Scribd
Encyclopedia
Scribd is a Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

 based document-sharing website which allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format. Scribd was founded by Trip Adler
Trip Adler
John R. "Trip" Adler III, is an American entrepreneurwho is best known for starting the social publishing companyScribd. Adler grew up in Palo Alto, California, and thenattended Harvard University where he studied biophysics and...

, Tikhon Bernstam, and Jared Friedman in 2006. Scribd's major competitors are Docstoc
Docstoc
Docstoc is an electronic document repository and online store, aimed at the business community.Although Docstoc operates in a way that is superficially similar to other online document retailer sites such as Scribd, its emphasis is on technical, legal and business documentation...

, edocr, WePapers
WePapers
wePapers is a document-sharing website, geared mainly towards college and university students, although fully accessible by anyone. wePapers allows users to share and find documents within various academic fields...

, and Issuu
Issuu
Issuu is an online service that allows for realistic and customizable viewing of digitally uploaded material, such as portfolios, books, magazine issues, newspapers, and other print media. It integrates with social networking sites to promote uploaded material. Issuu's service is comparable to what...

.

History

The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Trip Adler
Trip Adler
John R. "Trip" Adler III, is an American entrepreneurwho is best known for starting the social publishing companyScribd. Adler grew up in Palo Alto, California, and thenattended Harvard University where he studied biophysics and...

 was at
Harvard and had a conversation with his father, John R. Adler
John R. Adler
John R. Adler M.D. is a neurosurgeon, the Dorothy and Thye King Chan Endowed Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and Vice Chair for Innovation and Technology in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine.Clinically, Dr. Adler...

 about the difficulties
of publishing academic papers. He teamed up with cofounders
Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstam and they attended Y Combinator
Y Combinator
Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year...


in Cambridge in the summer of 2006. Scribd was launched from a San
Francisco apartment in March 2007 and quickly grew in traffic. In
2008, it ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according
to Comscore. In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store, and
shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...

 to sell
ebooks on Scribd. Over 150 professional publishers including Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

, Wiley
John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and...

, Workman, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson
Pearson PLC
Pearson plc is a global media and education company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is both the largest education company and the largest book publisher in the world, with consumer imprints including Penguin, Dorling Kindersley and Ladybird...

, Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...

 and Stanford University Press
Stanford University Press
The Stanford University Press is the publishing house of Stanford University. In 1892, an independent publishing company was established at the university. The first use of the name "Stanford University Press" in a book's imprinting occurred in 1895...

 are now associated with Scribd. ProQuest
ProQuest
ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based electronic publisher and microfilm publisher.It provides archives of sources such as newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, and aggregated databases of many types. Its content is estimated at 125 billion digital pages...

 began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December 2009.

In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

, Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...

, The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...

, TechCrunch
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....

 and MediaBistro.
Over 100 media companies now use Scribd’s branded reader to embed source material into their stories. In August 2010, news stories began to break and documents and books began to go viral on Scribd including the overturned Prop 8 and HP’s lawsuit against Mark Hurd’s move to Oracle
Oracle
In Classical Antiquity, an oracle was a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods. As such it is a form of divination....

.

Adler is currently the CEO of Scribd, where
he is responsible for the product and strategic direction of the
company. BusinessWeek
BusinessWeek
Bloomberg Businessweek, commonly and formerly known as BusinessWeek, is a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P. It is currently headquartered in New York City.- History :...

 named Adler one of the “Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010”.

Awards/recognition

In September 2009, BusinessWeek
BusinessWeek
Bloomberg Businessweek, commonly and formerly known as BusinessWeek, is a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P. It is currently headquartered in New York City.- History :...

named Scribd one the “World’s Most Intriguing Startups”. In December 2009, Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...

 named Scribd one of its “10 Hot Startups”.
Fast Company
Fast Company (magazine)
Fast Company is a full-color business magazine that releases 10 issues per year and reports on topics including innovation, digital media, technology, change management, leadership, design, and social responsibility...

 Named Scribd “One of its Top 10 Most Innovative Media Companies” in February 2010.

In May 2010, Scribd was recognized as one of the “2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies” by Lead411.

On September 1, 2010, the World Economic Forum
World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva, best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland....

 announced the company as a Technology Pioneer for 2011. After the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Award, Time Magazine named Scribd one of the “10 Start-Ups that Will Change Your Life”.

