One of my pet-peaves with the whole trend from traditional desktop software to a brave and virtually unrestricted world of Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) is the specific and painful process of bridging the gap between the two. Viewing documents that we’re created to be viewed offline on the web has not been fun. Adobe has used it’s market share to push a bloated PDF viewer on the world, that quite frankly causes problems with many browsers. Google got into the game a little while ago with Google Documents and was even able to launch supporting Microsoft formats like .Doc , .PPT and .Xcl . . . and Google took over the world and we all lived happily ever after . . . not quite. Creating and collaborating online is one thing but opening up .Doc, .Docx, .PDF. , .Xcl documents in your browser is another. If you’ve ever tried to view a document through Google docs you can attest to the frustration. Well, it turns out that Philly startup Vuzit has relieved my suffering with it’s new product/project called Nodobe.
What is Vuzit?
Vuzit (pronounced “views-it”) is an online document platform that utilizes web services and AJAX technology to create a best of breed web platform for distributing and displaying documents.
Vuzit allows content publishers to embed documents in their web pages, similar to how YouTube distributes video, thus maintaining consistent branding and site navigation. Vuzit provides publishers with tools to display documents alongside other web content and systems (e.g. advertising and analytics)” - Vuzit website
What’s new?
We are happy to announce that the Nodobe Firefox extension was approved for public consumption by the Mozilla AMO editors this weekend. It’s been downloaded over 500 times in the past couple days, despite a total lack of promotion on our part. We created this plugin so we would use Vuzit in more of our daily activities. We’re hoping that this product will show others the flexibility afforded by the Vuzit platform.” - Vuzit Blog
Go install it now and check it out out for yourself. Nodobe online document viewer for Firefox.
A little while ago Phillypreneurs was able to spend some time with the Vuzit team and get to know more about how they got their start and what’s next. Check it out:
Dave Speers is an online marketing consultant and start-up junky that has worked with a wide variety of Philadelphia businesses. Dave spends most his time annoying really smart people at Indy Hall co-working collaborative.
