Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

File-sharing company Box acquired Crocodoc today because your documents are boring and no one wants to read them. Crocodoc’s technology can turn them into interactive experiences using HTML5.

Box announced the acquisition today, but declined to reveal the terms of the deal. Chief executive Aaron Levie did say that the deal was a cash-and-stock transaction and that all of Crocodoc’s employees will be absorbed into Box. Crocodoc founder Ryan Damico will join Box as director of platform.

Crocodoc, once a Y Combinator company, was born in 2007 to make documents are more enjoyable experience. Many people feel that text documents are boring, even if you layer on as many PowerPoint transitions as possible. Using Crocodoc, you can turn your documents into carousels, flip-books, and more.

The company first started working in Flash to take elements of a document and make them more pleasing to the eye and interactive. But it quickly moved on to HTML5 as soon as the technology was available. Indeed, Crocodoc only complete its transition to HTML5 within the last few days.

Source: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Ryan Damico, founder, Crocodoc

“Things like document experiences haven’t really been modernized, they’re still very clunky, very cumbersome,” said Levie at the announcement today. “You think about what viewing videos looked like in 2005 before Youtube videos came around. You had to have all these different plugins and players just to view a video somebody sent you. We see the same sort of experience required for documents today.”

Box assures Crocodoc’s customers that, for the time being, the service will continue to run as normal. This means it will continue to work with Box competitor Dropbox. The technology will also be integrated into Box’s existing products and some form of rebranding will happen in the coming months.

The conversation often turned toward bringing “consumer-grade” products into the enterprise. This type of attitude seems to be flowing throughout Silicon Valley — the idea that consumer-grade apps are more beautiful, usable, well-built than enterprise-grade apps, which are characterized as clunky and outdated.

“It’s very consumer-grade design … I think that’s really the standard that you have to shoot for now,” said Box’s vice president of engineering Sam Schillace at the announcement. “Documents kind of seem boring. … We’ve had them for 20 years, but they are undergoing this interesting evolution.”

Damico told me that he is particularly excited to start building out new use cases for the healthcare industry, which could certainly use some consumer-grade love. This might include turning research papers into more-digestible flipbooks, or turning medical images into HTML5-based interactive documents in some way.

Damico may also tackle electronic health records — a massive market opportunity, given that so many healthcare institutions find them cumbersome, hard to read, and slow. A different presentation of a patient’s medical history might make all the difference. (For more on electronic health records, check out VentureBeat’s upcoming HealthBeat conference, May 20-21 — it’s one of the event’s major themes.)

Security, of course, is at the top of the priorities list when it comes to any health-related documents. Box recently received HIPAA compliance, which opens the doors for Crocodoc, which otherwise wouldn’t have been able to achieve that security itself.

Ryan Damico and Aaron Levie images via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Microsoft’s new Office 365 is cloud-integrated, saving documents up to SkyDrive when you save them on your PC. Now, with five new Bing-powered apps, Microsoft is bringing the power of the cloud back down into your local document.

Which means that a memo on the status of storm relief efforts can now contain live updates to weather conditions, emergency response units’ actions, and news coverage of the disaster. In other words, documents are becoming more like web pages.

The five new apps Microsoft is releasing today are designed to integrated with 365′s big capital-A applications: Excel and Word. One, Bing Maps for Office allows you to plot people on a map with a data visualization tool that integrates right into Excel. People and locations show up on a live map, embedded in your spreadsheet, that can be zoomed and switched to Bing’s bird’s-eye view.

Another, also for Excel, allows you to build a live finance portfolio which includes current pricing data showing you how much richer — or poorer — you are every day:

Source: Microsoft

Bing Finance for Office

For Word, Microsoft is releasing three apps that allow you to search for related news and videos right inside a document, search for and insert images into your document directly from the web — no copyright issue here, naturally — and access the most up-to-date online dictionary and grammatical information.

Source: Microsoft

Bing News Search for Office

You have to think that the addition of apps to Office 365 is the continuation of the evolution of documents from static entities that only change when you change them, to living creations that that can update themselves. And by giving documents apps, Microsoft essentially is transforming documents into apps … all the while and not incidentally giving you, me, and any Joe Blow Nonprogrammer the ability to build things that only short years ago would have required extensive development.

Not only is Microsoft is making office productivity tools more like the web, it’s giving us the ability to create mashups of data and analysis and visualization on the fly.

Expect more apps for Office in the near future.

photo credit: Microsoft Sweden via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Document management firm Knowledge Tree thinks email is killing teamwork … and making document creation more difficult, longer, and more frustrating than it needs to be.

