We contracted TNS, a global, independent market research firm to go out and quiz 1,000 adult Americans on our behalf, in a survey all about PDF files, digital documents, and paperless practices.

Needless to say, the results were shocking — both in the conventional (literal) context as well as in the “passing out from the sheer quantity of data sense.”

So, we brought in the awesomely talented guys at Column Five to distill all that data into one easily digested and conveniently shared infographic. Major props. It’s the first of a series we’re working on with them, and we’re pretty stoked with how it came out  – watch this space…

Click on the image below to view it in all its glory. After some bedtime reading? Click here to download your very own hi-resolution PDF.

Survey Methodology (AKA, required legal stuff)

This survey was conducted online, within the United States by TNS via its Express Online omnibus product on behalf of Nitro. The survey took place from September 29-October 2, 2011, among 1,000 adults ages 18 and older, using individual methodology. 

Portable Document Format (PDF) has been an ISO Open Standard since 2008, with an ever-increasing availability of alternative applications—many of which don’t allow their users to make the most of their PDF files.  With annoying updates, deliberately restricted functionality, in-application advertising, bundled third party toolbars, and so much more, free PDF readers seem all but freeing.

The Pledge

Here at Nitro, we’ve had enough.  For the month of February, we’re running a Facebook sweepstakes contest to spread the word and help our users declare their PDF independence.  All you need to do is join the cause and you’ll be eligible to win a brand new Sony Vaio E Series Laptop valued at $806.99!

What about the countless times you’ve received a card, left it in your pocket, and forgot it in the wash?  Well, say goodbye to conventional business cards with Cardcloud, a new application available for iPhone and Android operating systems.

Cardcloud—previously known as My Name is E— is an electronic business card service that allows its users to share their contact information quickly through their phones by either using the “beam” feature of the application or simply emailing to the other user.  This new technology reduces the typical hassle of having to input each individual field into the phone book.

Other services like Cardcloud that streamline information exchange include the increasingly popular Bump, which is a mobile application that transfers each person’s information when they literally “bump” phones.

Along with the heightened efficiency of contact exchange, this handy app also acts as a paperless solution.  The U.S. consumes 1.6 billion reams of paper per year, which translates to over $6 billion.  Imagine not only the relief on the environment but also on your wallet! (You’ll also never have to scrape those little pieces of soggy cardboard out of the washing machine again!)

Obviously, just doing away with business cards won’t exactly curb your paper consumption completely — but it’s a step in the right direction. Nitro Reader is another one, enabling you to fill forms, collaborate electronically, and even sign documents — all without having to print a single sheet of paper.

While the complete eradication of daily paper use is still a lofty goal for most people, leveraging Nitro Reader and applications like Cardcloud and Bump can certainly help until the next evolution arrives.

Nitro Pro 7 was designed with one goal in mind—to make working with PDF files as easy as possible.

You may have also noticed the new look of our website where this post has been published and a fun little creature appearing throughout.  Well say hello to the new face of Nitro!  His name is Milo, he’s a wombat, and starting next week he is going to walk you through some of the best features of Pro 7, like:

• Redaction – Search, mark, and permanently remove sensitive, private or confidential information – including images and text – from documents more easily and more affordably.

• Digital Signature Profiles– Easy-to-use profiles reduce the number of tedious steps involved in the application of digital signatures, so you can securely sign and return documents faster than ever before.

• Paragraph Text Editing – Automatic reflow and intelligent detection means you can now edit text in your PDF files as easily as you would with word processing software.

These new features and many more have firmly planted us on the top of the list of many publications including CNET and About.com.  CNET gave Nitro Pro 7 a huge thumbs up saying, “Overall, we think Nitro Pro 7 provides just about everything you could ask for from an all-in-one PDF solution.”

Seeing can be believing so make sure to check out a quick video tour that highlights our cool new features and some redesigned oldies-but-goodies:

We’re excited to release what we think is the best version of Nitro Pro yet..  What are you waiting for? Download a free 14-day trial here of Nitro Pro 7 and see how it makes PDF easy

Truth be told, we care a lot more about what you guys think – we want to deliver an awesome user and customer experience – but awards are an awesome way to recognize the contribution of everyone on the Nitro team, and when well-known publications place us on their annual lists, it helps more people discover us and our products.  We also gain a little “street cred,” so to speak…

This past summer Nitro has been featured on two major lists.  Here they are:

Inc. 500|5000

Inc. Magazine publishes a list every year comprised of the fastest growing companies in the United States.  There are just under seven million privately held, employee-based firms in America, and in the past three years the Inc. 500/5000 has created more than 370,000 full-time jobs – we’re proud to be part of that.

