released a couple of stats:

- Contributors using Docstoc are uploading an average of 100 documents per user.
- Since the release of Docstoc’s Sync and OneClick features, contribution has grown over 250% per month.

I can only imagine those numbers improving with the easy-to-use email feature.

Email Publishing With Docstoc – Get more Information Technology

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by Michelle Lentz

DocStoc, an easy place to store and share your online documents, announced DocStoc MyDocs and DocStoc Sync.

With the MyDocs feature, you can now create a My Documents folder, like on your PC or even your Mac, in an online location. All of your documents, including DOC, XLS, PPT, and PDF can be stored in MyDocs and accessed anywhere you have Internet access. Your documents can also be marked as public or as private.

Docstoc Sync is a downloadable application that automatically syncs documents from your computer to Docstoc MyDocs. This is a great way to keep your My Documents folder synced between your desktop and the cloud.

Before these additions, DocStoc was a great way to upload and collaborate on documents. With the addition of these new features, DocStoc is now a suite of online collaborative tools and document storage.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.