1) You are halfway across the country attending a meeting for work, or visiting family, and for some reason you need to find a file — a tax form, a newspaper clipping, your kids’ artwork, an essay you wrote — but you don’t have access to it, and now there’s a bit of a damper on the rest of your trip.

2) You look around your desk and filing cabinets, several times a day, and it’s painful to see how the papers have piled up over the years, you wish you could just make it all go away, or at least appear a bit more organized and accessible.

3) You have so many documents, so many papers, all important for one reason or another, because, like mom and dad always say, “keep everything for seven years, even your receipts”. But it just seems so tasking to save everything, how do you collect so many pieces of paper and still keep it in order???

4) You worry that your computer might crash, that your hard drives and flash drives will get lost or broken, and that your important documents aren’t safe from water or fire damage, but don’t know what to do to prevent the irreparable damage that would come if you lost everything.

If any of those describe things that you think about, then you need Pixily.

Click Here to get a head start on your New Year’s resolution. Go paperless, get organized, get Pixily!

 Look around your desk. Open your drawers and look inside. How many filing cabinets do you have? How many boxes do you have in storage, or the attic or basement? How much of your home and office do you take up with paper? If you’re feeling like it’s too much, then you might find what Pixily has to offer interesting. Pixily is a personal assistant. Pixily is a safeguard against losing important information. Pixily is a tool that allows you to safely and securely digitize your paper documents and store them in a personal password-protected account online, allowing you to recycle your paper copies and reclaim lost space in your home or office. For every 10,000 pages you recycle, you save one tree. Compare the amount of time it would take you to search through filing cabinets and boxes for one piece of paper, to the amount of time it will take you to type in a couple of words and hit a search button.

 With Pixily, you can use keywords and phrases to search your account for specific documents. Send your papers in a prepaid scanvelope and we’ll scan them into your online account, where you’ll be able to find them anywhere that you have internet access. You’ll receive your original papers back within 3-5 business days, ready to be recycled. You also have the option to have your documents securely shredded at Pixily, and we will recycle the paper for you.

 Pixily isn’t something that you need to think about every day. It’s not a bill you need to worry about coming in the mail every month. Pixily is your personal assistant, your extra set of hands and eyes. You can send as many scanvelopes in a month as you like. And in the meantime, you can start to collect papers and documents for the next scanvelope you’ll send. And there’s no need to worry about losing papers or having a hard drive crash, your documents are stored in “the cloud”, and available for you to access anywhere. (You do have the option to download your fully-searchable documents to a harddrive once they are saved to your online account.)

Pixily also has a staff that is ready to respond to any question you may have about Pixily, your account, or how to go paperless and get yourself organized.

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.

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 of course, 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. What’s 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.

Only 11% or 150,000 of the 1.4 million customers of NSTAR ¹ have gone paperless by adopting eStatements. You would think this number would be much higher since electric and gas statements are probably the first set of statements you want to go paperless with. The charges are usually around $100 to $200 a month, do not vary much from month to month, there are usually no late fees for forgotten payments and even my grandmother knows that she needs to pay the electric bill every month. In comparison, the charges on your credit card statements are much higher, vary significantly from month to month, and have high late fees justifying reasons to hold on to paper statements.

This low rate of eStatement adoption comes as no surprise to us at Pixily. We at Pixily have been studying paper accumulation habits among households and businesses for the last 10 months and have found that people still like to receive paper statements even if they have signed up eStatements. Some of the reasons they have cited are:

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Yes, the more money you make, the more paper you collect. This statement may sound far fetched but it is mostly true. Our firm, Pixily has been studying paper collection habits for almost a year and has found that the education, wealth and age are directly correlated to amount of paper you accumulate.

If you are wondering how I am able to make such a bold statement, let us see what the different sources of paper are and how these sources are impacted by wealth, age and education.

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Yesterday I saw WALL-E with my family and friends. It is truly a great movie as everyone else is saying. It was also my kids (and their friends) first movie in a theater.

WALL-E is a trash compactor robot (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class). Part of what makes him human (besides the 25 years of hard-work and perfection by Pixar team) is his tendency to collect things he finds interesting. They include a rubik’s cube, egg-beater and a sheet of bubble wrap. Much of the movie is about a particular thing he picked up: a plant sprout.

Like WALL-E, we may be hard-wired to collect junk as well.

According to the experts, the tendency to hoard is animalistic and has its roots in food hoarding. I believe this theory as I observe it in my twins. Anirudh and Sahana have a separate collection of tiny trucks, cars and animal figurines that they do not want to play with, but just store in a special place. They are just 3 and their behavior is more inborn than acquired.

