TechCrunch
Doctape Launches Standalone File Viewer App For iOS With Support For 80+ File Types
German cloud storage and file management startup doctape has launched a new standalone iOS app aimed at making it easier for iPhone and iPad users to view file types not supported natively by iOS.
The app is lining up to compete with the likes of Documents by Readdle and GoodReader but doctape claims its app supports many more file types than most extant iOS file viewers, and also offers a better viewing experience for “most document & media formats” thanks to its conversion engine.
The doctape Viewer app uses doctape’s cloud-based file conversion engine to support file imports from a variety of third-party sources — including the likes of Dropbox, Box, Picasa, Instagram, Github, Gmail, Google Drive — so they can be viewed on an iOS device.
The viewer app works independently of doctape’s cloud storage and file management service: doctape — files to go, but it’s presumably hoping to drive users from one to the other. “The current goal of doctape Viewer is to decouple our document conversion from our cloud storage offerings and to integrate very deeply into the existing ecosystem of cloud storage services and apps,” Sascha Reuter, founder and CEO of doctape, tells TechCrunch.
Doctape is not releasing user numbers for its file management cloud service but Reuter says its background conversion-engine has converted “millions” of files, for mobile and browser (HTML5) access, to-date.
More than 80 file types are supported by the new doctape Viewer app — including:
- Adobe PDF files (PDF)
- Microsoft Office files (Word DOC/DOCX, Excel XLS/XLSX, Powerpoint PPT/PPTM/PPTX)
- Libre Office & Open Office files (ODT, ODT, SXW, STW)
- Text-files (RTF, TXT, CSV)
- Audio files (MP3, M4A, AACF, AIFF, WAV, ALAC)
- Video files (MP4, MOV, MPV, M4V, 3GP)
- Image & vector files (JPG, PNG, TIF, BMP, AI, NEF, ARF)
- Adobe Photoshop files (PSD)
“While there’s a bunch of services allowing accessing files on the go, users are still suffering from the limited filetypes supported by their mobile devices. With the release of doctape Viewer, we’re opening our background conversion-services to work with about every existing service & app there is,” Reuter notes in a statement. Which is really throwing down the gauntlet to users to find a file type that can’t be viewed using its app.
doctape Viewer for iOS is a freemium app, with the free version limited to two conversions per day. The pro version of the app — available via in-app purchase — offers unlimited conversions plus additional features such as a full-text search. Reuter said the startup plans to expand the premium version’s feature-set in future — including adding background conversion for video and audio files, an iPad optimized interface and also integrating its cloud storage service.
Kickstarter Owns Indiegogo With Around 6X More Total Dollars Raised, Average Success Rate Much Higher
Indiegogo seems to always play second fiddle to Kickstarter, despite the fact that it was on the crowdfund scene first, and now someone’s done the math to figure out exactly how the two compare. Freelancers working in the crowdfunding space Jonathan Lau and Edward Junprung scraped Indiegogo’s website to derive comparable numbers to those Kickstarter makes available free on its own website via its stats page, and the results are eye-opening.
Kickstarter has had over 110,000 campaigns run on its site according to its own data, while the scrape run by Lau and Junprung found about 44,000 campaigns total on Indiegogo. That number contrasts with the reported 142,301 that appears to be the last publicly available figure regarding total campaigns on Indiegogo, but the discrepancy is likely explained by the fact that Indiegogo delists campaigns that are unsuccessful and that raise fewer than $500, a practice which would skew data derived from a scrape vs. that taken from whole, internal values like those found on KS.
Indiegogo campaigns were found to have raised far fewer successful dollars than Indiegogo, with around $98 million total all-time, while Kickstarter had about six times that, or $612 million. Kickstarter has had 40 projects cross the $1 million threshold, with only 3 doing the same on Indiegogo, and Kickstarter’s average success rate is 44 percent, while Indiegogo’s is around 34 percent (which doesn’t take into account the many delisted projects that failed to raise at least $500. Including those delisted efforts, the previously reported 9.3 percent success rate on 142,301 total campaigns matches up nicely.
Despite hosting many more successful projects, unsuccessful dollars raised (in other words, those associated with projects that didn’t meet their goal) on both platforms is around the same, with Kickstarter seeing $83 million raised and Indiegogo only slightly behind at $70 million. Indiegogo’s money raised is also disproportionately resting on the shoulders of just a few projects, with 40 percent of its total funds attributable to campaigns that passed $100,000 in funding.
Kickstarter is generally perceived as the number one crowdfunding site on the web, and it looks like that perception is well-deserved according to the numbers. Which isn’t to say Indiegogo’s necessarily doing anything wrong; there’s a place for a site with fewer barriers to listing, the ability to run flexible funding campaigns and the chance to get a bit more foolishly ambitious, to be sure. But the very different nature of the two sites from a balance sheet perspective could lead to an ever-widening gap in the type of content we see from both, and the way potential backers view each as well.
Check out Lau and Junprung’s full chart of figures here if you’re interested in digging deeper into the data or disputing their findings.
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