Jeff, many thanks for trialling http://www.edocr.com and reviewing the key players in the market place today. It would have even been better if you ranked each of us according to certain criteria – now who would be keen to do this? Perhaps, I should put my analyst hat on and produce a non-bias report.

I am surprised at your criticism of scribd.com, as I thought the piracy issue has been fixed. In our case, we will unpublish any document contested until the publisher proves his/her rights. Fortunately, we have not received a single copyright violation to date. This may be down to the fact, we are much more smaller than our US friends.

Given your analysis of docstoc, we changed “community” to read “groups”. Again, I am surprised that group functionality was not available at Docstoc.

We ourselves had lot of criticism about usability. As most self-funded startups, we have many issues to deal with, and as such, we could not respond to user feedback positively. This was mainly due to team issues, which resulted in no developments taking place since Sept 07 except for minor configurations. We are now trying to address this and expect to have some vital features available in the new year.

In terms of the usability, I must congratulate Trip and the boys at Scribd. They have done a superb job putting everyone else to shame, including ourselves. We were proud of our design layout in Sept 07, when in my opinion, both Scribd and Docstoc look undesirable. Our layouts and design require significant face-lift today.

Going forward, most likely, we will not be competing on Scribd’s and Docstoc’s terms, as the gap has widened (they all have more features and functionality than I could count) and therefore no point in competing directly unless we win the lottery tomorrow. We are looking to carve our own niche. Once we are ready, we will make everyone aware.

Lastly, you may be right in including Slideshare here when compared with Scribd and Docstoc. Slideshare has inspired us more than anyone else, and I hope they will continue to concentrate on slides. However, one of their recent investors refused to speak to us on the grounds of conflict of interest. So, it is probably worth watching the space to see how they spend their $4m or so.

Ironically, everyone on this list except us seem to have raised the magic $4m. Well done, guys. What will we do if we had $4m. Perhaps spend a lot of that looking for a safe bank…Here is some documents on financial crisis http://www.edocr.com/tags/financial-crisis-2008

Best regards, Manoj

Jeff,

thanks for the comments, and yes we are coming out with our groups functionality soon. Please shoot me and email and we’ll feature you on our home page.

All the Best,

Jason, co-founder Docstc