Almost all documents — a full 94 percent — require teamwork, according to Knowledge Tree, and the traditional email-it-around-for-changes merry-go-round isn’t cutting it anymore, according to the company.

In fact, 63 percent of documents require between three and five revisions, 20 percent are changed between five and 10 times, and an astonishing six percent of documents are revised more than 11 times.

I think most of us in the business world have been on the receiving end of those emails. The result is that only one in four people think that it is easy to get colleagues’ feedback.

Not surprisingly, the document management company believes that a document management solution is a better option. Document management systems make communication more visible, a company spokesman told me, giving teams comprehensive knowledge of what’s happening.

Document management also gives companies insights into business process.

“We hear that businesses need to organize documents based on rich metadata, like by business unit, geography, product line, date delivered, and more,” a company representative told me. “They need to get insight into these documents based on the way their business is organized.  You can’t value an asset your team doesn’t know it has.”

A good solution for creating shared documents might also result in … more sharing.

Currently only one in four people think that it is easy to get colleagues’ feedback. Most of them — 59 percent — share documents via email, while another seven percent use hard copy, and 5 percent simply skip the painful process entirely.

Here’s the infographic:

photo credit: kk+ via photopin cc

Today, I found myself privy to the first meeting between Box’s CEO, Aaron Levie, and his new vice president of engineering, Sam Schillace.

The pair have known each other for years and both saw early potential in cloud computing technology, but Schillace is no easy target for any startup. Until this week, he was the entrepreneur-in-residence and Principal at Google Ventures. “It has been a seven-and-a-half year recruiting project,” Levie half-joked.

Sam Schillace, Box’s new VP of engineering

This announcement follows a spate of recent announcements for Box, a Silicon Valley-based cloud storage startup. In the past month, the company pulled in $125 million in funding, and opened its first international office in London. This week, the company also brought on Evan Wittenberg as its new VP of People (startup speak for vice president of Human Resources).

It will be an intriguing partnership. Levie told me he first reached out to Schillace in 2005 to discuss a potential integration with Box (then “Box.net”). It didn’t work out, as Schillace was already in acquisition talks with Google. Schillace’s startup, Writely, was the first co-editing service, and provided the foundation for Google Docs.

“It has been a decade-long progress moving from desktop to cloud,” Schillace told me, when asked about his reasons for joining Box now, given that he has been a technical advisor to the company for the past two years. “We are just seeing the knee of the curve.” He said he would dedicate his energies to improving collaboration within Box’s core product.

Schillace will continue to serve as an advisor for Google Ventures and its portfolio companies.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

KnowledgeTree, a company that does business-specific cloud-based document management, has just taken a $4.75 million round of funding from a collection of East Coast and international VCs.

KnowledgeTree isn’t quite like Google Docs; rather, it has some very specific tools for collaborating, versioning, and managing documents in very specific work environments, such as in-house legal counsel and finance teams. Users can create workflows for documents; in that way, it almost mimics what some cloud task-management software would do (see also: Asana).

It also allows anyone to search through a company’s entire knowledge base of documents — like an intranet search, but probably less janky (that’s a technical term).

All in all, KnowledgeTree is in a white-hot and quite profitable space of the industry, and it’s trying to use this capital to elbow its way through bigger doors to catch more clients.

Here’s a demo explaining a bit about what KnowledgeTree does, with voiceovers courtesy of The Deepest-Voiced Man in the World:

KnowledgeTree charges on a per-seat basis and has a sliding scale based on the size of the team using its software, and it counts among its clients such big fish as Miramax, Orbitz, and Fuji Chemical.

This round is the company’s second infusion of institutional funding and comes from River Cities Capital Funds (with offices in Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida), Core Capital Partners (a Washington, DC venture firm), Hatteras Funds (in Raleigh, North Carolina), and previous investor Hasso Plattner Ventures (based in South Africa).

“At many of the world’s largest organizations, KnowledgeTree has proven the value of a ‘structured social’ approach to managing documents,” said KnowledgeTree CEO Daniel Chalef in a release. “With the new funding, KnowledgeTree will rapidly scale our success in customer acquisition while evolving our product’s features to meet the market’s need for business-centric and social document management tools.”

Or, in plain English, they’ll use the money to get more paying customers and design cutting-edge features to compete with Asana, Google, and every other enterprisey, cloudy company on the market.

Edward McCarthy, Raleigh-based managing director of River Cities Capital Funds, and Will Dunbar, managing director of Core Capital Partners, will join the board.

