Webware

There's nothing worse than trying to print a two-page article from the Web and have it print out in a half-inch column across 37 sheets of paper. It happens all the time, and if the site you're on doesn't have a special printer friendly option, your only other method was to use special software, or attempt to save the page as a PDF then print it out later.

A service called PrintWhatYouLike takes all the work out of this, and does you one better by letting you select only the parts of the page you want to print, leaving things like large Flash ads, site menus, and other clutter off of your precious bathroom reading.

To do this you just plug in the page's URL. You then have the options of simply clicking the parts of the page you want, or getting rid of things like the site's background and images. There are also some handy tools to change the text size, along with a font changer in case you're printing something off a page that insists on using undersized, illegible fonts.

The service is completely free and worth bookmarking. Power users will want to make use of the bookmarklet, which lets you print any page you're looking at without having to jump back and forth. Just one click and it brings up the special PrintWhatYouLIke interface.

Related: Extra page killer Green Print

[via Lifehacker]

When you run a URL through PrintWhatYouLike it's simply a matter of picking what you actually want to print from the page. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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)

Document host Scribd has a new service for people afraid of opening attachments. It's simply an e-mail address (iPaper@Scribd.com) you add as a CC recipient on your e-mails. If there are any documents attached, they'll be uploaded to Scribd and hosted for you. Less than a minute later the service sends a second e-mail with a link to that document or documents on Scribd, all of which have been set to private--regardless of whether you or the people who are getting the e-mail have Scridb accounts.

Last week I sat down with Scribd co-founder Trip Adler to chat about this new service and Scribd in general. The last time I wrote about them it was for the dubious Paper-to-iPaper program, which lets people send off their paper documents to be scanned and hosted. I gave it a try and it actually works as advertised--they even send it back free of charge. The whole process took about three weeks, which Alder says will be shortened as the program progresses.

Scribd founder Trip Alder

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

WW: What are users uploading the most of?

Alder: We get a lot of academic papers, school work, study notes, things like that. We get a lot of eBooks and presentations for work and legal documents. We get a lot of slideshows of photos.

WW: What's the average size of what people are uploading?

Alder: It ranges. We have a lot of really long documents that go over 1,000 pages, and a lot of really short ones too. The long stuff tends to be more interesting, it gets a lot more traffic too.

WW: Have you thought about spinning off versions for niche sites, like adult content or something document heavy like the Smoking Gun?

Alder: We've thought it, but we're working with educational institutions and big enterprises, and people can find that stuff somewhere else.

WW: Speaking of which, how is the push to get school to use your service?

Alder: There are institutions using it, we haven't been pushing that hard because it takes forever to contact universities. We talked to Harvard for example, where I went to school, and it's so hard to get the entire organization to use a single tool because it's so segmented into different areas. MIT OpenCourseWare is uploading all their documents. They created an account just to test it out--they don't have that much yet. They're going to upload about 100,000 documents. As we get bigger and get more resources we'll definitely try to get out and talk to more universities and get them to upload content.

WW: Do you have any users who are uploading an outrageous amount of stuff?

Alder: Yeah we have some power users. We had one guy who was uploading 40,000 documents or something. We ended up hiring him and now he's our community manager.

WW: What type of content was it?

... Read More

Shoppers who want to save some trees soon will find a new option for rejecting receipts at the checkout counters of major retailers.

A service that will enable consumers to receive digital receipts through big box stores, such as Best Buy and Target, is set to launch May 16.

AllEtronic is an add-in for digital cash registers running popular point of purchase applications. When it recognizes a customer as a sale is rung up, allEtronic blocks the receipt-printing process, triggering details to be sent to its servers instead.

Consumers can visit allEtronic's Web site to view and export receipts to personal accounting software. First, they have to enter the first six and last four digits of a credit card number when they sign up for the program.

