Mobile document service Soonr gets more collaborative
Soonr, a company that gives users access to their documents (including Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs and PowerPoints, among others) on their mobile phones, is launching version 3.0 of its application today, which adds collaboration and premium services to the mix.
We wrote about Soonr’s iPhone application back in January, when we said it “nails the desktop to cloud to iPhone connection.” Soonr is only one of many services that lets you backup your documents on a company’s servers, then access those documents from your iPhone (plus, in Soonr’s case, more than 800 other mobile devices), but it’s the fastest because it only downloads the data you need, not necessarily the whole document.
Soonr already supported some lightweight collaboration, mainly by allowing multiple users to comment on a document. Collaboration is a bigger focus with the new release, says chief executive Martin Frid-Nelson, with a Projects area for collaboration within a team that goes beyond individual documents and an administrative system for managing that collaboration. Other new features include the ability to fax documents from a phone through eFax accounts, to search across devices and computers, and to play videos.
The Campbell, Calif. company is also starting to charge for its services. The standard version of Soonr, which includes up to five online workspaces and 2 gigabytes of storage, is still free, but it’s adding Premium and Pro accounts that provide more storage and workspaces, starting at $7.95 per month.
Soonr has raised a total of $18.5 million from Cisco Systems, Clearstone Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and others.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.