Need to download prepared legal documents or business outlines? There’s a digital store for that.

Similar to how Apple sells apps, music and videos, and Amazon sells music and books, Santa Monica’s DocStoc has opened a store for customers to search for and buy documents online.

Anyone can upload their files to DocStore and name a price. Sellers keep 100% of the revenue for purchases within the first 60 days from listing, and revenues are split evenly with DocStoc after that.

Once you’ve signed up, transactions are a one-click process — something that has worked well for Apple and Amazon to encourage impulse buys.

“We’re making the App Store for documents,” said DocStoc Chief Executive Jason Nazar.

The 2-year-old company hopes to introduce some of its 20 million monthly visitors to its premium content. Helped by a partnership with LegalZoom, the DocStore is targeting small businesses and professionals.

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) February 4, 2010 — Verve Wireless, the leading provider of mobile publishing and advertising technologies to local media companies, today announced its end of year milestones and highlighted its work with Nokia in providing local media companies worldwide with a series of mobile news applications for Nokia’s foremost smartphone, which are available for download from the Ovi Store.

Mobile Access to News Increases by 500% via Verve Network: Apps in Demand
During the month of December 2009:
• 100 Million mobile news pages were served, a 160% increase year over year.
• Over 8 million readers accessed news from mobile devices via Verve’s mobile publishing platform, a 500% increase from the same period a year prior.
• Over 3 Million mobile applications have been downloaded to date.

“The amount of page views to our local media partners has grown tremendously this past year, and is indicative of how quickly consumers are adopting new ways to access their news and information. As we roll out our white label app solution we expect a tremendous increase in readership,” said Tom Kenney, President and co-founder of Verve Wireless. ” If this rate continues because of growing adoptions, the increasing sophistication and ease of smartphones, and prevalence of high speed networks, we are looking at over 20 million people visiting our publishers’ mobile sites and applications, and serving up approximately 300 million mobile news pages to those readers by this time next year.”

Types of Mobile News Accessed: Local News Maintains Interest but Breaking News Creates Spikes
• Local news was the most accessed content.
• Within local, general news followed by sports, and then national was the most accessed content.
• However, major breaking world or national news drove the biggest traffic spikes, for example the news of Michael Jackson’s death spurred a daily increase in traffic by 133%.
• Video has grown in importance for local media. In the past 3 months, more than seventy local media companies started mobilizing their video content through Verve’s platform. Viewership has increased by 106%.

Think Global: Read Local

The first publications to launch with the news applications included Metro International, the world’s largest international newspaper, The Associated Press, and The Khaleej Times, the largest English language paper in UAE. The Metro Mobile News is offered in seven languages across eight countries with 30 different local editions including Denmark, Holland, Finland, Italy, Mexico, France, Sweden, and the United States with more countries scheduled to follow. Since launching last quarter, the news and information applications in the Ovi Store by Nokia gained top ratings and have been downloaded in 82 countries around the world.

“Staying informed and having access to local news is a common desire across the globe,” said Purnima Kochikar, vice president, Forum Nokia. “Working together, Nokia and Verve have enabled leading media companies around the world to take advantage of the sophisticated capabilities of Nokia devices like the Nokia N97 Mini using the Verve publishing platform. When combined with the ubiquitous availability of the Ovi Store, consumers in any language and in any market are able to enjoy more utility from their Nokia devices every day.”

About Verve Wireless

Based in Encinitas, CA; Verve Wireless, Inc. and their proprietary Verve Local Content Gateway(TM) allow local media companies and advertisers to seamlessly extend their reach into mobile devices across all the major carriers. Verve Wireless currently works with over 700 leading media companies from the US, Canada, and Europe including dailies, radio, local broadcast stations, and online properties. For more information visit http://www.vervewireless.com

LOS ANGELES, CA (Marketwire – January 14, 2010) – On January 4th, Zadspace, Inc. began distribution of its 200th unique ad campaign, a new promotion for Ab Circle Pro, a highly successful home-fitness machine of the same name.  The Ab Circle Pro is exclusively distributed in the US by the Direct Entertainment Media Group, Inc. (DEMG).  With this latest campaign, Ab Circle Pro redoubles its use of the Zadspace network for direct customer acquisition.

