Box Acquires Crocodoc (YC W10) | Hacker News Reader

Box Acquires Crocodoc (YC W10)

blog.box.com

123 pointsgoronbjorn42 comments

We built a special embeddable viewer for today's announcement using our new HTML5+SVG document viewer: http://box.crocodoc.com/documents-reimagined/

We're looking forward to launching the new version of Crocodoc once things settle down on our end. You can preview how it will work at http://preview.crocodoc.com

Hey! Congrats guys!

On your blog page -- http://blog.crocodoc.com/ -- clicking the top-left logo should take you to your home page.

Thanks for the heads up! Should be working now.

The service isn't being shut down is it? Please tell me you guys are going to stick around.

It's not being shut down :)

Viewing a document on Yammer? That’s Crocodoc. Looking at a resume in Linkedin Recruiter? Crocodoc again. Reviewing an assignment on Edmodo? Crocodoc. Getting directions from Siri? Not Crocodoc. But you get the point.

That statement is funny to me because getting directions from Siri is the only one of those that I've actually ever done.

IIRC, Dropbox uses Crocodoc for their online PDF previews. Might get awkward.

It's a shame, since Crocodoc seemed way better than anything else out there for doing HTML5 previews.

I was hoping that Dropbox acquires Crocodoc and use them for online document editing. That would free me from using google docs for anything.

Yea they do, wonder how fast they will drop support for it (and build their own)

CEO of Crocodoc here. Crocodoc's API will remain a stand-alone offering as part of the Box platform, and we're going to be investing heavily in making our service even better! Nothing's going away, and we'll continue to support all of our existing (and new) customers.

This is the way to do it. Not every acquisition means that customers lose.

It is indeed. I believe that their API will remain up and be used by many, but it probably won't be used by DropBox for long. Classy move by their CEO to make it clear that DropBox is welcome to use it.

Is this agreed on, and properly documented? Or is it just your words against Box that very soon will become your owner and can do whatever the hell they want to, including shutting you down (if some insane people are in charge [this happened before]).

Congrats on creating a great product. Add watermarking please!

PDF.js is awesome and works remarkably well.

Does it support .doc, .docx, .ppt, etc?

This is going to sound like I'm trolling you, but pdf.js only supports PDFs. You'll need to convert those other doc types to PDFs before using them with pdf.js.

Can you recommend any tools for this? LibreOffice butchers XLS files.

You can try MS office. If you dont want to buy/install it you can just use the in browser version. All you need is a MS account and you can also export the files as pdf..

An alternative is the embedded version of the Google Docs viewer.

Congrats to Crocodoc! They're one of the hardest working teams I know and totally deserve it.

Thanks, Omar! Getting to share an office with Priceonomics has been grand!

I love seeing these kinds of moments on hacker news. Very inspiring. Congratulations guys :)

Doh. Congrats, but I'm a little worried. We just moved thousands of documents to Crocodoc's platform just a couple of months ago. I'm not really looking forward to having to re-engineer our integration.

I should have seen this coming. You guys have a very awesome product. We shopped around for almost a year and used 2 other platforms before discovering and switching to you guys.

Hi there, co-founder of Crocodoc here. Crocodoc will continue being the best platform for document viewing and collaboration. Box is investing heavily in our platform and will make sure we stay awesome. Any updates to the API going forward should be totally seamless, but if you run into any problems, just give me a ping (I'm Peter). I'll make sure the transition happens smoothly.

Congratulations. It's great that you're keeping the API and service going for everyone, not just Box.

Is there an alternative company you can just subscribe to without having to get a call from their sales guys, if not i'll make the call but ideally I just want to sign up and use it.

I feel like the naming of all these technology startups is finally reaching a point of no return. Out of context, "Box Acquires Crocodoc" sounds like gibberish.

Because "Ford acquires Visteon" sounds better out of context?

"Pfizer acquires Excaliard"

"Nike acquires Umbro"

I wish box had photo synching mobile apps. There was a third party one for Android but it wasn't up to much.

Congrats, Peter and team! :)

Thanks!

Wow! Congratulations guys. Very glad to hear the news.

congrats! We use Crocodoc a lot and their API is amazing as well as their support. All our customers have loved it.

Very sweet. What's the tech here?

I stopped reading at "Documents. Reimagined.".

Is any marketable change these days not a "reimagination"?

How much ?

Congrats on the exit Ryan!

Wooo! Awesome guys!

Congrats guys!

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