As we are finishing up some very exciting new features to be rolled out, we are happy and proud to note that Pixily is one of the 7 finalists in the AWS Startup Challenge.

To quote Amazon “With the 2008 AWS Start-Up Challenge, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is searching for the next hot start-up that is leveraging AWS to build its infrastructure and business. The grand prize is $100,000 in cash and AWS credits and a potential investment offer from Amazon. We have carefully selected seven finalists with promising businesses built on top of AWS. These start-ups will compete in the final judging round for the grand prize.”

We take pride in our innovative use of technology to solve real problems. So, it feels great to be recognized for our use of Cloud Computing in helping consumers and small businesses get organized and unlock information trapped in paper.

In spite of the bad week on Wall Street, Pixily ended it with some great news. We heard from MITX late last Friday that Pixily was selected as a finalist for the 13th Annual Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exhange (MITX) Interactive Awards. We were nominated under the Best Applied Technology category. We are quite honored and proud to receive this nomination.

For those who are wondering what MITX awards are, here is the official quote from MITX website:

The MITX Awards is the largest and most prestigious awards competition in the country for interactive and web innovations and celebrates the best creative and technological accomplishments emerging from New England. 

The winners across the 29 categories will be announced on November 19th, 2008.

Amazon is bringing the Amazon Web Services (AWS) startup tour for the second year in a row to Boston and Pixily is invited to present at the conference. It will be held on September 22nd at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge.

If you are thinking of cloud computing or Amazon Web Services, you should attend this event. We attended this event same time last year and it helped us craft our infrastructure strategy. We learnt a lot from it and a year later we run 95% of infrastructure on Amazon Web Services.

Here is the agenda for the conference:

Event Schedule:

 2:00-2:20    Opening Statements – Andy Jassy, Sr. Vice President, Amazon Web Services

2:20-3:00    AWS Presentation – Jinesh Varia, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

3:00-3:15    Break

3:15-3:55    Customer Presentations:

Prasad Thammineni, CEO, Pixily

Ryan Angilly, Founder, MessageSling.com

Greg Arnette, Founder & CTO, Sonian Networks

3:55-4:25    Customer Q&A

4:25-4:45    Presentation – Mike Hirshland, Partner, Polaris Ventures

4:45-5:00    Closing Statements – Andy Jassy, Sr. Vice President, Amazon Web Services

5:00-7:00    Cocktail/Networking Reception sponsored by Polaris Ventures

 

We are very happy to announce that Pixily is now a certified licensee of the TRUSTe® Privacy Seal Program. What this means is that our privacy statement and practices have been reviewed by TRUSTe for compliance with their strict program requirements.  We have made some modifications to our privacy policy as part of the certification process. These modifications are mostly clarifications on what was already in place.

Your privacy and security are of utmost importance to us and this demonstrates our continued commitment to those principles. The Truste certification is an excellent addition to our existing daily audits run by McAfee Secure and further reinforce our stringent internal processes and audits.

In their own words, Truste’s mission is : “TRUSTe helps consumers and businesses identify trustworthy online organizations through its Web Privacy Seal, Email Privacy Seal and Trusted Download Programs.” The TRUSTe program is consistent with government and industry guidelines concerning the use of your personal information. These standards include the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Commerce’s Fair Information Practices, the California Online Privacy Protection Act, and the CAN-SPAM Act.

We attended our first WebInno event in September 2007, one month into founding Pixily. We were very impressed with the group of people we met and we have since then aspired to present at this conference. Yesterday, that became a reality.

We are very honored to have won the Audience Choice award. Since we were chosen by an audience and not just by a panel of judges, it is a true validation of the service. Being the first in the market, we not only have to create awareness for our firm but also have to educate people on the service.  Being awarded means people recognize that : 

• there is a need,
• we have addressed that need, and
• people want to use it.

Here is the proud Pixily team with the award (and a big shout-out to the rest of the team that is not in this picture). GO PIXILY!!

The hurricane season is in full throttle. While Gustav and Hannah werent as fierceful as they could have been, preparations are in full swing as we are bracing for Ike. It also appears that a lot of the painful lessons learnt from Katrina had translated to better preparedness, be it the more organized evacuation or the use of technology to be able track all the evacuees. Natural disasters like these remind us that we can never be too prepared. Our thoughts and prayers go to victims of the hurricanes.

Digitizing important documents (such as statements, pay stubs) ahead of time, and keeping only critical documents (such as passports, birth certificates etc,.) in a small weather-proof box that can be easily carried with you, would be a good idea.