“We initially tested the Zadspace solution in Q3, 2009 because we saw a unique way to boost new customer acquisitions,” said Cindy Minionis, Vice-President of Marketing for DEMG. “The ROI for the channel has been positive, so we integrated the Zadspace solution into our overall marketing strategy by getting a second campaign up and running.”

Zadspace campaigns differ from traditional direct marketing as the company leverages the real-time collective intelligence of the Dimensional Modeling Engine (DME) to dynamically determine ad placements.

“We program the campaign targeting parameters, but the DME selects the Ab Circle Pro campaign for specific customer orders, so we really didn’t control which campaign would be the 200th,” said James Ho, VP of Products and Co-founder of Zadspace. “However, we were thrilled it was one of our ongoing partners, Ab Circle Pro, as our goal has always been to provide a consistent and effective medium for advertisers to increase awareness of their products and services.”

About Zadspace:
Founded in 2006, Zadspace is a privately-held, venture-backed direct marketing company with offices in Los Angeles and New York City.  Zadspace endeavors to “make every offer received relevant to the consumer” and thereby increase the effectiveness of direct marketing and eliminate waste. Through technological innovation and its “outside of the box” medium, Zadspace has created a better way to deliver targeted, one-to-one marketing messages.  For more information, visit www.zadspace.com.

Conventional wisdom today is that online advertising dollars cannot sustain the operations of publishers. Declining click-through-rates and mounting banner blindness suggest this. Bedrock believes that these problems are, in part, a failure of existing ad networks to tend to the rapidly evolving needs of advertisers and publishers. Bedrock turns the current system on its head in the following ways:

• Turning over the responsibility for ad creation to publishers. Unlike traditional ad networks, Bedrock does not provide creative to publishers. Rather, advertisers purchase visits on a cost-per-click basis and publishers build, host and distribute their own ad units. Bedrock believes that publishers have a unique understanding of their visitor demographics, site, and context and can build ad products that drive far higher click- through-rates than achievable with standard ad networks.

• Allowing advertisers to focus on ROI, not ad creation. Bedrock provides unparalleled, real-time transparency into visits while making available inventory not redistributed by any other ad networks accessible to advertisers.

• Enabling publishers to capitalize on “non-standard” inventory. Currently, online real estate such as Flash widgets, desktop clients and chat rooms are not capable of displaying standard network ads. Bedrock enables publishers to monetize newfound inventory.

“Bedrock has provided us with an opportunity to see beyond the typical IAB Banner Unit and the flexibility to better understand our users” says Thomas Dodson from OVGuide, an online video guide. Darian Shirazi, CEO & Founder of Fwix, a local news aggregator, comments “Bedrock has given us the flexibility to integrate advertisements into Fwix’s AdWire in a way that makes the most sense for our product and business.”

# # #

About Bedrock
Bedrock is a monetization platform for building the next generation of ad-products. Bedrock empowers publishers to build, host and distribute their own ad-products. Publishers drive clicks into Bedrock where advertisers bid on clicks at the keyword level on a cost-per-click basis. Advertisers focus exclusively on their downstream conversion and incentivize publishers to optimize ad-products.

More information and video overview available at http://www.bedrock.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRLog (Press Release) – Oct 26, 2009 – Berkeley, California. – Pulpo Media (www.pulpomedia.com), the leading provider of online audience-based marketing solutions for the global Hispanic markets, today announced that Tiffany Terrazzano has joined the company as Vice President of Sales.  She will lead Pulpo Media’s efforts in the eastern region and Latin America to deliver Pulpo Media’s online Hispanic targeting platform and audience network-allowing online advertisers to more relevantly engage the diverse Hispanic Market worldwide.

Tiffany Terrazzano is a fourteen-year media sales and marketing veteran with experience leading both Hispanic and General Market media sales for some of the Nation’s top companies.   Ms. Terrazzano has held progressively responsible positions in media and sales with companies including Post-Edge Marketing, I-ON Advertising, CBS Digital, Univision, and Consorte Media. Ms. Terrazzano has consistently ranked as one of the top sales executives nationally in the companies she has represented.

“Tiffany is a great example of a partner; she is constantly working to build complimentary programs that deliver value for her clients. I’m certain Tiffany will have a major impact in joining the talented team at Pulpo Media,” said Bob Kilinski, former SVP of Marketing and Wireless for RadioShack Corp.

