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A Content Management System of One’s Own

Pixily Creates Consumer Market Business Model and Revenue Streams with the Help of ABBYY FineReader Engine

Client: Pixily - An online service for making one’s own paper and digital documents immediately available.

Location: Waltham, MA

Size: Eight Employees

Leadership: Three co-founders: Prasad Thammineni, Chief Executive Office; Vikram Kumar, Chief Technology Officer; and Anand Rajaram, Chief Product Officer

Product: Online document management portal (powered by ABBYY’s FineReader Engine)

Market: Consumer and Business

Market Differentiators: Brings document management, storage and content management to the masses at compelling price points

Website: http://www.pixily.com/

Companies know they need content management solutions, so they hire enterprise managers whose job it is to manage huge quantities of data. They know when and how to “spec” high quality OCR products, the best scanners, data extraction tools, etc. And corporations are willing to pay, with solutions soaring to $100K+ price tags as quality content management solutions leave the desktop and join much larger networks.

On the other hand, small businesses, home offices, and general consumers don’t have these options if they want to implement the functionality of an enterprise content management system. The mere mention of ECM and CRM elicits the conspicuous blank gaze of these document management newbies. However, the need for good data management exists, and there are dollars to be made, even in household situations.

And for start-up Pixily, Inc, small businesses and consumers offer a virtually untapped market. Pixily is a simple, intuitive, one-of-a-kind service that helps people aggregate, organize and find their documents. An online portal is established for consumers who then mail in (or upload) their documents in pre-paid envelopes to Pixily. Best of all is the personal Google-like search function that allows people to benefit from quality searches within their own document archives.

Documents are processed within seconds, and they are made searchable using the ABBYY FineReader® Engine. “OCR is the key,’ said Vikram Kumar Chief Technology Officer of Pixily.

Unlocking a $150,000 MBA Education

“For the search to work, the OCR has to be really, really good, and that was the one place where ABBYY really helped us out,”said Pixily co-founder and CEO, Prasad Thammineni. Mr. Thammineni’s original vision was based upon his need to scan, easily reference and access 8000 pages of text from his Wharton MBA Program – instead of simply boxing up his $150,000 education. “We’ve unlocked the information in the paper and made it available on the web, giving people anywhere, anytime access to their paper documents.”

Content Management for The Masses

Pixily’s unique business model represents one of the first content management solutions ‘for the masses’. Its target market: Any of 18 million U.S. households with an annual income of over $75,000 whose residents are between 30-65 years old, and who have too little storage space; and over five million small businesses who are looking for an outsourced and simple-to-use service. Another unique selling point of Pixily’s is its willingness to accept boxes of data and digitize them into the customer’s account.

A $10,000 System for $14.95

According to Mr. Thammineni, in order to do what Pixily offers, a consumer would “need to buy a document scanner at $300 to $400, purchase software to convert scans into a desktop format such as PDF, then put together a content management system to find the documents.” As Thammineni further emphasizes, “The solutions today are very complex and expensive—you can spend $10k but it’s limited to the four walls of your home office.”

With Pixily however, consumers and small businesses can go paperless (think green) for as little as $14.95 per month -- scanning, storing, and making searchable the papers people would like saved for them. Pixily launched in July 2008, and prior to that the company had 200 beta testers committed to the product. Already, the company has gained high-profile media accolades.
Customers now use Pixily to house all of their paper bill statements, handwritten notes, receipts, invoices, magazine page cut-outs, and much more. They save time and money by mailing in their paper documents to Pixily, who then handles the scanning for them. Other users who prefer to do the scanning themselves access their digitized information anytime, anywhere using Pixily’s intuitive interface. Organizations such as mortgage companies, who have to keep 10 years of documents on file, love the man-hours saved by letting Pixily file, scan and organize their box loads of documents.

Customers love Pixily’s key features, and the ability to:

The Technology Supporting the Vision

Anand Rajaram, Pixily’s Chief Product Officer, talks about how Pixily’s efforts to identify potential partners led them to ABBYY. “Initially we were trying to put together the quickest possible thing. We looked for the quickest download, and we identified two or three OCR vendors who we should talk to.”

Mr. Rajaram continues, “We heard really good things about ABBYY’s accuracy at TAWPI, plus we had used and tested ABBYY in a previous application we were going to use. From a platform perspective, we are on Linux. ABBYY is one of the best offerings on the Linux platform.”

Mr. Rajaram came up with a 20-point criterion and began his evaluation. Using his experience in developing large-scale projects, he realized that many applications normally have tradeoffs in terms of speed and accuracy, but according to Mr. Thammineni, “this is where ABBYY excelled.”

Both executives mentioned the difficulties start-ups face in getting product and licensing agreements off the ground, and they cite ABBYY’s flexibility in working with Pixily through licensing discussions and extended evaluations. “Anytime we ran into any issues we always got timely responses, said Mr. Thammineni, who has founded multiple companies in addition to Pixily. “They have been a very, very good partner and they recognize that as a startup, we have certain constraints.”

“We were hearing ‘we will work with you’,” said Thammineni, “and that’s something I have never heard from someone in sales. We were very surprised and enticed by that.”

See How Others Are Succeeding with FineReader Engine!
Visit case studies site.