ThinkFree vs Scribd

The online office service ThinkFree has launched a new Flash-based document viewer called Uni Paper. It can be embedded to any web page and displays most common office formats: PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The max file size is 5MB. The readers can view and search in a document without the need to download it to desktop. And when you edit this published document in your online ThinkFree account, the changes are reflected in real-time back anywhere the Uni Paper has been embedded or shared. Besides the opportunity of publishing documents on your site, you can add it to ThinkFree public catalog, that can attract additional readers. But ThinkFree's viewer is not so advanced as one in Scribd, Docstoc, Slideshare. For example, it's missing the option to view all the pages of a document at once, and the the directory of publicly shared documents contains very little categorization, or genre-based exploration.

Online office providers EditGrid and ThinkFree announced that soon the EditGrid spreadsheets will be integrated into ThinkFree online office suite and replace the existing native spreadsheet application Quick Edit Calc. Recall that EditGrid - is excel-like application that allows to collaborate on documents in real time like in Google Spreadsheets. It also can import the table data from external sources, such as stock quote sites. In addition to the integration with the really cool application, ThinkFree can expand its presence in the Chinese market (the developer of EditGrid - is the company from Hong Kong)

The online office service ThinkFree has launched a new Flash-based document viewer called Uni Paper. It can be embedded to any web page and displays most common office formats: PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The max file size is 5MB. The readers can view and search in a document without the need to download it to desktop. And when you edit this published document in your online ThinkFree account, the changes are reflected in real-time back anywhere the Uni Paper has been embedded or shared. Besides the opportunity of publishing documents on your site, you can add it to ThinkFree public catalog, that can attract additional readers. But ThinkFree's viewer is not so advanced as one in Scribd, Docstoc, Slideshare. For example, it's missing the option to view all the pages of a document at once, and the the directory of publicly shared documents contains very little categorization, or genre-based exploration.

Drop.io, the file storage and sharing service, has partnered with Scribd to let its users quickly view different types of documents in their account. From now on all supported documents in Drop.io you can see the option to view it online in Scribd’s Flash-based iPaper viewer. Drop.io isn't the first file storage that integrated with Scribd. For example Box.net, a similar service, offers iPaper integration and lets users edit their files using Zoho. It’s possible that Drop.io is aiming for simplicity over a more complete feature set, but allowing for platform-agnostic file editing probably wouldn’t hurt. Other players in this space include Omnidrive and Dropbox.

Scribd - is a service that positions itself as an "YouTube for documents". When you first come to Scribd, you may think that this is another toy for bloggers and communities, but maybe soon it will become a common tool for any business, like Word for example. How businesses are using YouTube? Basically, to present their new products. YouTube - is the most convenient way to publish a business-related video and the most convenient way to view it for your clients. Moreover, YouTube is useful not only as a website, but as a service for publishing the video anywhere. But besides these video-presentations customers sometimes want to view product documentation or company white papers. Usually companies just upload pdf-files on their sites. But believe, when your customer opens a document in Scribd's online viewer, it's a big difference from downloading the pdf file.