We have had some questions on how envelopes are accounted for each month and what the cut-off is for the envelopes to reach us in a given month. Like most things Pixily, we have tried to keep this as simple as we can.

Billing cycles are 1-month intervals based on when you sign up and/or when you upgrade (if applicable). So, if you signed up for Pixily on Oct 4th, your monthly cycle will be from the 4th of each month to the 4th of the following month. Let us follow through this example.
Consider the billing cycle from Nov 4th to Dec 4th, for the Value Plan (which allows for 1 envelope per month), this is how it works:

1. Every month, we replenish your envelopes such that you get them by the beginning of your billing cycle (Nov 4th). When you sign up for the very first time, we send you one additional set of envelopes so that you always have one set handy.
2. Envelopes for that month, can be sent by you upto Dec 11th, allowing for a grace period of upto 1 week from the last date of your billing cycle (Dec 4). This is to ensure that someone who mails it on the last date of their billing cycle (Dec 4th), still gets a chance for the envelope to be counted for that month.

As long we receive your envelope between Nov 4th and Dec 14th, it will be counted for the cycle from Nov 4th to Dec 4th, and you will not be charged anything additional over what is covered by your plan.

Simple, right? We wish it were simple enough to not warrant a blog post, but hope this clears things up.

To say that 2008 has been an exciting year would be, well, the understatement of the year. 2008 is when we made the leap from being an idea to being an awesome service with tons of happy customers. None of this would have been possible without the support and encouragement of our customers, partners and the extended Pixily family. So, a heartfelt Thank you, from all of us at Pixily.

We look forward to an exciting year ahead with dozens of great features planned. Happy Holidays and we wish you all a happy and “organized” 2009.

January is National Get Organized Month. To celebrate our association with the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) and as a sponsor of National Get Organized Month, we are offering our members the ability to mail or scan in an extra 50 sheets of information during the month of January. This special offer, available until January 31st, is designed to help consumers and small businesses get a jump start on their New Year’s resolutions to get organized and clear out the backlog of paper clutter in their homes and offices.

Stay tuned for more ways to get organized and stay organized. Happy 2009.

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.

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 Exchange (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.

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 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.

We had a surprise gift on the morning of July 24th, four days after we launched. CNET’s Josh Lowensohn wrote an article about us titled, Pixily turns stacks of paper into search-friendly scan“. He called Pixily, a cool scan-by-mail service. How cool is that!?!

He talked about how Pixily eliminates paper clutter from your life by scanning them and making them searchable. He also drew parallels between NetFlix and Pixily and how like NetFlix, we leverage the postal service to make it easy to go paperless.

With CNET, ReadWriteWeb and many more blogs covering us, we are starting to see website traffic from all over the world. As of July 27th, we had visitors from 86 countries including Canada, UK, Germany, India, Japan, Philippines, Trinidad and many more countries. 

By July 23rd, the blogosphere started buzzing about Pixily. We are very excited and overjoyed on the kind of things people are saying about us. Here is what happened on July 23th, 2008:

Can Scanning as a Service Clean Your Desk?
Amazon Web Services Blog

Amazon wrote about us because we use Amazon data centers to host all our servers and to store all your documents. We choose Amazon because this is the same company you have come to rely on over 10 years to buy everything from books to electronics. Amazon now rents out its data centers to companies like Pixily. Moreover, these data centers are one of the most secure centers in the world and are available 24/7. That means your documents and data are completely secure and accessible whenever you want and from wherever you want.

Put Your Paper Docs Online in 3 to 5 Days Max
ReadWriteWeb

This is the first mainstream blog that picked up our story and is not connected to us in any way. This story describes how Pixily works and talks about our turnaround time. It also highlights how we are offering a service at a price point and in a package that consumers and small businesses can afford and is easy to use. This kind of service has always been available to large companies and for the first time you have access to this technology through Pixily.

Here are few excerpts from the article:

“It’s the kind of service that big companies spend a lot of money on, now made affordable enough for anyone.”

“… That’s pretty awesome.”

One day after we launched Pixily, we received a huge PR bump in the Sunday Boston Globe, the largest circulated daily in New England.  Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe’s columnist, wrote about his experience using the Pixily service in his sunday column, Innovation Economy, under the title: Is paper piling up? Send it off to Pixily.

Considering we did not hire a PR agency, this is a big coup for us. We got introduced to Scott through a mutual connection. When we described what Pixily is, Scott liked our idea and wanted to write about us. Over the course of a week, Scott tried our service, interviewed us in person and followed up with questions on the phone. From the time the column hit the streets on July 20th, over traffic has spiked, and the blogosphere has been buzzing about us (more on this in a later post).

In addition to the article, Scott conducted a an extensive interview and produced a three minute video. He asked us questions such as why we choose to boot-strap and not go for venture funding; what are the benefits of cloud computing and why we choose Amazon web services.

Here are few excerpts from the article and the video:

(more…)