To drive home its tree-hugging angle, allEtronic displayed a receipt tree at the Eco City conference April in San Francisco.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET)

Participating retailers will likely display an allEtronic decal near the usual lineup of credit card logos. Some shops may add allEtronic kiosks or tout the service in their TV commercials.

Retailers that still use paper receipts for internal records could continue to do so, but without printing a customer copy.

AllEtronic won't give users' e-mail addresses to third parties for advertising, according to CEO Isaac Lay. It will share with stores the names and addresses of users, but a contract will prevent retailers from snail-mailing people coupons and ads.

The company is seeking a stamp of approval from Trustwave, which would mark allEtronic as a secure service for storing partial credit card numbers.

AllEtronic touts its product as green for helping to save the trees felled for some 600,000 tons of thermal receipt paper used by stores each year. It takes 15 trees, 19,000 gallons of water, and 390 gallons of oil to make a ton of paper, according to the company, which is based in Fullerton, Calif.

GreenPrint is another free service built to attract treehuggers. The free utility shaves off extra pages when people print from a personal computer.

Update (10:06 AM): The submission process differs from the original plan. If you have the address, please don't send anything there. Please check the updated instructions below. And yes--this is real. Post has been amended from the original to reflect these changes.

We know it's April 1st, but this is 100 percent real. I made James Yu, Senior Product Developer at Scribd swear on his unborn first child that this isn't an April fool's gag. Starting today the document hosting company will take any of your real documents and scan them for you to be hosted on Scribd.

The company has a strict process to make sure you're not just going to send them truck loads full of documents. You must follow these explicit instructions:

To participate, just send a brief description of the type and quantity of your documents to paper@scribd.com. A Scribd representative will reply shortly with further instructions for how and where to mail the documents. Scribd will have the content scanned and published on Scribd.com to be easily shared with anyone. Include your Scribd username along with your paper so that your content will be published in your account. If you are not a Scribd user, include your email address, and Scribd will email you a link to your published content.

The most amazing part in all of this is that this service is completely free. Comparable commercial services range in price, but some I found were up to $.80 a sheet. There also appears to be no size limit, meaning you could literally send several boxes of old papers you have laying around. I can see this being huge with college students who have those final papers that are marked up by their professors or teaching assistants with all the edits and notes that aren't on the final drafts on their computers.

Also worth noting is that documents are shredded after scanning, although if you're worried about privacy you should realize they're going on the Internet.

We've been giving some play to Adobe Acrobat replacements and other PDF tools in the last few weeks, and it's clear people are serious about handling a large variety of document types without having to muck about with the right software or browser extensions.

To that end Scribd, a start-up that's all about documents and how to share them with others, has had a solution of its own using Adobe's FlashPaper and crunching all sorts of documents to fit in it. This morning the company launched its own viewer that not only replaces FlashPaper, but also improves upon its design for both users and publishers.

The new viewer is called iPaper. While the name might bring to mind Apple products of yore, the document viewer is a total Acrobat killer. It's fast, lightweight, and is designed with Web readers in mind. While it may look similar to FlashPaper, there are several key differences that make it much better suited for long documents, photos, and Web videos.

Scribd's iPaper one-ups FlashPaper in letting you view, share, and integrate documents into Web sites.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The biggest one being that iPaper has been designed with publishers in mind. The viewer goes hand-in-hand with a new publishing platform that lets Web publishers integrate advertising into documents or media they feel like sharing. There are no preroll or off-to-the-side ads; instead Scribd has worked in Google AdSense text ads that have been put between every few document pages and that slurp up contextual ads based on what's contained the document (example here). It's effective and not annoying.

Secondly, the publishing platform lets site owners integrate iPaper into their sites. There are three basic ways to do it. The first is basic embedding (which existed before iPaper), as well as a tool called QuickSwitch that will automatically convert any linked document into a hosted iPaper player when site owners install a small line of code on their page. For power users, there's also an open API that lets them integrate iPaper and document conversion into the back end of their sites or services.

