Pixily turns stacks of paper into search-friendly scans

Pixily is a cool scan-by-mail service that launched in early June. Like Shoeboxed, which I checked out last month, Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets. The big difference between the two services is that Pixily is focused less on receipts and finances, and more on day-to-day papers like insurance claims, long cell phone bills (with call lists on them) and little things like birthday cards.

Everything that's scanned goes through optical character recognition (OCR), so you can search for it in the built-in search tool. It also lets you tag, and make notations to documents for the sake of sorting. If you've got digital documents, you can upload them into the mix as well.

Like Netflix, Pixily works through the mail with similar pre-paid envelopes that you can stuff with as much paper as allows. Each paid plan has a higher number of envelopes you can send in each month, along with limits on how much scanned content the service will host for you. After it's scanned, it's sent back in the same mailer, which can be chucked in with your paper recycling--envelope and all.

It's worth noting that for things like school papers and general writing, Scribd.com has a free program called Paper-to-iPaper that lets you send in all sorts of paper items by mail (at your postal expense) complete with OCR. One thing to note, however is that you have to get the content pre-approved, and things like bills and notes scribbled on paper are not welcome.

Pixily plans start at a free level (which requires you sending in documents on your own dime), all the way up to a $60/month plan that serves up four envelopes a month for you to stuff.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Pixily requires using the mail to get your documents online, although if you've got PDFs lying around, you can send those digitally to go alongside your scanned docs.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[hervalfreire]

actually I don't see a lot of similarities between shoeboxed and pixily - pixily is focused on plain documents (the kind of document you will probably want to take a look at again someday - mortgage letters? magazine articles? heck, old love letters?? ;)) while shoeboxed is focused on storing small paper receipts - which I personally never even bothered storing at home!

Plus, pixily allows you to upload pdfs yourself (that's what I've been doing since my address is outside USA and they don't accept international mail :-() and more important than that, doesn't ask you to type again everything you posted! (shoeboxed asks you to type what's written on the receipt?!). Very different market niches, I guess..

[danenglander]

Josh,

Thanks for the Shoeboxed shout-out. Shoeboxed now offers a 30-day free trial on all Receipt Mail-In plans.

You can all sign up now at http://start.shoeboxed.com to take advantage of our great service.

In case that doesn't link: you can start your free trial here.

Dan Englander
VP Community
Shoeboxed.com
Call me: [phone]

[danenglander]

@hervalfreire I don't think Josh was implying that the features or even focus of Shoeboxed and Pixily are the same thing, but was just pointing out that we are both companies trying to digitize what people have up until this point mainly stored in paper form.

Another clarification from your comment: Shoeboxed does not require you to enter in any information about your receipts under the Receipt Mail-In program. It is all entered into your account for you. And we don't just do "small receipts." We'll scan and enter any financial document: receipts, invoices, canceled checks, bills, credit card statements, etc. You'll be ready to go for taxes, expense reports, bookkeeping, and general budgeting.

Dan Englander
VP Community
Shoeboxed.com
Call me: [phone]

[igl00lgi]

Do all these companies being trusted with personal documents screen their employees, and if so how well. And doing a half baked online database background check doesn't qualify as even close to well when dealing with the potential personal information that would be submited to make this even worth the effort. I would hate to sign up for something like this and then realize that the work is farmed out to low security prisoners at some correctional facility.

[anandrajaram]

@igl00lgi To quote the Pixily FAQ on Security and Privacy "All documents are processed by personnel that have gone through background checks similar to what financial institutions conduct to ensure the utmost privacy of your documents.".

Moreover, each envelope is tracked throughout the entire Pixily process. Once the documents have been scanned they are encrypted and stored in two locations in Amazon data centers. When you access your documents, all information goes through encrypted channels similar to how credit cards information is transferred online. We also run third-party privacy and hacker-safe tests daily to ensure that our servers are completely hacker-proof.

Anand Rajaram
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer
Pixily
Ph: 888-ORG-NIZE

[danenglander]

At Shoeboxed, we drug test and do criminal background checks on all our employees. All our document handlers also happen to be college graduates. We have extensive and ongoing security and privacy training of all employees interacting with users' documents and information. When processing receipts, document handlers don't even know the name of the person that the receipts belong to.

Dan Englander
Shoeboxed

[missqueue]

Some receipts, invoices and bills show the Full Name and Address on them. For example, purchases at the Apple Store will post the name and address on the receipt. So how is privacy protected there? - Perhaps the memory zapper from the Men In Black movie would do the trick! ;P

But on a serious note, are writing materials and tools for documentation prohibited in the scanning room like how Pixiliy.com states on their FAQ section? See here: http://www.pixily.com/help/question.php?ID=29

Please let us know. If anything though, I think Shoeboxed provides more value for their services in the amount of receipts that can be scanned, compared to Pixiily's max of only 200 sheets/month...then extra costs incur of more sheets are needed.

[surfbored]

How much of the scanning (for Pixily and Shoeboxed) is outsourced? I'd be highly concerned about my private information going overseas where US laws don't protect my privacy. Keeping the work in country is no guarantee, but farming it out is even worse.

[anandrajaram]

All of Pixily's scanning is done by background screened Pixily personnel within the United States. We don't have any plans to outsource the scanning outside of Pixily nor do we have any plans to outsource it outside of the United States.

Anand Rajaram
Pixily
Ph: 888-ORG-NIZE

[danenglander]

@surfbored All of our scanning and processing is done right here in Durham, North Carolina!