WatchDox offers a more modern form of document security, raising $12 million to keep enterprise documents protected as they are shared on the go.

As employees work from their mobile devices, they often need to access, share, and control information from outside their organizations’ protected network. WatchDox’s platform provides “document-centric security.” Features include the ability to track shared documents, restrict recipients from copying, editing, and forwarding, setting expiration dates, applying watermarks, and change document permissions at any time.

The Document Exchange solution tracks all protected documents that come through email and there are various extensions that integrate with enterprise systems and APIs. Organizations can also set up specific Workspaces for sensitive, structured interactions, such as deal rooms and clinical trials. More than 500 enterprises around the world use WatchDox, including major financial institutions, government agencies, and Fortune 500 corporations.

This round of financing will help WatchDox expand its footprint in the financial services, pharmaceutical, biotech, legal, energy, manufacturing, insurance, and government markets. It also supported the acquisition of InstallFree in December,a developer of technology that makes applications accessible across devices.

Millennium Technology Value Partners, which provides “alternate liquidity solutions” participated in this round, along with existing investors Blackstone, Gemini Israel Funds, Shasta Ventures, and cofounder of Check Point and Imperva Shlomo Kramer.

WatchDox has raised $35 million to date. It is based in Palo Alto.  Read the press release. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Slick conference calling app UberConference has integrated its service with hot startups Evernote and Box, a sign it’s dedicated to making conference calling smarter and more useful.

UberConference’s goal is to make conference calls not as painful as they usually are with cloud-based software. It recently launched an enterprise-class version of its offering and new iPhone and Android apps. Now it is lining up partners to make the experience better.

“The direction we’re going is to be more collaborative,” Craig Walker, CEO of UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, told me while demoing the new features. “We’re always asking ‘How can we make this more powerful?’ We’re excited to be partnered with these two great companies.”

With Box or Evernote integrated into the software, workers can collaboratively edit documents while on a conference call and then share the results with team members. At the end of a call, links to the notes and files used during the meeting are included in the call summary. Notably, UberConference is one of the first partners to integrate with Evernote Business. Walker said he will likely add Box and Evernote support to its mobile apps eventually.

On top of adding handy Box and Evernote Business integration, the UberConference team has also added international calling support for more than 40 countries across Europe, South America, and Asia. Basically, the company has made it so if you are located another country besides the U.S., you don’t have to pay for often-expensive rates for international calling to the U.S. Instead, you’re able to dial an in-country local number to get into a conference. International support only works for UberConference paid accounts.

Walker said the company’s next big additions will likely be a full-fledged iPad app and a native app for Android tablets.

UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, based in Pleasanton, Calif., has raised $18 million to date from top tier investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company is also the brains behind the apps NoshList, Nosh, and Jotly.

Photo via UberConference

Allison purchased his first home at the young age of 17 and found out quickly how much paperwork can complicate the process. I had a similar experience helping my mom buy a house a few years ago — paperwork was emailed, printed, signed, scanned, and emailed or faxed between at least three people. Trying to follow the paper trail would make anyone dizzy.

DotLoop tries to cut down on all physical paperwork by creating one space, called a loop, where people can collaborate on documents. Especially in the negotiation process, this cuts down on the time spent sending documents back and forth.

“A loop is a virtual workspace in real-time, [it's like] Google Docs but with more permissions and versioning,” said Allison in an interview with VentureBeat.

Real estate agents, loan officers, and home buyers can all access a document together to hammer out the details of the deal. Once everyone approves a contract or loan document, it can be printed, signed, and processed.

Document sharing is a popular feature seen in Google Docs and Zoho Writer, services used a lot in small businesses. DotLoop only serves the real estate industry and offers a secure place for sensitive document sharing. It plans to expand into other industries in the future.

“Our vision is bigger than real estate, [we want to] eliminate paperwork in all fields,” Allison noted.

With the funding, led by Trinity Ventures, DotLoop is launching a free version of its service for individual real estate agents. It’s been serving entire real estate firms until now. It is also moving west from its headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio to open an office in San Francisco.

Raining paperwork image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile printing application Breezy announced today that it is releasing an iPhone app and a GPS printing tool that can seek out nearby partnered printers and send out a print request.

Those in desperate need of a quick print job can choose a printer from one of Breezy’s thousand-ish partners that will print out the document. Some partners charge for print jobs, some don’t, but the user will have to pay whatever the partner charges when they pick up the document, Breezy chief executive Jared Hansen told VentureBeat.

Free Breezy users — who previous to today’s announcements could already print documents with a branded watermark from Blackberry phones — will also have to pay a convenience fee to use the GPS-enabled service. Premium users, who pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee that removes a watermark from all printed documents, won’t have to pay anything.

“There’ll be almost 1,000 locations online as of tomorrow and a couple thousand more coming online in the next few months,” Hansen said. “Any small business that wants to join the network can do so by just downloading our software for free.”

The company also experimented with creating a Facebook Credit-style system that would make Breezy users buy Credits for printing documents that would automatically pay the partners. But the company’s partners told Breezy that the process was frustrating and they still wanted to have a direct relationship with the customers, Hansen said. So they ended up killing the plan.