“We are excited to welcome Tiffany to the Pulpo Media team,” commented Justin Kuykendall, CEO of Pulpo Media. “Tiffany brings a deep understanding of the challenges that marketers face when looking to reach and engage Hispanics online.  Her strong relationships, customer focused approach and experience developing complex , targeted advertising programs for top Global brands will be a strong asset to further fuel Pulpo Media’s growth.”

“The Hispanic marketplace is highly fragmented and diverse due to vast differences in geography, culture, buying habits, and more,” said Tiffany Terrazzano.  “I’m thrilled to be delivering an innovative and differentiated solution to the market that was specifically designed for these complexities.  With Pulpo Media, marketers can better target online Hispanics, get insights into who they are reaching across their entire media plan and can also dynamically connect the right message to the right user.”

Pulpo Media delivers proprietary audience-based marketing and publishing tools that improve campaign targeting, messaging and analytics-increasing the overall effectiveness and engagement of online advertising to Hispanics.  This translates into increased performance and better localization for advertisers and their brands, higher revenue and more relevant campaigns for publishers and data providers, and a better user experience for Hispanics on the web.

Ms. Terrazzano joins Ian Tattenham, Vice President of Sales in the western region, and will report to the CEO.

Pulpo Media Press Contact:
Kay Chang
510.594.2294
kay@pulpomedia.com

# # #

About Pulpo Media
Founded in 2008, Pulpo Media (www.pulpomedia.com) radically improves the performance of Online Advertising for the Global Hispanic Market through its Tentaculos^TM technology platform and Pulpo Media Audience Network. A technology enabled marketing services company; Pulpo Media targets the growing U.S. Hispanic, Latin American, Spanish- & Portuguese-language Internet populations worldwide and the advertisers looking to reach them. The company is angel backed by Crosscut Ventures and MHS Capital and is headquartered in Berkeley, CA with employees in New York, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Vigo, Spain.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Marketwire – October 12, 2009) – Zadspace, Inc, a direct marketing company, has emerged from private beta testing with a new form of direct marketing that utilizes the exterior of delivery packages for targeted messages.  Over the yearlong beta period, Zadspace’s “outside of the box” campaigns produced a 150% higher response rate than direct mail.

Zadspace sidesteps mailbox overload by affixing full color, 4″ x 6″ advertisements – known as “Zads” – to the exterior of cardboard shipping boxes, right next to the shipping label.  To ensure timeliness and relevancy, each peel-off Zad is triggered by recent, targeted transactional data – including demographic and geographic information – and printed on demand at the shipping facility.

“Direct mail competes with all of the other impressions that arrive in the mailbox,” says Todd Outten, CEO and Co-Founder of Zadspace.  “The Zad has a virtually guaranteed read rate, and it rides along with the fulfillment of an anticipated B to C transaction.  It’s a powerful combination of pristine placement and perfect timing.”

Lester Wunderman, the Chairman Emeritus and Founder of Wunderman says, “Zadspace has found a unique solution for one of the biggest problems with direct mail – a cluttered mailbox filled with multiple offers.”

During the private beta period, Zadspace ran over 100 campaigns for 25 different advertisers.  More than 500,000 Zads were delivered directly into the hands of consumers over the course of a year, allowing the company to confirm the efficacy of the medium.  In addition to testing favorably against direct mail, Zadspace beta campaigns outperformed the response rate of package inserts by 1,200%.

Zadspace will be demonstrating its patent-pending technology to the public at the DMA09 conference on October 18, 2009, as a guest of Media Horizons, Inc.  Visit Booth 2923 to learn more.

About Zadspace:

Founded in 2006, Zadspace is a privately-held, venture-backed direct marketing company with offices in Los Angeles and New York City.  Zadspace endeavors to increase the effectiveness of direct marketing while eliminating waste. Through technological innovation and an “outside of the box” medium, Zadspace has created a better way to deliver targeted, one-on-one marketing messages.  For more information, visit www.zadspace.com.

Contact:

Jon Chun, Vice-President of Marketing
Zadspace, Inc.
press@zadspace.com
www.zadspace.com

Los Angeles-based Crosscut Ventures (www.crosscutventures.com) is one of the newest venture capital funds in the area, and has quietly been working on funding local companies over the last year. The fund–started by Brian Garrett and Rick Smith–has been focused on digital media investments, and so far has made investments in six companies. The fund has just celebrated its first year in business, so we thought we’d catch up with Brian to hear more about what the firm is investing in, the challenges of raising a venture fund in this market, plus his view on the Los Angeles venture market.

