Documentlabs is a Sydney-based startup that is hoping to make life easier for “corporate and SME’s who have a need to publish to the Internet what is commonly referred to as an “interactive document” and those who wish to create a searchable library of their material for their clients.”
The idea sounds simple. Make it easy for people to upload documents, throw in some stats and take the hosting burden off the companies leaving them to do what it is they do well.
Looking at examples on their site, you can see that the documents are definitely easy to navigate and the hosted files and Documentlabs reader look professional. There’s only one problem in my mind – what’s the market?
For instance, larger orgs tend to have professional websites and the notion of hosting your own PDF version of a document with analytics is not something that would frighten either their internal IT staff or outsourced web presence providers.
With that in mind, it would seem that maybe the target market is all those SMEs out there that want a quick, easy and relatively cheap way to create a web library.
Only problem is that Scribd is quick, easy and FREE and does everything, more or less, that Documentlabs do.
That having been said, Documentlabs does look more professional, but how many orgs out there, that are incapable or unwilling to host their own documents, would want to pay a premium to look a little more professional?
The answer may be many. There may also be a whole bunch of large orgs (like those in the examples) who love using the service. Or maybe the corporate and SME world is full of people like me who don’t think hosting my own docs is that much of an issue. Either way you’d think it’s going to be a tough sell to a general audience.
Perhaps that’s why, as co-founder Ian Lufkin explains, “Documentlabs will be targeted towards several vertical sectors in the Australian, American and European markets”.
I’m rooting for the Documentlabs guys, but time will tell if they can find a market. If they can, then with the way this type of business scales, we could be hearing more from Documentlabs in the near future.
So major news outlets have been reporting the news that Telstra is giving up on Sensis.com.au, it’s own search engine, after spending over $100M and a decade trying to build the online property.
