Last April, OfficeDrop raised $1 million in angel funding for its online solution that allows people to take all the paper documents cluttering their offices, scan them, then manage, organize, and store them in the cloud. With its round of angel funding, OfficeDrop set out to work on the development of mobile apps, and has since launched both iPhone and iPad apps that turns your Apple and Android devices into a scanner.
Among other things, these apps allow users to take a picture of a recept when on a trip and send it their expense folders in OfficeDrop’s cloud “filing cabinet.” These apps also allow users to search documents on their phone, pulling up a receipt you scanned four months ago. OfficeDrop is hardly the only app that turns your mobile device into a scanner (as you can see here), and these set of apps can be judged based on how much functionality they offer in post-scan image editing, whether they offer search text within a PDF, and can integrate with services like Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Docs.
Today, OfficeDrop wants to bring its mobile functionality back to the desktop, as it is announcing updates to its ScanDrop Mac and ScanDrop Lite apps (ScanDrop Lite is free) that let any Mac user integrate scanned paper with digital screenshots to create multi-age, searchable PDFs. But what’s really cool about this is that, with a single click, users can now share these scanned docs via social networks or store them in Evernote, Dropbox, OfficeDrop, and Google Docs.
ScanDrop works with the majority of Mac scanners available on the market, so once a user scans and creates a document, users now have the option of sharing text-searchable PDFs with unique links that sends them directly to recipients’ email addresses, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, Tumblr, and Amazon Wish Lists, to name a few.
Since ScanDrop is compatible with online cloud filing services like Dropbox, Google Docs, etc, users can drop their OfficeDrop PDF files into their accounts and share them with just about anyone, from anywhere. Users also tend to create documents to send not only by scanning hardcopies of documents into their computer, but also by taking screen shots — and these can also be converted into text-searchable PDFs.
Thus, within ScanDrop, users can merge scans, screenshots, and image files into a single, multi-page PDF to then share as they choose. If a user scans a receipt, he or she can then grab a screenshot of a corresponding spreadsheet of receipts and share that as a single PDF document through Facebook or Twitter, for example. (With ScanDrop Lite, there’s simply a limit on how many files you can scan and share.)
While there are many popular screenshot tools, like Skitch, they tend to lock users into whatever storage system they’re affiliated with. (Skitch was bought by Evernote last year.) OfficeDrop is therefore trying to break down these barriers so that you can share scans and screenshots anywhere with anyone — right from your desktop or mobile device.
The team told TechCrunch that the service has grown from 7,000 active users in 2010 to 80,000 active users at the end of 2011, with 9-fold growth in year-over-year revenues over the same period. Combined with OfficeDrop’s apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android phones that turn devices into scanners, ScanDrop is a nifty complement, making the total service pretty useful for all of your scanning, screenshotting, and storage needs.
For more, check out OfficeDrop at home here.