In our own small way, we would like to make a difference. From now through the end of the hurricane season, we will give two months off of Pixily for anyone whose mailing address is in the hurricane prone states of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. We know you would have more important things on your mind, so you may treat the first two months’ envelopes as “All you can send”, and don’t have to worry about page limits. No special action is necessary. The promotion will automatically be applied upon registration at Pixily.

If you have friends, family or near and dear that can benefit from being prepared for the rest of the hurricane season, please spread the word.

The US Patent trademark office (USPTO) has gone digital by implementing a system where all applications that it will receive from now on will be scanned first before they are processed. Furthermore, as of August 27th, 2008, it does not require applicants to submit duplicate copies of all Patent service request forms. Incidentally, even the letter that announced the change was scanned and published on their web site as a PDF.

The USPTO required applicants to submit duplicate copies since two of the business functions, namely, processing of the fees and processing of the applications, where performed in two different parts of the USPTO office. Now with each application being scanned at the time of receipt, the entire USPTO can access these applications from anywhere and anytime.

This is a great first step for an over burdened government organization to make business processes efficient, fast and less expensive. We only hope that this will decrease the overall application processing times.

I got a near surreal reminder of the power of usability yesterday. I was showing some recent pictures to my 3-year old son on my new iPhone 3G and he instinctively started advancing to the next picture using his fingers. This is really what user interface and human computer interaction ought to be about. A 3-year old with no other defined mental model should be able to just use it.

On the other hand, I wonder if the iPhone would pass the so-called Grandma Test, which we employ quite frequently at Pixily. The Grandma may have some mental models to unlearn before she can use the iPhone (or she may choose to just stick to her jitterbug). Around here, the user interaction related conversations evoke the most discussion, since we all care a lot about it. Our product’s usability reflects it loud and clear.

The snippet view is a stellar example of our extreme usability. The thumbnail (to the left) gives a telescopic/big-picture view of the page, and the snippet (to the right) anchors our vision to familiar logos, and patterns (such as Billing Date and Account number) mimicking what we do when we flip through stacks of paper. The labels and other metadata (below) provide the necessary context. All in all, they are discrete nuggets of information in perfect harmony. Our users love it.

So, what tests do you employ as you design your user interaction? Where do you draw the line between the toddler test and the grandma test?

We at Pixily at gearing up for the upcoming Olympics at Beijing. One of the three main themes for this Olympics is “Green Olympics”, the goal being to recycle as much as possible. Imagine all those mountains of paper and miscellaneous stuff that gets piled up over the course of the next few weeks.

Thanks to Pixily, it wouldn’t take an olympian effort for our users to go green or to sort through all that clutter. In fact, we hear that they have been experiencing “Eureka” moments over the past three weeks as they get a taste for Pixily. In the interest of sharing the joy, here is a blow-by-blow account of how to use the Pixily Search.

When you login to your Pixily account, the Search bar is front and center. You may enter any word or a combination of words that you are searching for.

Our patent pending Archimedes algorithm (Eureka Creator, get it?)  then searches for two broad categories (at this time, anyway). It searches for keyword matches in the actual content of the documents and also searches for labels that match the specified search terms.

Keyword search Results: Each of the individual keywords are searched (so for example, if you search typed the words Invoice Amount, both “Invoice” and “Amount” are searched for. Documents that contain all the search terms will be rated as more relevant. This search is not case sensitive so invoice, Invoice, INVOICE, InVOICE are all the same. I can hear the “pack rats” in us scream A!Ha! just about now.

Label Search Results: For the more organized amongst us, the search is only useful if it finds out how we have organized things. And ofcourse, the search is not only useful, but also powerful in its ability to be able to zero in on what we are searching for. Using the label list on the lift you can quickly select labels and narrow down on documents that contain the label that you searched for AND also have the label that you clicked. Whats even better is that the label search allows for partial matches. So a search for Invoice will also match Invoices. Isn’t that nice, when we know that the time we spent on organizing was well worth it, and available in different contexts?

So what’s next? Our code magicians are furiously working on adding more power to search so that we can search for exact phrases, restrict search to a limited set of documents and much more. Stay tuned for a more cool tips and tricks on Search. Meanwhile, enjoy your Eurekas.

The PR continues. Mass High Tech, a leading journal covering business news in the New England high technology industry, featured Pixily in their latest issue under the title Cloud computing bursting on the corporate scene.

Christopher Calnan, the Staff Writer at the Mass High Tech,  spent about an hour interviewing us. He had very insightful questions and made us look at our usage of Amazon Web Services in ways we did not in the past. By the way, Amazon Web Services is one of the best examples of Cloud Computing.