Let’s start with an overview of the fund. What do you invest in?

Brian Garrett: We started Crosscut Ventures about a year ago. We closed our fund in August of 2008. We’re describing ourselves as a micro-cap venture fund, focused on digital media opportunities in the emerging ecosystem of Southern California. For us, digital media means consumer Internet, online advertising, mobile, gaming, and most importantly–this is Rick’s and my background–next generation infrastructure to support the consumption of this media.

What do you mean by infrastructure?

Brian Garrett: It’s analytics, it’s delivery platforms, it’s optimization of technology facilitating compression and delivery of video. It’s analytics around users and visitation on web sites, and it’s knowledge of the consumption of photos–for example, GumGum–or video images on the web. It’s all the stuff that allows publishers and advertisers to better understand their user base and how to effectively monetize it.

Let’s talk a bit about your background. Can you talk about your experience?

Brian Garrett: Rick and I have worked together since 2001. We spent six plus years at a local firm, Palomar Ventures, doing Series A and Series B investments. In about 2005, I started looking at the local market, and realized that there are not lots of enterprise IT companies here, which is Palomar’s focus. We started seeing deals like Intermix, LowerMyBills, Rent.com, Shopzilla–all of these successes started in SoCal–and very few had raised money from local investors. Like any entrepreneur, we had the idea that there should be local capital, supporting the local ecosystem. About that time, the ecosystem became viable–we started seeing second time entrepreneurs starting their next business, and instead of seeing them head up to Sand Hill Road, we felt there should be a fund here that is easy to access with guys who understand the landscape and know the players. We’ve been here a long time delivering that capital, in what has turned out to be an interesting market, underserved by venture dollars.

You mentioned you’re a microcap fund–can you talk more about that?

Brian Garrett: There’s been a lot of talk about how the venture model is broken, and funds north of $100M can’t generate enough returns in terms of value creation in their investments to even return 2x on the fund. If you do some rough math, if you have a $100M fund, you have to create $1 billion in total market value to return 2x on the capital committed. But, if you look at the last four or five years of data, there are far more exits in the sub-$100M range, by an order of magnitude, than companies sold for over $100M. The concept of microcap, is it’s a smaller fund size–between $5 and $50M–and it puts in smaller investment amounts. For Crosscut, in our current fund, we typically put $100,000 to $500,000 in a first investment in a company. The idea, is you are finding more capital efficient businesses, because companies are easier to build than three years ago. You keep them lean, have meaningful milestones for the dollars invested, and position them to raise additional capital–or never go out to the financing market again. In this case, a $20M, $30M, or $40M exit is a very meaningful return for an investor group and for the entrepreneur

So you’re talking about smaller rounds?

Brian Garrett: to be very clear, our average deal size is $100,000 to $350,000 in our initial investment, up to $500,000. We syndicate our rounds so that we are typically raising $750,000 to $1.5M in initial seed funding for an early stage company.

How tough was it to start up a new fund?

Brian Garrett: Fundraising was absolutely brutal, and still is. We basically put some calls into friends–local entrepreneurs, guys we’ve worked with in the past, friends of the fund–and instead of trying to raise institutional money in a world that was collapsing, got them to put up a smaller chunk of money so we could show people what we mean by the opportunity in the market, so we can show our efforts as a fund and how we want to position the fund in the future. Fortunately, we closed in August, before it got really bad. But, there’s no getting around it, fundraising has been incredibly brutal. That said, we’re doing our best, and we’ve done six deals in the last 12 months, arguably one of the more active firms in this market. We’re being very, very critical of opportunities, and trying to put together a good portfolio to increase our chance of raising a larger fund later.

What are some of your investments?

Brian Garrett: We were part of the initial angel round for Jason Nazar at Docstoc, and that was a case of just backing an aggressive, hungry young entrepreneur with lots of energy and an interesting idea. Subsequently, Rustic Canyon came in and led the Series A round. The next two deals: a company in San Diego, Verve Wireless, and a local company here called GumGum. Verve, we coinvested with the Associated Press, and they’re up and running and aggressively growing their network.  They are the de-facto, standard mobile CMS for the newspaper industry. They’ve got some nice metrics behind them. GumGum was a seed deal, with First Round Capital, and they recently announced a Series A from GRP and Mark Suster. We also invested in a local company called Zadspace, with DFJ Frontier, and our first Norcal deal is an early employee at Tribal Fusion, who is starting a new business focused on monetizing Hispanic users across Latin America. The most recent deal we closed was a few weeks ago, an angel round with a group of LA angels and investors, in a company called Affordit, which is the new company of 5-time entrepreneur Wil Schroter.