Timeline

In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones.
In April 2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast" which allows automatic sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter. Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its integration of Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 social plug-ins at the f8 Developer Conference.
Scribd rolled-out a re-design on September 13, 2010 to become according to TechCrunch
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....

, “the social network for reading.”

Financials

The company was initially funded with US$12,000 from Y Combinator
Y Combinator
Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year...

, and received over US$3.7 million in June 2007 from Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures is a prominent venture capital firm focused on investments in early stage technology companies. The firm's partners include Allen Beasley, Jeff Brody, Satish Dharmaraj, Tom Dyal, Tim Haley, Brad Jones, Nety Krishna, Chris Moore, Lars Pedersen, Scott Raney, John Walecka, Geoff...

 and The Kinsey Hills Group. In December 2008, the company raised US$9 million in a second round of funding, led by Charles River Ventures
Charles River Ventures
Charles River Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology and new media companies.The firm, which is based in Waltham, Massachusetts and Menlo Park, California, was founded in 1970 to commercialise research that came out of MIT...

 with re-investment from Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group, and hired as president George Consagra, former Bebo
Bebo
Bebo is a social networking website launched in July 2005. It is currently owned and operated by Criterion Capital Partners after taking over from AOL in June 2010....

 COO
Chief operating officer
A Chief Operating Officer or Director of Operations can be one of the highest-ranking executives in an organization and comprises part of the "C-Suite"...

 and managing director of Organic Inc. Consagra left Scribd and became CEO of Good Guide in August 2010.

David O. Sacks, former PayPal
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....

 COO and founder of Yammer
Yammer
Yammer is an enterprise social network service that was launched in September 2008. Unlike Twitter, which is used for broadcasting messages to the public, Yammer is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups, making it an example...

 and Geni
Geni.com
Geni is a genealogy and social networking website. Launched on January 16, 2007, the Web 2.0 company aims to create a family tree of the world. While family profiles are private, Geni’s mission is to create a shared family tree of common ancestors...

, joined Scribd’s board of directors in January 2010. Scribd hired Robert Macdonald, former head of media and publisher partnerships at Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, in July 2010 as its SVP of business development and opened a New York office. Scribd also utilizes Google Advertisements
AdSense
Google AdSense which is a program run by Google Inc. allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to automatically serve text, image, video, and rich media adverts that are targeted to site content and audience. These adverts are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google, and they...

 for revenue generation. It also makes revenue from Scribd Store sales. In August 2010 it began beta testing premium services.

Prior to the $9 million round, Scribd was valued at $10 million. Their current valuation is likely much higher.

Technology

Scribd uses iPaper which is a rich document format similar to PDF built for the web, which allows users to embed documents into a web page. iPaper was built with Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...

, allowing it to be viewed the same across different operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash installed (although Scribd has announced non-Flash support for the iPhone). All major document types can be formatted into iPaper including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument
OpenDocument
The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....

 documents, OpenOffice.org XML
OpenOffice.org XML
OpenOffice.org XML is an open XML-based file format developed as an open community effort by Sun Microsystems and other OpenOffice.org project contributors in 2000-2002. The open-source software application suite OpenOffice.org 1.x and StarOffice 6 used the format as their native and default file...

 documents, and PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

 files.

All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be private or open to the larger Scribd community. The iPaper document viewer is also embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple to embed documents in their original layout regardless of file format.

Scribd iPaper requires that Flash cookies are enabled, which is the default setting in Flash. If the requirements are not met, there is no message; the white or gray display area is simply blank.

Scribd launched its own API to power external/third-party applications, however, only a few applications use this API.
Its revenue model has gained coverage on numerous blogs such as TechCrunch
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....

.

On May 5, 2010, Scribd launched the largest implementation of HTML5 to date at the Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

 Conference in San Francisco.
TechCrunch reported that Scribd is migrating away from Flash to HTML5. "Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”" In July 2010 Publishers Weekly wrote a cover story on Scribd entitled “Betting the House on HTML5.”

Reception

Scribd has been received positively by several commentators. Scribd has been praised by several newspapers and has been dubbed as the potential "YouTube for documents".

Notable users of Scribd include Virginia senator Mark Warner
Mark Warner
Mark Robert Warner is an American politician and businessman, currently serving in the United States Senate as the junior senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is a member of the Democratic Party. Warner was the 69th governor of Virginia from 2002 to 2006 and is the honorary chairman of...