While I think Adobe will eventually address the bloat that Acrobat has become for Web users, it's up to publishers to take a proactive approach to letting the greatest number of users access content in the same way they read words or watch videos. For that, Flash is definitely a phenomenal go-to. The iPaper document viewer shows promise at unifying document sharing by lowering the barrier to entry for users who simply don't want to deal with the hassle of extra applications.

I've embedded an example of the iPaper viewer after the break. Be sure to play around with the table of contents and zoom controls.

Flypaper lets you make professional-quality presentations from ordinary events.

Flypaper, formerly FreshBrew, creates cool Flash presentations without requiring the user to actually know Flash.

The presentations are based on templates, which users can then put their own data in, including audio and video, if the template supports it. The authoring application is a clunky downloaded application, which is weird for a glitzy Flash content company, but it does give you more drag-and-drop capabilities than you would probably get with a pure Flash authoring application.

Still, the output that we saw here was good. The "stories" that Flypaper makes look like professional Flash presentations. Whether you actually want your vacation photos or resumes in a Flash application is a question only you can answer.

GoldMail took the stage right after FlyPaper. It's oriented a bit more toward setting up linear presentations, which I think makes more sense. I covered GoldMail in November. At Demo 2008, the company is launching its business version, which adds custom branding, tracking, and a direct response feature.

See also, Vuvox, which I saw at Demo 2007.

Earth Class Mail, which enables people to manage snail mail online, has closed $13.3 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Ignition Partners of Bellevue, Wash., with more than half of the money raised by the Keiretsu Forum angel investment group.

The company aims to open a chain of retail stores, starting with one in Manhattan early this year, according to the Portland Business Journal. The storefronts will focus on easing the process of signing up, which requires completing some notarized forms. The Seattle-based service is used currently in 130 countries.

Earth Class Mail is billed as an efficient, eco-friendly alternative to a post office box and ideal for on-the-go workers. For between $10 to $64 per month, customers have their mail sent to the company rather than a personal address.

Letter openers on the 70-person staff are disabled veterans with Department of Defense security clearance. They scan the envelopes and upload the images to the Web. Customers view the mail online and decide which items to have opened and read, recycled, or forwarded.

Earth Class Mail's users recycle 90 percent of mail received, but only 20 percent of mail delivered to someone's door gets recycled, according to the company.

For DIY nuts out there, the Web is a source of plentiful project ideas and guides. It's also the home of a handful of paper craft projects, the kind you can print out and put together with a little bit of glue and ingenuity. A new, and really neat one got sent our way this weekend. It's called Paper Critters, and it's a Web-based creation tool for making your own desk art in the form of a boxlike creature. You can edit all five sides of it using a simple drag-and-drop editor with a variety of stamps and drawing tools. There's also a custom stamp that lets you use an image from your hard drive.

When finished putting everything together, there are several ways to share you work, including a printout feature that comes complete with step-by-step instructions. There's an e-mail tool and a permalink to send to others on your usual e-mail client, or via IM. My favorite is the embed code, which lets you drop it into a blog or Web site.

Once a critter has been shared, it goes into a group collective called "The Colony." From there, anyone can give it a look and add it to their favorites list. There's also a section for user comments. The real killer application is being able to edit other peoples' work and customize it. While this won't be reflected on their original, if you see something someone else has made, you can print it out yourself, or make alterations.

I've embedded an example of a 3-D Paper Critter. I've also been told by creator JR Fabito that a Facebook Application could be on the way. If you're into these kinds of projects, there are countless blogs dedicated to chronicling Web-syndicated paper crafts. Two of my favorites are Paper Forest and PaperKraft.net--both offer some serious eye candy and links to other projects.

Disclosure: Paper Critters creator JR Fabito is an ex-CNET employee and one of the designers of Webware.com.

Put together your own eccentric paper doll with Paper Critters. This one was designed with a Space Invaders motif.

(Credit: CNET Networks)