KnowledgeTree was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Image courtesy of Dmitriy Shironosov, Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Not only is Microsoft serious about the cloud, but it’s also serious about keeping its customers in the government happy. acknowledges

Today the company announced a new version of its cloud-based document software suite Office 365 for Government. Essentially, government version does everything its consumer counterpart does, including Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Office Professional Plus, and more.

“We also know that security and privacy play a big role in any decision to move to the cloud,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post announcing the new version. “Today, Office 365 supports the most rigorous global and regional standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, EU Safe Harbor, EU Model Clauses, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the US Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).”

By September, Microsoft said it plans to add support for IPv6 on Office 365 as well as support for Criminal Justice Information Security (CJIS) policies.

It’s in Microsoft’s best interests to start scaling out its Cloud based document service to compete with the likes of web-based Google Apps. VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig previously pointed out that the service was perfect for smaller businesses, so targeting the government is a big step up. Also, the service will need to remain online without fail.

More importantly, Microsoft probably wants to hold on to all those government services that use the latest non-connected version of Office. If it can prove to the government that it’s a secure platform for which to share and collaborate on important documents, it could very well carry over to the business sector.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google added a whopping collection of 450 fonts to its online document service Google Docs today — thus freeing your text from years of enslavement by the likes of Arial, Courier New, and the universally reviled Comic Sans.

Well, you know what Comic Sans? We’ll just see how comical you are within a sea of equally goofy font options now available to co-workers, friends, and family members who have zero grasp of basic design principles.

Google Docs users can add the new font styles by clicking on the font menu in the tool bar and selecting the “Add fonts” option at the very bottom. From there you’ll see the entire menu of web fonts available, such as Economica, Princess Sofia, Jolly Lodger, Happy Monkey, Dynalight, Wallpoet, Lobster one, Lobster two, and Esteban. All of your chosen fonts are displayed alphabetically in a sidebar to the right. You can click the “X” to remove any font you don’t plan on using. That sidebar will then appear in the “font styles” tool bar when you’re working within a doc.

Even with all these fresh new font options, it’s possible that bland white document background isn’t doing for you anymore. Thankfully, Google has added over 60 new document templates for you to choose from.

The full list of Google Docs updates is listed below, via the Google Docs blog:

• Google Drive launched as a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all your stuff.
• There are now a few more options for inserting images in Docs, including inserting from Google Drive, searching for images from the LIFE Photo archive, or taking a snapshot with your webcam.
• Charts in spreadsheets now has support for minor gridlines and options to customize the formats of axis labels
• Accessibility in Docs got better with support for screenreaders in presentations and with the addition of NVDA to our list of supported screenreaders.
• From File > Page setup… you can now set the default page size for your new documents.
• It’s now easier for speakers of right-to-left languages by automatically showing bidirectional controls when you type in a language that might use them.
• Apps Script had many improvements, including
  • A new ScriptService for programmatically publishing your scripts and controlling when they run.
  • A new function to find the root folder of someone’s Drive.
  • An increase in the allowed attachment size in emails from 5MB to 25MB.
  • An increase in the size of docs files you can create from 2MB to 50MB.
• There are now over 60 new templates in our template gallery.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Downloading a PDF or Microsoft Office file from the web is easily one of the more antiquated practices still being used today. It’s also something cloud document startup Crocodoc wants to abolish with its new HTML5 document embedding service, which launches today.

If you’ve ever viewed a document in Dropbox, Yammer, or LinkedIn, then you’re using Crocodoc’s product. The startup’s service takes PDF and Microsoft office document files and replicates them online for wider consumption. While this functionality is also available in Google Docs, Crocodoc’s service preserves the document in a way that’s very similar to how it looks and functions within native desktop software. With Google, I can technically see the document, but often times a documents style, images, and other formatting is altered.

“You’re essentially getting something that’s on par with Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word, but within a web app, ” Crocodoc founder and CEO Ryan Damico told VentureBeat in an interview. “When you view a document in Google Docs, its much slower to load in the browser, everything is blurry when you try to zoom in, and there’s kind of faked text selection that doesn’t really look right.” He adds that while Google Docs is a consumer-focused product, its main focus isn’t in translating documents perfectly, which is necessary for many people.

Crocodoc’s new service can be embedded into a variety of third-party apps by using iFrame or JavaScript, and without the need for plugins or additional software. Customers can customize the doc experience to fit specific branding, and offer commenting and markup tools for collaboration with others.