Breezy went with developing an iPhone application instead of an Android application because that’s where most of the demand for a mobile printing app exists, Hansen said. The company started work on the app several months ago — back when it wasn’t immediately clear that iOS devices like the iPad would come to dominate the mobile enterprise device market.

“For a while I thought Android would take off first in the enterprise; it seems that has not happened and that’s been pretty fortunate for us,” Hansen said. “There are a lot of nice solutions for Android that aren’t as well-developed on iOS yet.”

The new iPhone application is much slicker than the Blackberry application because there are lots of graphical features you can implemented on iOS devices that you can’t implement on the Blackberry. The company started with a Blackberry application because those phones dominate the enterprise, Hansen said. The company is working on an Android application that should be available sometime later this year.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Online document sharing site Scribd announced today that it is releasing Float, a mobile application that pulls content from news and content websites and lays it out in a homogenous reading format.

“The things online that you read aren’t just your PDFs or slide shows, [they include] news content and everything else — we want to bring those in with the content you publish and make it a consistent reading experience,” Matt Riley, Scribd’s director of products, told VentureBeat.

The app pulls important photos, the byline and text from stories produced by sites partnered with Scribd. It then displays it in a vertical reading format that embeds photos throughout the text. iPhone owners can then scroll down to continue reading a story, or swipe left or right to advance to the next part of the story as they would with an e-reader like the Nook or Kindle.

“You’ll find your favorite websites and put them on your main page, and we pull all the content in from the sites,” Riley said. “We try to provide a nice, clean reading experience for content on your phone — we strip out external links and strip out the ads.”

Readers can pinch to magnify the text or shrink it. Rather than zooming in on the text, which makes it a little less unsightly on the eyes, the app re-renders the text in a larger or smaller format. So it still looks crisp and propagates through to the rest of the article very quickly. The app aggressively caches content on the phone, and renders the rest of the story while the reader is on one part of the story, Riley said.

Another cool feature is the “night-time” reading feature, which changes the text to white on a black background and is easier to read in low-light environments without straining your eyes. Users can also bookmark content to a “reading list” similar to Instapaper — those articles are downloaded to the phone and users can read them offline.

Users can log in with an existing Scribd account or log in directly with Facebook. Users can also connect a Twitter account and see a “reading view” of their Twitter timelines. The app downloads the content from a connected link on a Twitter feed and displays it like other stories.

The whole experience feels very polished, save for split-second slowdowns when trying to zoom or shrink text. The app stuttered slightly when re-rendering text in a demonstration at Scribd’s headquarters on an iPhone 4 — which is currently the top-of-the-line smartphone that carries the app.

The app already syncs up to news content producers like Fortune, Time, Wired, The Associated Press and CNET. The company doesn’t plan on releasing a software developer kit to let individual sites add their content to the Float app. It will roll Float out to other sites over time, Riley said. Any content published on Scribd will also be available on the Float app.

“We’re starting off at launch with over 150 publishing partners who we’ve worked with proactively that are happy with putting their content in our [app],” Riley said. “We’re looking to the fall to add more premium partners.”

The application is available for free on the Apple App Store today. The company will release an iPad version fo the Float reader app next, and it will be available for Android devices later this year. Scribd is based in San Francisco, Calif. It has around 75 million users.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Evernote today released a complete overhaul of the iPhone version of its popular Web-based note-taking software.  Evernote 4 has new features to organize written, spoken or photographed notes on an iPhone.

Evernote 4, available in Apple’s App Store, gives the two-and-a-half-year-old iPhone software a nice, modern look. New features include resource views tagged with geographical locations; multiple attachments; and audio notes up to 90 minutes.  It is also now possible to view a single notebook, or collection of notes, at a time.

While competitors such as Catch Note and Springpad are also getting their share of users, Evernote, based in Mountain View, Calif., appears to be the dominant player in the fast-growing note-taking software market. Evernote now has substantially more than 6 million users, though it hasn’t shared exact numbers. Springpad, by contrast, has more than 1 million users, and Catch Note’s app has been downloaded 250,000 times.

Evernote raised $20 million in October to expand internationally.

Here’s a video to highlight the new features of Evernote 4:

A limited version of Evernote 4 is free, but a full version costs $5 a month or $45  a year.

On its blog, the company said that the future iPad version of the software will get many of the improvements from the just released iPhone version.

Users will see another iPhone app update from Evernote in the near future. On its blog, the company said that upcoming releases will include more of your requested features, including shared notebooks, Notebook Stacks, and in-app editing of notes with styled text and multimedia.

The San Francisco startup’s ambitions seem have expanded quickly over the past couple of years. It launched a marketplace for selling documents and e-books, and even added an option for users to turn those documents into printed copies. The company also said it wants to make its documents available on every mobile device and e-book reader.

“2011 is going to be a milestone year for us,” Scribd chief executive and co-founder Trip Adler said in a written statement. “As the world rapidly changes the way it reads, we are rapidly preparing to change the way we deliver what they read.”

The company says it reaches 60 million readers every month.

The new round was led by Australian firm MLC Investments and SVB Capital. Scribd said all of its past backers (including Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Kinsey Hills Group) participated in the new round. Scribd has now raised a total of $25.8 million.

[image via Flickr/Ian Wilson]