As mentioned in my previous post on Ubiquitous capture, one of the key new features of Pixily is that you can now email documents to your Pixily account. The email bodies and attachments in any of the supported formats will be processed to your Pixily account, just like the documents you mail in or upload.

In this post, I will describe this feature up-close and personal and discuss the different ways of using it. 

How does this feature work?

Each Pixily account gets its own unique email address, which is <your-username>@pixilymail.com. So for example, if the username you use to login at Pixily is johnorganizer, your pixily email address will be johnorganizer@pixilymail.com. Thats nice and easy to remember, isnt it?

Unlike the more common approach of using magic strings (look45youme@foobar.com) , we made your email address simple to remember. And simple, not just for you, but also for your clients, business partners, friends or anyone else that would like to send you documents via email. So you can go ahead and provide your pixily email address to them and any documents they send will be processed to your Pixily account. Remember, it is pixilymail.com

What happens when I receive an email at my pixilymail account?

• We send an acknowledgment to both the sender and to you, that we have received an email to be processed. The email will then be processed to your account.
• Both the email’s body and its attachments (in supported file formats) will be processed to your account. Currently, the supported file formats are PDF, TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TXT, HTML, DOC, XLS, and PPT.
• The email’s subject line becomes the name of the document, for the email body. Attachment names will be preserved. So for example, if you receive an email with Subject “Invoice for December 2008″ with an attachment called “Acme-Corp-2008-Invoice.pdf”, you will find two documents in your pixily account, one called “Invoice for December 2008.html” and another called “Acme-Corp-2008-Invoice.pdf”.
• And to state the obvious, both the email body and the attachments will all be made searchable.
• If a document fails processing, an email will be sent so that you can inform the sender.

What about spam and how do I control who sends me email?

So am I going to get a lot spam in my account, you ask. Nope, not really. Our spam filters are among the best in the industry, so you can safely enable anyone to send you emails. But if you’d rather not do that, you can specify that only specific email addresses can send you email (and soon, you can authorize anyone from a specific domain). You can change this setting your email preferences accessed from the account page.

By default, only the email id that you provide while registering with pixily is enabled to send you email. So, if you provided johnorganizer@gmail.com while registering with Pixily, you can already send emails from that email id. You can modify the settings as follows: (Click the image to view an enlarged version)

What are the benefits of this feature? How can I use it on a daily basis?

The possibilities that this feature enables and its associated benefits are limitless. Here are a few illustrative examples of how you can use this feature:

1. Automatically send online receipts to your pixily account while shopping online. All you have to do is to user your Pixily email address. The same applies for online itineraries too.
2. Most multi-function printers, desktop and office scanners support the ability to “Scan to Email”. If you have a scanner, you can “Scan to email” any document and add it instantly to your pixily account. Document types supported by such scanners (TIFF, PDF, JPG) are all supported by Pixily.
3. You can use your camera-phone to capture information to Pixily. Take a picture of that receipt, or your favorite wine’s label and send it as an email attachment right from your phone.
4. You may setup filters in your email client, to automatically forward all emails (or emails with attachments) to your pixilymail id.
5. You can cc: or bcc: your pixilymail id so that you dont lose track of any email conversations that happen or to keep track of.

Not surprisingly, email is already becoming the most popular way to capturing data at Pixily. How do you use the email feature as part of your workflow? Do you find it a time-saver? Do you fire and forget to your pixily account? Let us know.

We have been extremely busy at Pixily (to say the least), and our latest release has a lot of very exciting features. I will do a quick overview of those features here, but some of them are involved enough to deserve their own post. I will be covering each feature in-depth during the coming weeks.

This release is a gigantic step towards our vision of “Ubiquitous Capture”. We want our users to be able to capture information in any form, in any manner and make it accessible anywhere, anytime.

Without further ado, these are the highlights of this release:

1. Support for more document formats: Thus far we supported only PDF documents for upload, but as of now, we support a lot of additional file formats. All files in the following formats are made searchable and viewable using the same awesome viewer that you have all come to love:
   • .doc - Microsoft Word (Office 2003)
   • .ppt - Microsoft Powerpoint (Office 2003)
   • .xls - Microsoft Excel (Office 2003)
   • .jpeg - JPEG format (common enough for me to not bother with esoteric acronym)
   • .png - Portable Network Graphics
   • .tiff - Tagged Image File Format
   • .bmp - Bitmap files
2. Email documents to Pixily: In addition to uploading files using pixily.com you may now just send an email (with attachments of any of the file formats that we support). If your user id with pixily is jimorganizer, your pixily mail id will be jimorganizer@pixilymail.com. So go ahead, forward invoices, receipts and statements that you receive and cc: your pixily mail id for future reference. In addition to emailing from your email client, you may also use this feature to email documents to us directly from multi-function scanners. Scan It, Mail It, Find it! It can’t get any easier than that.
3. Give the gift of Pixily: If you know someone that has everything (literally or figuratively :-), a Pixily subscription will be the perfect choice for them. What better way to support the “I need to be more organized” New Year resolutions of your near and dear, than by getting them started with a Pixily account. And what’s more you get 1 month free for giving the gift of Pixily. Visit http://www.pixily.com/gift for details.
4. What’s in a name?: You may now name and rename all your documents stored with Pixily (this includes both scanned documents and emailed documents). From the document viewer page, click on the “Document Name” section (surprise!!) to name and rename. And of course, document names are searchable too. Here is a screenshot showing how a new tab has been added to the search results page for document name search hits.
   
5. Sort or not?: There are now two additional ways to sort any given list of snippets. We have added the ability to sort by most viewed documents and also recently viewed documents. Comes in handy when you want to quickly get at a recently viewed document or a favorite document that you keep accessing time and again.
   

In addition to the above features, we have also upgraded our Multi-file uploader to provide support for Adobe Flash v 10.

Did you find your wishlist of features addressed here? Anything you find missing? As always, we are listening.

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.