The startup charges by the document, so its service will probably be most useful for businesses, or organizations that produce a heavy flow of documents that need to be shared among a large group. The startup’s first product, Crocodoc Personal, is targeted at consumers and still available. Its new product is already powering the document viewing experience within Yammer, SAP, LinkedIn, Edmodo, and Dropbox.

Founded in 2010, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised about $1 million to date. Its funding comes from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and top Silicon Valley investors including Dave McClure, Joshua Schachter, Paul Buchheit, and Steve Chen. Crocodoc has four employees, but has plans to double or triple its staff within a year, Damico said.

Photo of the Crocodoc team (above) and screenshots via Crocodoc

Business-focused social network Yammer has acquired document collaboration startup OneDrum, the companies jointly announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Yammer provides companies with their own private social network that employees use to quickly communicate and update their activity throughout the day. (Disclosure: VentureBeat writers use Yammer to communicate on the job.) And while Yammer currently offers some document storage, the OneDrum software will allow businesses to share, sync, and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents in real-time.

“It’s impossible to separate the conversation from the content,” said Yammer CTO Adam Pisoni in an interview with VentureBeat. “But, there is no end-all solution right now where you can create, discover, collaborate, and share content without going between a bunch of different applications.”

Yammer plans to launch a OneDrum document-sync desktop application this summer. The app will have a folder for each Yammer group users create under the broader Yammer account, and will sync documents immediately upon saving. Later on the company plans to add tools that will let people search for anything within the shared documents without having to leave Yammer. It’ll also allow people to view shared documents on multiple platforms, such as the Web, smartphones, and tablets.

But perhaps the biggest addition OneDrum offers is the ability to transform your Microsoft Office docs into a collaboration tool that rivals search giant Google’s Google Docs web app. Users can view changes to a document in a real-time, and much like Google Docs, color-coded cursors identify different users collaborating in the document.

“Most companies use Microsoft Office every day, so adding a social layer through Yammer makes a lot of sense,” Yammer CEO David Sacks told VentureBeat.

U.K.-based OneDrum is the first acquisition for Yammer, which recently closed a $85 million round of funding. OneDrum previously raised a total of $1.62 million in funding. It will bring all 10 employees to Yammer, with CEO Jasper Westaway leading the integration of the two products.

We’ve embedded a demo video from Yammer showing off some of the new integrated social document sharing.

http://vimeo.com/40128698

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google appears to be close to rebranding its online document service, Google Docs, as a virtual hard drive in the cloud.

A blurry screenshot (shown above) snapped by blogger and social media consultant Johannes Wigand appears to show a slightly modified version of Google Docs, called Drive. The screen appeared for a few seconds in “an event powered by Google,” Wigand reports.

The screenshot looks almost identical to the “new look” for Google Docs that’s currently available as an option in some Google accounts, except that the word “Docs” in the upper left has been changed to “Drive.” The folder menu is labeled differently as well: It’s called “My Google Drive” instead of “My Collections.”

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler elaborates on the screenshot, adding other clues that Google Drive is coming, such as a Google Docs dialog that mentions “Google Drive” and some code that recently appeared in the source code for Google’s open-source browser Chromium.

TechCrunch also adds a detail not apparent from the screenshot: That Google Drive will be a full-fledged competitor to other online storage services like Dropbox and Box.net, with the ability to sync with local files. There’s no source for this last assertion, however.

Google Docs already acts as a virtual hard drive in many ways, with the ability to store and share images, videos and PDF files in addition to document formats that are editable in Google, such as spreadsheets, presentations and word-processing documents. Google offers 1GB of storage for free, with the option to purchase 20GB for $5 per year. It supports uploading and downloading of entire folders, although without automatic syncing. Turning Docs into Drive would be a small change, but the name change might significantly change the way people think about and use the service.

By comparison, Dropbox offers 2GB for free, or 50GB for $10 per month, and will automatically sync folders between the cloud and multiple computers. Box.net offers 5GB for free, or 50GB for $10 per month, with corporate options starting at $15 per user, and also offers automatic syncing and collaboration features. Other virtual drives have similar pricing.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Online legal document repository LegalZoom has raised $66 million in its most recent round of funding.

LegalZoom is an online service that helps people find and fill out legal documents. That can include documents to create a last will and testament, filing to incorporate a business, trademarking a name or title or filing for a divorce. The documents range anywhere from $100 to $400, according to the company’s website. LegalZoom is not a law firm — it just supplies the documents. That means the site won’t offer any kind of legal advice.