. Former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman
Meg Whitman
Margaret Cushing "Meg" Whitman is an American business executive. She is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett-Packard. A native of Long Island, New York, she is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School...

, New York Times DealBook reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a Gerald Loeb Award-winning American journalist, author and television personality. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times...

, All Things D Reporter Kara Swisher
Kara Swisher
Kara Swisher is an American technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and an author and commentator on the Internet....

, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

 (FCC), Red Cross, UNICEF, World Economic Forum
World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva, best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland....

, The World Bank, Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company is an American multinational automaker based in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The automaker was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. In addition to the Ford and Lincoln brands, Ford also owns a small stake in Mazda in Japan and Aston Martin in the UK...

, HewlettPackard, and Samsung
Samsung
The Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea...

.

Scribd has currently more than 50 million users and it hosts more than tens of millions of documents. Scribd's documents are embedded more than 10 million times across the web and more than 1.8 million searches are conducted on Scribd's website everyday.

Criticism

Scribd has often been accused of copyright infringement. In March 2009 Scribd launched a copyright management system and has made upgrades to the system including the addition of OCR. The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

reported in May 2009 that Scribd hosted pirated works by authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author. She has written novels, poetry, children's books, essays, and short stories, notably in fantasy and science fiction...

.

In September 2009 American author Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd "shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors." Her attorneys Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara
Kiwi Camara
Kiwi Alejandro Danao Camara , also known as K.A.D. Camara, is a Filipino American attorney. In 2001, he became the youngest person to matriculate at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 2004. He was also involved in a racial controversy at the school that attracted...

 sought class action status in their efforts to win damages from Scribd for allegedly "egregious copyright infringement."
On May 11, 2009, Motoko Rich, writing in the New York Times, reported on Scribd hosting pirated works. Sibley Camara filed a class action lawsuit against Scribd, accusing it of calculated copyright infringement for profit. The suit was dropped in July 2010.

Since its inception Scribd has been served with 25 DMCA take down notices.

Controversy

In March 2009 the passwords of several Comcast
Comcast
Comcast Corporation is the largest cable operator, home Internet service provider, and fourth largest home telephone service provider in the United States, providing cable television, broadband Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers in 39 states and the...

 customers were leaked on Scribd. The passwords were later removed when the news was published by The New York Times.

In July 2010, GigaOM
GigaOM
GigaOM is a Web 2.0 blog started by Om Malik and published by Giga Omni Media, Inc. in San Francisco, California. According to the company website it has a monthly global audience of 500,000. It is among the top 50 blogs worldwide by Technorati Rank, and is listed on CNet's Blog 100 list...

 reported that the script of “The Social Network
The Social Network
The Social Network is a 2010 American drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, the film portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits...

” movie was uploaded and leaked on Scribd and promptly taken down per Sony’s DMCA request.

In August 2010, Scribd began beta testing premium services including the Scribd Archive. The test was met with minor community backlash leading Scribd to make changes to its policies. Now when trying to download almost any document from Scribd, users are asked to pay for it first via their premium content service.

Supported file formats

Supported formats include:
  • Microsoft Excel
    Microsoft Excel
    Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

     (.xls, .xlsx)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
    Microsoft PowerPoint
    Microsoft PowerPoint, usually just called PowerPoint, is a non-free commercial presentation program developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite, and runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X operating system...

     (.ppt, .pps, .pptx)
  • Microsoft Word
    Microsoft Word
    Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...

     (.doc, .docx)
  • OpenDocument
    OpenDocument
    The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....

     (.odt, .odp, .ods)
  • OpenOffice.org XML
    OpenOffice.org XML
    OpenOffice.org XML is an open XML-based file format developed as an open community effort by Sun Microsystems and other OpenOffice.org project contributors in 2000-2002. The open-source software application suite OpenOffice.org 1.x and StarOffice 6 used the format as their native and default file...

     (.sxw, .sxi, .sxc)
  • Plain text
    Plain text
    In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text....

     (.txt)
  • Portable document format
    Portable Document Format
    Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....

     (.pdf)
  • PostScript
    PostScript
    PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

     (.ps
    .ps
    .ps is the Internet country code top-level domain ccTLD officially designated for the Palestinian territories.It is administered by the Palestinian National Internet Naming Authority.Registrations are processed via certified registrars....

    )
  • Rich text format
    Rich Text Format
    The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange....

     (.rtf)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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