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Definitely not the first. Vuzit has been offering a non-flash document viewer for years. http://www.vuzit.com.

Ryan from Crocodoc here. It is fair to say that we're not the first non-Flash document viewer -- there are some really solid image-based viewers like Vuzit who have been around a lot longer than we have.

What we are the first to do is leverage new HTML5/CSS3 standards like SVG and text transformations to create a fully embeddable document viewer that renders text natively and has built-in commenting, markup, and PDF export functionality.

You can compare the two different approaches used on the same document here:

http://www.vuzit.com/blog/2010/10/vuzit-now-supports-tight-i... (see embedded viewer under bullet #3)

http://crocodoc.com/uzvIYS

They do offer PDF export functionality and annotations, but yes, I can see where crocodoc has some nice advantages, possibly. I'm not associated with Vuzit, but I am a user, so I don't necessarily know how they would respond to this.

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