The funding announced today comes from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners

The company told VentureBeat earlier this year that it planned to raise money and had added Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners as investors.

LegalZoom relocated its offices from Hollywood to Glendale after a spat with the city of Los Angeles regarding taxes. Sources within the company told VentureBeat the company was preparing to go public in February earlier this year.

The Los Angeles, Calif.-based company was founded in 2001. LegalZoom raised $2 million in what looks like an early seed funding round and about $46 million in an institutional funding round that included Polaris Venture Partners and Kayne Anderson Private Investors. The company says it has more than 500 employees and has served more than 1 million customers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

Tickets On Sale Now

Google has released a slick new Android application for Google Docs that makes managing documents easy and adds the ability to convert words in images into editable text.

Editing documents is still done exclusively on the web, but the added functionality provided by the native Android app greatly improves the user experience of Google Docs on mobile devices.

Google also acknowledges that documents are meant to be shared and thus has added support for widgets that access stored contacts easier. It’s these kinds of improvements that could reasonably lure people away from using traditional office suite software.

But perhaps the most notable addition is the new ability to convert words found in images into a document with editable text via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This feature breathes new life into printed text and may prove deadly to old-school book stores that invite customers to lounge around sampling books and magazines. After all, customers can now simply take a picture of a particular article or book passage and convert it into text to read later, all without having to pay the book seller.

The Google Docs app is consistent with the company’s overall strategy to attract new users by seamlessly integrating all of its services into the Android platform, which many have said makes Android devices more desirable than the competition.

Currently, the Docs app is only available to devices running Android 2.1 or higher. But even if Google makes a version available for other platforms, don’t expect the same user experience (e.g. Google Voice for Apple’s iOS).

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Online legal document host LegalZoom is in the early stages of preparing to file for an initial public offering, a source told VentureBeat today.

The company hasn’t filed any documents that indicate it will go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The process begins when a company files a Form S-1, which includes its most recent financial details and how much money the company is looking to raise. So the actual initial public offering might not happen for several months.

LegalZoom is an online service that helps people find and fill out legal documents. That can include documents to create a last will and testament, filing to incorporate a business, trademarking a name or title or filing for a divorce. The documents can range anywhere from $100 to $400, according to the company’s website. LegalZoom is not an actual law firm — they just supply the documents. That means the site won’t offer any kind of legal advice for those seeking it out.

It’s a private company, which means it does not disclose its financial information. But the company did get in a spat with the city of Los Angeles over how much they would have to pay in taxes around this time last year. The company ended up deciding to relocate its offices from Hollywood to Glendale.

The Los Angeles, Calif.-based company was founded in 2001 and has more than 500 employees. LegalZoom raised $2 million in what looks like an early seed funding round and about $46 million in an institutional funding round that included Polaris Venture Partners and Kayne Anderson Private Investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Whether it falls under Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ definition of a publishing company or not, online document host Docstoc isn’t taking any chances. The company will use Apple’s newest subscription policy for the premium iPad service it launched today.

The company hosts documents that are important for smaller businesses that range from applications to launch a web-based company to move-out forms for landlords and tenants. Users can access a lot of the documents for free, but the company’s newest premium service has more than 10,000 documents that it has deemed mission-critical for smaller and mid-sized businesses.

“We’re here to host every single document a small business is ever going to need,” said Docstoc founder Jason Nazar. “Whether that’s from firing people, which (Launch conference host) Jason (Calcanis) knows plenty about, to starting a web business.”

Docstoc offers an online subscription that lets users can pay $20 a month for access to all of its online documents. Users can also pay $20 to view and print individual documents. The company is also launching an iPad application that allows Docstoc users to access its premium documents, view them and print them.

But it isn’t clear where Docstoc falls in Apple’s new definition of a publishing application. Apple’s Jobs said that web-based applications hosted on remote servers — software-as-a-service, or “SaaS” applications — do not fall under the new subscription model. That would include storage apps like Dropbox and enterprise applications like Salesforce. Companies that are classified as being publishers, however, have to pay Apple 30 percent of their subscription fees.

Docstoc is distributing content, but it isn’t necessarily original content — they’re just documents that are used pretty often by smaller and mid-sized businesses. There’s already a lot of confusion as to what kind of apps fall under the new plan. Docstoc is going to commit to the subscription plan and avoid the risk of getting its app booted off the store. The service will be one of the first to use Apple’s new subscription plan for iPad users.

The company launched three years ago at the TechCrunch 40 conference. The site has around 25 million active visitors and 10 million unique registered users.