How do you recommend that entrepreneurs approach you?

Brian Garrett: Rick and I are extremely approachable. We try to be respectful of every entrepreneur and their idea. We might not like the idea, but your next one might be brilliant, so we’re responsive to every idea. Our contact information is on the Crosscut website. We try to do a good job of turning around and giving a good enough explanation of why we passed, if we pass. We know that you’re only as good as your reputation is in the community. We’ve been here a long time, and we’ve working hard with our portfolio to engage and add value, to make introductions, and open up relationships, and help the company hit its milestones. That said, and most venture guys say this, but I’ll say it again–it is best to have a warm introduction and to be referred in. We’re very open to ideas that fall within our sweet spot, especially if it’s something we know something about and can add some value. Otherwise, if we’re just money, it’s not the best scenario for us.

Finally, what’s your opinion on where the SoCal VC industry is nowadays?

Brian Garrett: At the full macro level, venture capital is under attack. There will be less funds in the next few years. But, if feels like the microcap strategy is one of the areas that is resonating. In terms of SoCal as a market, it’s a shame. There are great groups down here, but they don’t have the track record and history of the Sand Hill funds. In a tough fundraising environment, they’re seeing greater scrutiny. They really need exits in those portfolios to justify their next raise. Venture is, unfortunately, shrinking locally at a time when innovation, ideas, and most importantly, seasoned entrepreneurs, have never been stronger.

Image licensing network GumGum has raised $2.6 million in and extended Series A funding round led by GRP Venture Partners with First Round Capital participating. This brings GumGum’s total funding to close to $4 million.

GumGum has been seeing fast growth since its launch last year. Measured as an advertising network (but for images), GumGum became a Quantcast Top 100 site, reaching 13.7 million people in the U.S. and 23.5 million worldwide in February. Currently, GumGum reaches 29.8 million people in the U.S. and 50 million people worldwide, according to Quantcast’s lastest stats. More than 2,000 Web publishers license images through GumGum, which allows them to pay based on how many people see the image or use them for free with embedded advertising.

GumGum current clients include B5Media, gossip site DailyFill, Glam Media, MTV, TMZ, New York Post and Gawker. Sites contract directly with photo agencies, and GumGum keeps track of who is using what images and how many times they are viewed. That is what those Quantcast numbers are counting, thus GumGum acts like an ad network for images. GumGum’s founder Ophir Tanz says the new round of funding will be used to develop additional solutions around image licensing as well as drive new revenue opportunities to publishing partners.

Encinitas, CA – June 25, 2009 – Verve Wireless, the leading provider of mobile publishing technologies to local media companies, today announced partnerships with Media News Group, A.H. Belo Corporation, Hearst Corporation, and Cox Newspapers to mobilize local media properties such as The Denver Post, The Dallas Morning News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Palm Beach Post, and Examiner.com. Verve now mobilizes over 450 local media properties, covering the top 200 designated market areas in the U.S. and continues its international expansion by partnering with the Khaleej Times of the United Arab Emirates. In just three months, Verve increased by 85% the amount of local media companies that it has brought to the mobile web reaching more than three million consumers, serving over 47.5 million monthly page views, and delivering more than a million mobile video streams per month.

Main Street Adopting Mobile Faster than Madison Ave.
Local media publishers like Media General’s Richmond Times Dispatch and their portal (Richmond.com) are using Verve’s proprietary publishing and mobile advertising system to extend their communities and readership onto mobile phones as well as utilize their local ad sales teams’ knowledge and existing relationships with local businesses to offer mobile ad solutions. Small businesses from all across the country are using mobile in new and innovative ways to reach their customers.

