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Posts Tagged ‘Free Users’

Adobe’s Acrobat.com comes to smartphones

Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: It’s releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobe’s (as well as Google Docs and the upcoming web versions of Microsoft Office) is the ability to access your documents anywhere. Now Acrobat.com users can not only read and share files from their phones, but also upload documents and send faxes.

Acrobat.com started out as a free service, but in June it launched premium versions, where users pay for web meetings and the ability to create PDF documents. The mobile app follows that model. Free users can send two faxes and upload up to five documents from their phone each month, but if you want to do more, you’ll have to upgrade to a pay version.

The other major improvement is the creation of a central environment to view all your files in Acrobat.com, rather than having to view all your documents in Buzzword, all your spreadsheets in Tables, and all your presentations in, uh, Presentations. This may be what Product Manager Erik Larson was referring to when I asked him in June about future improvements, and he said, “I don’t necessarily think presentations, spreadsheets, documents are these three separate things, even though I know that’s the way the world thinks right now.”

The new version of Acrobat.com will launch at 3am Pacific on Saturday, Nov. 21. Larson told me in June that the site has 5 million registered users. (I’ve asked for more recent numbers and will update if I receive them.)

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Card.ly: Lightweight Personal Microsites from Three Guys with Three Weeks and Five Hundred Bucks

We’ve all seen a great deal lately of two trends: Personal website creation made simple (here’s our favorite four resources of the moment) and social media aggregation services that pool all a user’s streams and networking information.

Today, TinyChat creator Dan Blake along with cohorts Oliver Turbis and Joshua Gigg have announced the launch of a new freemium-model service that combines good-looking personal sites with users’ existing social media data, and all in a mercifully lightweight format that’s as easy to digest as it is quick to set up. Although the service, called Card.ly, is reminiscent of Retaggr or Chi.mp, it humbles the competition by delivering a simpler, more focused result. Blake et al. apparently understand the old adage, “Less is more.”

Sponsor

The team took about three weeks and spent $500 to create Card.ly, according to an email from Turbis this evening. The monetization strategy is simple enough: Free users are given an array of incentives to upgrade to reasonably priced premium accounts. For $24.99 a year, users have access to more/better “skins” or page themes, analytics and SEO features, and an unlimited number of networks and RSS feeds in each profile.

The Card.ly team is also appealing to designers/developers by asking for skin submissions; each skin can then become a source of revenue for the designers as users select and purchase their skins.

Creating this “card,” in reality a four-page microsite, took about ten minutes:

The pages are small and simple, and the range of free skins is appealing:

Turbis told us soon, users will be able to create their own skins for their pages from the ground up without having to submit them to the community. Also coming soon is an embeddable widget:

As far as startups go, this team definitely kept it small and simple – a lesson other companies should learn well. We hope they’re able to see great results for this effort.

Discuss

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