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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!!