“We have been advertising in print and online with Media General and are quite impressed with the results we have gotten from our initial mobile campaigns,” said Brent Barkin, vice president and director e-commerce for Shoe Station, a regional shoe store in the southeast with an online retail store at Shoestation.com. “We created a mobile campaign that included a text code that we added to our website and to the paper receipts for in store purchases, within minutes we were seeing responses that converted into sales.” “Our core focus remains making it easy for our local media partners to easily bring their content to mobile including news content and advertising,” said Tom Kenney, president and co-founder of Verve Wireless. “We have a training program for our local media partners to educate them on how to best take advantage of mobile. Once they start using it, they see the potential and their ad sales teams start to create unique and creative programs for their clients.”

Deep Regional Reach for National Brands
Verve has the largest local mobile ad network covering the top 200 DMAs in the U.S. In just the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Verve serves over two million mobile page views a month. National brand advertisers are increasingly leveraging Verve’s AdCel ad platform to reach mobile consumers based on a variety of targeting parameters ranging from regional down to a hyper-local neighborhood level, creating additional revenue streams for their partners while providing efficient and scalable media placements for national brands. “We are serving over a million page views in each of the top DMAs and even in the smaller markets, there are increasingly larger numbers of mobile views. People want to stay connected with news and events that are occurring in their communities, and mobile is quickly becoming the preferred method,” Kenney remarked.

New iPhone 3.0 Web App Module and Mobile Video for Publishers
Additionally, Verve rolled out enhancements to their platform that automatically creates a version of the publisher’s site optimized for the new Safari browser on iPhones, as well as providing mobile video delivery across the leading smartphones in the market.

The iPhone module allows publishers of all sizes and markets to participate in the fastest growing smartphone segment. Publisher’s can create a specialized version of their own mobile site to take advantage of the Safari browser’s unique capabilities, such as location awareness, automatic short cut that places an app icon on the phone for quick access, exceptional layout and navigation elements, and world class rich media delivery. The demand for this new module was stemming from news organizations like The Orange County Register who see in excess of 40% of their mobile web traffic coming from iPhones. Demand for mobile video is also increasing, and Verve’s partners are now able to distribute their video assets across the leading mobile handset devices, taking advantage of the immediacy and impact of short-form video clips of local news and events. In less than two weeks since expanding the video capability network wide, Verve has seen mobile video consumption more than double to over one million discrete views per month.

Rick Loughery
Dig Communications
rloughery [at ] digcommunications [dot] com
415-233-4935

About Verve Wireless
Based in Encinitas, CA; Verve Wireless, Inc., and their proprietary Verve Local Content Platform(TM), allow local media companies and advertisers to seamlessly extend their reach into mobile devices across all the major carriers. Verve Wireless currently works with leading media companies from across the US, Canada, and Europe/ Middle East including dailies, radio, and local broadcast stations. For more information visit http://www.vervewireless.com.

A year and a half after launching at our first TechCrunch40 conference, document-sharing service Docstoc is taking off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash. The service is growing at a healthy clip, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide).

DocStoc is still much smaller than its rival Scribd, but hopes to catch up with some of its changes (as does Issuu, another document-sharing service that keeps adding features). In order to encourage more activity and higher-quality document uploads, DocStoc is introducing DocCash. The company will be splitting AdSense revenues 50/50 with anyone who uploads documents and wants to opt into the service. Right now the ads only appear on Docstoc pages, but will eventually include Flash ads in DocStoc’s embedded Flash player as well. (See video tutorial below).

DocStoc is also unveiling a new homepage with a much more blog-like feel. Featured documents a will be selected by an editorial team, more images will be highlighted, and different document categories are highlighted on the left (including business, technology, legal, and current events). Former TechCrunch writer and Website designer Mark Hendrickson worked on the new homepage. It looks much cleaner now, with topical documents and those related to breaking news now being highlighted (I’ve embedded Barack Obama’s tax return below—his income was $2.7 million last year!).

Finally, it is opening up its APIs so that other sites can integrate DocStoc functionality into their own sites. These APIs allow other sites to include previews and document embeds, document search, use DocStoc’s document viewer, and upload documents directly to DocStoc.

If DocStoc is ever going to catch up to Scribd, it will have to keep adding features and make sure the best docs are uploaded to it service. The APIs and DocCash might help, as well as little things like upload speeds (DocStoc seems faster to me). But with rising popularity also comes rising headaches. Already authors are beginning to complain about book piracy. Uploading copyrighted works is against the terms of service of both DocStoc and Scribd, but policing such usage becomes harder and harder with the number of documents getting into the millions.