Do you know about Scribd and ipaper?

March 20, 2008

I happened across this amazing start-up recently and immediately fell in love. Scribd describes itself as a “Silicon Valley startup creating technology that makes it easy to share documents online”and goes on to say that you can think of it “as a big online library where everyone can publish original content”.

I believe that this iPaper is excellent for businesses because it allows you to present whitepapers, presentations and outlines of your services right on a web page using flash instead of expecting a person to download a PDF, WORD document or PowerPoint presentation. I can see why they managed to secure funding from Y Combinator, Redpoint Ventures and others - they are unto something.

The ability to browse and search public documents only adds to the utility - go to scribd categories and search for “business plan template” and you will understand how it can be useful for an entrepreneur.Now imagine a high school student working on a paper, or looking for old exam papers to practice - the potential applications and amazing. A whole community is springing up around these documents and they even allow the embedding of ads so that publishers can earn some revenue. I can’t wait to search for some books and take a read.I uploaded my first document - my presentation from the Global Reggae Conference last month at UWI in Jamaica.

While there is no audio to go with it and actually explain my slides and go into the detail I did, it still is easy to understand. The ability to embed this presentation anywhere and a link to download a pdf version is excellent. Naturally the biggest drawback with flash is that search engine spiders can’t index the content but the tagging helps to address that issue somewhat. Take a look at my presentation below and drop me a line if you sign on and start uploading your own content. I plan to spend the weekend converting a bunch of my documents to add them to my company website to better explain some of our services.