Crocodoc (YC W10) Makes It A Snap To Share And Mark Up Documents | Hacker News Reader

Crocodoc (YC W10) Makes It A Snap To Share And Mark Up Documents

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74 pointsrdamico29 comments

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).

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.

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!

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Well, rendering complex PDF files through html/javascript is considerably more difficult than using, what I presume to be, native adobe library in flash to read and edit PDF documents.

At least with PDF files. That's what I tried, and the rendering is flawless. I haven't seen a PDF -> HTML/JS conversion that actually produces usable results, yet.

I'm a developer with Crocodoc. We can get very high fidelity document rendering using Flash. We tried out a few PDF -> HTML converters and none of them offered the level of fidelity and accuracy that we were looking for.

I think it boils down to one question: When given the chance, would you go for the no-Flash JS tool? I guess they decided people don't actually despise Flash that much.

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?

"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.

Agreed re: #1. Anyone who's taken an intro-level security course or had any experience with webdev can tell you that "unguessable" is beyond being an oxymoron - it's a running joke. There's no such thing as security through obscurity.

Of course, they do offer password protection for Pro users, and if they're using SSL that's great too; I just feel like "unguessable" is not the best word to use when discussing any aspect of an app's security.

As an aside: the <del>mark up</del><ins>review</ins> tagline is fantastic! Really clever.

On point 1 above: self-hosting is not necessarily the answer either. It really depends on the underlying architecture.

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.

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

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

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.

(doc,ppt)->pdf->flash ?

OpenOffice, perhaps?

Or this? http://poi.apache.org/

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. :(

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

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.

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.

Congratulations and good luck crocodoc team!

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)

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.

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