The Economist opinion (Curse of Untidiness; DNA all over the place) I referred to in my previous post talks about how this tendency could explain few things while at odds with the modern desire to be tidy and a minimalist.

The economist in Anand (pun intended) referred me to this “Endowment Effect” behavior, an effect observed 28 years ago. Apparently, the value of a thing intrinsically increases when one owns it and this has been demonstrated in several experiments (not just amongst humans but also chimps and capuchin monkeys).

What is even more interesting is how this irrational behavior conflicts with the rational world of markets.

I tend to agree with the other interpretation that this behavior is not exactly irrational but just “differently” rational. May be this behavior could be a variable in Willingness to Pay and Choice Modeling.

As much as we tend to accumulate, there is also value in being a minimalist and agile. There are costs associated with compulsive hoarding and disorganization.

How do we reconcile our urges and still feel organized? WALL-E has his ambidextrous limbs and neat array of bins in his truck to store and find things. And he probably has petabytes of RAM and SSD to remember where he placed his stuff.

How can we mere mortals have the same control as we collect more and more paper and digital documents which hold critical personal information?

Get a Pixily account. Get and feel organized, simplify your life, and go paperless.

July 1: Corrected Water -> Waste

I think I am finally beginning to understand my twisted relationship with paper.

As a student at Columbia Business School, I spent the past year shuffling around the massive piles of paper: class notes, problem sets, articles, course readers, bank statements, bills, and receipts. Given my constant frustration with this, you’d think that I’d be a little more paper savvy. Sadly, I too am a contributor to the sobering statistic that most documents are printed or copied up to 19 times.

Last week, we here at Pixily wrapped up a critical project. We’d done much of it using shared documents and, as a result, had not really generated a lot of paper in the process. When looking at the final version, I thought I’d print a copy of the 43-page doc for our files. Why? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps, I thought I would be nice to sit down and read through the document later, at my leisure. I always find that I retain more information when I read a hard (versus onscreen) copy of a document. Maybe I just wanted the hard-copy evidence of our accomplishment- a little trophy, if you will. Either way, a colleague stopped me: “We don’t print.” He was right– that’s just not our gig here. We’re trying to help people sort through the paper in their lives, not add to the pile.

I thought about my knee-jerk reaction to print the doc, thinking about why I prefer (or believe that I prefer) reading physical, rather than digital, documents. It dawned on me that the big difference is that I usually read paper documents armed with a pen, pencil, or highlighter. I underline as I read along and make notes, most of which are illegible, even to me, in the margin. Since I end up underlining half of the text, little argument could be made that I am highlighting the most important parts of a document.  Maybe I just drag my pen along the page so that I pay attention to what I am reading. Catherine Marshall, a reasercher at the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M, studied copies (8 - 20 copies each) of various texts from a university library to try to figure out exactly why people annotate the way that they do. Interestingly, she found that:

“annotations become a visible trace of the reader’s attention when the material is difficult and in narrative form; in other words, attention is easier to maintain if the material is relatively accessible. Philosophy texts, with their oftentimes dense narratives, are particularly prone to page after page of highlighting or underlining.”

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the shift to paperless systems has not occurred. People (myself included) need to be able to interact with their documents. Current software applications don’t support such interaction. This is what we’re working to fix at Pixily, i.e. bringing your paper documents to life. If users are able to annotate their digital documents, with the same ease and intuition made possible be a pen, they won’t need to print these documents out. Even when they’ve made comments on paper copies, these can be scanned into Pixily for easy storage, sharing, and search.

We’re hoping that this will help reduce prevalence of impulse printing and maybe, just maybe, help people live in harmony with their documents.

I am a wannabe Getting Things Done (GTD) follower and after years of false starts at a having a good personal task management system, I think I have finally figured out what works for me. I had heard really good things about Remember The Milk (RTM) and had tried it out briefly in its early days. For that matter, the problem with any system that I tried was that I didn’t readily have access to the system whenever I needed it and lacked the discipline to keep track of things in one place. But now, RTM and the cool set of tools that support it have shown me a way. This is how I work:

• I have a bunch of task lists defined at RTM (such as work, personal, finance, someday/maybe etc,.). I have created tags and smart-lists for GTD contexts as described in this blog entry.
• A great majority of the time, I add tasks to RTM using QuickSilver. In hindsight, this was the single biggest deficiency in all the other systems that I tried. Adding tasks to RTM using Quicksilver is by far the quickest way to dispatch things to RTM. I just go “Ctrl+Space” “Per…” (autocomplete to Personal), “Ad (auto complete to add task), “Pay for son’s portrait pictures at 10pm tomorrow” and off it goes. I continue to be impressed with QuickSilver, I think they should package it with every Mac. But I digress.
• I have a 35 minute commute (not all that bad, really) and tend to think about my ToDos during the commute. I have had unsuccessful attempts at using my phone’s voice memo recorder. The problem is that I used to record it on my phone, but never went back to my phone to listen to those. Again, I lacked that discipline. Enter Jott. I love their service. As and when I think of tasks or follow up items to do, I send a jott to myself. Jott integrates beautifully with RTM and Google Calendar. Btw, apparently Jott had (has?) folks in India transcribing voice memos to text. Isn’t that a great way to give something workable for your users, and keep refining it over time and perfect the technology? Again, I digress.
• Once a great majority of my tasks started to get captured at RTM, a funny thing happened. I found myself keeping it more and more current and up-to-date. The tools helped me bridge the lack of discipline in accumulating my tasks in one place. I am now a believer in the fundamental idea behind GTD that having a trusted system to setup tasks is the first step towards Mind like Water . Back when I was reading about GTD for the first time, I didnt think this would be the make-or-break, but it turned out to be.
• When I complete my projects / tasks, I quite often send an email to someone with the status or something else. The RTM Gmail extension (needs GreaseMonkey) helps me set them to complete, move dates, etc,. right from Gmail. I do check email quite a few times a day, so there is an added advantage of the tasks due that day being “in my face”. A nice side-effect.
• For my weekly review (which I should get better at), I use the RTM web site itself, which with its Google Gears support, also makes all my tasks available in offline mode.

Overall, I am happy with how things are now. Happy? That may be an understatement. I mean, this is so freakin’ cool, I feel guilty for all of this being free.

For me, it turned out that the missing piece to the puzzle was that I didn’t have quick and simple ways of aggregating my tasks in a single trusted system. This I believe, is also a big reason why our users love Pixily. At its core, Pixily is a single trusted system to gather all your information, regardless of where or how they are. We offer the following quick and simple ways to aggregate your information:

• Paper documents in prepaid envelopes or boxes (no trips to the post office, no counting sheets, no weighing envelopes). Just Stuff It and send it.
• Upload via the Pixily application using the multi-file uploader.
• Email documents to your Pixily account (coming soon).
• Another top secret, Quicksilver-like wicked-easy way to get your information into Pixily, which we cant talk about just yet.

This 5 minute video and this picture will give you a good idea of How Pixily Works:

So what is next for me? I look forward to tuning my contexts and start breaking my projects into more tangible Next Actions. I also need to get better at my weekly review. Stay tuned.

I get this question a lot when I tell people what Pixily is. Like most business ideas, the idea for Pixily was born out of a personal need. Well, here is the story behind Pixily:

After starting four companies, I went back to Wharton Business School to get an MBA in 2005. After I wrote my last exam in April 2007, I looked at 8000 pages of bulk packs and course notes and asked myself if there is a way I can keep those without having to carry them everywhere I moved. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to digitize all documents and carry just the Adobe PDF versions of the paper. There would be be no need for paper anymore and I can find any article, business case or class note, just by searching the documents using keywords.

After some research, I bought a high-end scanner for $800 and spent two weeks scanning all these pages. I also converted these pages into searchable PDFS similar to what Pixily offers today. Even though it was a painful and a time-consuming process, it was well worth it. I refer to these documents all the time just by searching on the keywords in the documents. I have classmates calling me asking if I could share my digital versions with them. Of course, I only share them with those people who took the classes with me - just to be sure I am not violating any copyrights.

After I moved back to Boston I started performing due diligence on four of my ideas including that of Pixily. The more I talked to people about Pixily, the more I heard from people how much they liked it and how they wish they could use such a service. I called our part-time accountant and asked her what she does with all our documents after they are processed. She responded by saying that she stores them in her basement along with her 49 other clients documents in boxes. When I mentioned the idea to her, she was excited. This were her words: “With this idea, my clients can access their documents whenever and from wherever they want. I do not need to go looking for them anymore. This would be a huge time and money saver”. Having the customer validation, I decided to put together a team and pursue Pixily.

I spoke to Anand Rajaram and Vikram Kumar (my partners in Pixily) who were running jPeople (my previous startup) about what they thought about the idea. They loved the idea and they told me they could relate to the problem. Vikram is the super-organizer and Anand like me is a wannabe-organizer. All of us spend time either organizing documents into folders or in finding documents when needing them.

I asked Anand and Vikram if they are willing to join me full-time in making Pixily a reality and bring paper to life. After some deliberation they said yes and in August of 2007 we founded Pixily and like they say: the rest is history.