

Crocodoc (YC W10) Makes It A Snap To Share And Mark Up Documents - rdamico
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/25/yc-funded-crocodoc-makes-it-a-snap-to-share-and-mark-up-documents/

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mnemonicsloth
I wonder if students would use this to read notes/textbooks cooperatively?

I can't count the number of times I've wasted half an hour trying to figure
out WTF an author or professor is talking about, only to learn two pages later
that I was hung up on an over-generalized equation, badly-worded
simplification, or similar. One yellow sticky note in the margin that said
"gets more specific 2pgs later" --which a lot of readers would pencil in for
themselves anyway-- could save man-years of time over the life of a text.

It would be useful for authors too. Teaching documents usually have a feedback
cycle measured in years (if the loop is ever closed at all), whereas this
would allow them to access their readers collective impressions almost
immediately.

You could start by adding publicly-available PDF textbooks like:

<http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/>

<http://diestel-graph-theory.com/>

<http://www.plasma.uu.se/CED/Book/>

(I'm sure there other open texts out there that are less wonky, of course.
This is just what's on my menu).

~~~
peterlai
Thanks for this idea! My Thesis adviser helped a few professors at MIT review
chapters of their textbooks before they were set for publication. I'm going to
email him asking if any of his peers are still in the review process. Do you
have any suggestions yourself for who I should contact? I sit behind
support@crocodoc.com if you do.

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gkoberger
I found it interesting they used Flash- it seems like all their features could
have been done using JavaScript.

While Flash almost certainly works better in this situation, I wonder how it
affects their odds of an acquisition. Is "increasing chances of acquisition"
important or talked about at YC?

Scribd uses Flash (and their document viewer looks a lot like Scribd, another
YC company- is it the same code, or just a homage?), however it seems to me
the features would be more at home at Google Docs or Zoho.

Either way, awesome startup- it was incredibly easy to use, and did exactly
what it said it would. Well done, and congrats!

~~~
benologist
"how it affects their odds of an acquisition"

My guess is it'll affect it as much as their decision to use a gif for their
logo instead of a png.

~~~
sunchild
I disagree. A Flash-based presentation layer is a liability, since it's
vendor-locked.

~~~
benologist
Almost everybody is building on a platform they don't really control. Notables
include Facebook, iPhone, Windows, OSX, .NET, Wii, XBox, PlayStation ... even
open source is only technically under your control since it's out of the
question for most people to maintain and continue developing whatever they use
in a worst-case scenario.

~~~
sunchild
That's silly: if it's an open standard, I can migrate off of it. If it's a
single-vendor closed alternative to open web protocols, I'd be worried. Now
that at least one very popular browser has no Flash support, I'd also worry
about that.

~~~
benologist
You can migrate off a closed platform as well. There's nothing to stop them
moving to an open technology or another closed technology or not moving at all
in the future, as long as their needs are met.

And you're looking at just one little layer of the vendor lock in, whether
open or closed platforms you can be tied to a number of different vendors.

------
sunchild
A few criticisms from someone who has tried everything in this market:

1\. Security is a weak point. From their FAQ:

"Documents uploaded to crocodoc are assigned a unique, unguessable URL (e.g.
<http://crocodoc.com/gQlo2g>), which you can selectively share with others you
wish to collaborate with.

For added security, crocodoc Pro users have the option of password-protecting
their documents, which are uploaded and viewed using bank-grade SSL
encryption. Companies interested in running crocodoc behind their firewall can
contact us to request more information on intranet deployments."

This is insufficient security for any serious business application. Nothing
about data encryption at rest. Nothing about link expiration. Nothing about
the authentication used for password protection. Running behind a firewall has
nothing to do with the security of data once it is transmitted.

2\. The format seems to be proprietary. Call me crazy, but if I'm investing
the time and energy into marking up documents, I want to take them away in a
portable, editable format. Maybe I missed this point on their site?

~~~
jamesbritt
"2. The format seems to be proprietary. Call me crazy, but if I'm investing
the time and energy into marking up documents, I want to take them away in a
portable, editable format. Maybe I missed this point on their site?"

Oh, excellent point. I was just trying out the site, and it's quite
impressive. But you're comment was something that completely slipped my mind.

For my purposes I'll eventually want a local copy of the document with all the
additions. The FAQ says nothing about this.

Also, I was editing a document in 3 different browsers to see how it handled
multiple users. I didn't see any automatic updating, like how Google Docs
shows other edits in near real-time among my changes.

I had to refresh the browser to see the new state of the file. I can see that
creating assorted cross-editing problems.

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ashishbharthi
Hosted document management is still not quite popular within big enterprises.
It will be worth to make non hosted solution available with MS Office
integration.

~~~
vegashacker
According to the article there's a version that companies can install
themselves on their own servers.

~~~
ashishbharthi
I just skimmed through article and missed that. I think they are on the right
track then.

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markbao
Awesome. How do you guys convert binary DOC/PPT files to files you can work
with? If I remember correctly, the only way to do it was to convert it on a
Windows system.

~~~
tlrobinson
OpenOffice, perhaps?

~~~
sunchild
Or this? <http://poi.apache.org/>

~~~
jamesbritt
I hope not. In a quest for Linux-usable tools for manipulating Word docs I
gave POI a shot, and with even moderately complex documents the results were
horrible.

Running Word on an EC2 instance of Windows Server looked to be my best option.
:(

~~~
sunchild
I suspected as much. Microsoft seems to have started from the GUI and worked
their way down to an API.

~~~
jamesbritt
The Word API is really quite handy, and scripting it using Ruby (for example)
is easy and effective. On win32.

Reading their binary format, though, is another matter.

~~~
sunchild
Yeah, but it: (a) requires paid licenses, and (b) runs on a troublesome OS.
It's also an absurd waste of time and resources just to convert a text format.
I'd just as soon run it through Google Docs and scrape the result, etc.

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eam
Congratulations and good luck crocodoc team!

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andrewcooke
nice idea. imh(and completely uneducated)o the front page is perhaps a little
more cluttered than it need be. there's two links to feedback (one via a
menu), two to the faq, etc. you could probably get rid of either the grey
bottom bar or the drop-down menu (perhaps even both if you tried really hard
:o)

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joshu
Congrats guys!

I met with the team a few hours after their launch on TC. Phone bleeped;
they'd gotten their first paying customer! Exciting.