In order to qualify, the company must have demonstrated significant growth– both in revenue and employee headcount. This year, Nitro came in at #699!  This is pretty significant for a company of our size (80% of the companies listed have more employees!)

The overall ranking is great – no doubt about that – but we’re even more excited to come in at #57 in the Software category and #27 in San Francisco!  To make the top 30 in San Francisco, the incubator and home for so many companies we admire and respect … well, #27 is pretty awesome!

The response was pretty overwhelming – we saw tweets, emails, comments, and just about everything else (no carrier pigeons, sadly…) So, we’d like to thank all our users and customers for the kind words and support. You guys rock, and we wouldn’t have made the list without your support…

BRW Fast 100

Whilst we’re headquartered in San Francisco these days, we have an office in Melbourne, we’re Australian-founded, and have more than a few Aussies on staff—the connection down under is still pretty strong!

BRW is the business publication of record in Australia, covering news, trends, and opportunities in the private sector and beyond. With some pretty spectacular timing, our inclusion on the BRW Fast 100 puts us as one of the 100 fastest-growing companies operating in Australia.  Sadly, we have to wait until October to find out the exact ranking – it’s going to be tough!

Accolades and awards are great, but they’re certainly not why we do this. Ultimately, we’re passionate about developing innovative products that make your life easier – easy-to-use, affordable (ideally free!), and no-BS solutions for working with digital documents. And, so long as you guys keep using them, we’ll keep building them!

Congrats to the entire Nitro team, and our awesome user base.

Here are 5 quick and easy tips from grilling to the gridiron that are sure to help your weekends become epic and easy:

1.  Buy tickets near your friends.   Ticketmaster announced last week that it has integrated a system with Facebook so that you are now able to sit as close as you want to your Facebook friends at the same game.  Do away with standing up on the phone, waving your arms to show your friends where you are with this handy new tool.

2.  Download directions to the stadium.  There is no reason to get in the car and drive towards the stadium without good directions or knowledge of where you’re going and even those directions can get confusing at times.  Almost every smart phone nowadays has some sort of navigation application with GPS functionality so that even if you get turned around, your phone won’t.  However, if you don’t have the functionality of one of a smartphone, don’t worry, many websites like MapQuest will now text directions directly to your phone.

3.  Keep your tailgate recipe on your phone.  It is always pretty easy to lose the crinkled sticky note with the correct measurements of ingredients for your “famous BBQ sauce.”  However, it is typically much more difficult to lose your phone.  If you save your recipes as a PDF through our free Nitro PDF Reader, you can quickly bring them up without a hassle.

4.  Hold onto your tickets electronically.  How many times have you gotten to the stadium and then realized you left your tickets sitting on the counter?  With e-tickets now available for everything from airports to concerts, the technology is moving to sporting events.  Evernote, a popular note-taking application that is now fully integrated with Nitro Reader, offers a great solution to keep your tickets electronically.  Your tickets can now be scanned on your phone at the stadium gate quickly and effortlessly.

5.  Follow your real and fantasy rosters.  With web browsers on every smartphone, you can follow stats of your starting Quarterback and other players for both your favorite team and your digital one all from your phone.

Although these tips are not going to single-handedly bring your team a Super Bowl or national championship, they will definitely make your day watching football much more enjoyable.  If you can streamline your pre-game ritual with just one of these, the players won’t look like the only professionals in the stadium.  With Nitro Reader on your computer, you can make game day a breeze.

As some of you might have already seen (albeit in the slightly more formal context of the press release!) we announced some pretty exciting news over at Nitro HQ this week… We think Paul sums it up pretty nicely:

“It’s a great time to be joining Nitro. We’re going to take our successful desktop application business and build on it as the foundation for some exciting new initiatives that will live in the cloud. While I can’t go into the details just now, I’m extremely excited about the possibilities ahead for Nitro and our customers. Our goal is to revolutionize the way people work with documents. (Call us ambitious.)”

Many of you would be familiar with Firefox – the open source Web browser launched by Mozilla as the first real alternative to Internet Explorer, with a mission to “promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web.” Paul was Mozilla’s first full-time marketing hire, finishing up around four years later as VP of marketing.

In that time, Firefox amassed more than 300 million users – thanks to a global community that helped spread the word.  We’re big fans of Firefox, and we’re big fans of Mozilla.

Paul spent the last two years heading up user growth at Automattic. Automattic are the folks behind WordPress.com and major contributors to WordPress.org (AKA, the blogging platform you’re likely reading this on) as well as a bunch of other awesome products like Polldaddy and VaultPress.

We could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture – we’re excited. Excited to see what Paul brings to the Nitro universe and the way in which all of you (and many, many more people) discover Nitro and our products. He also happens to be a stand-up guy.

Stay tuned, and – in the meantime – welcome aboard, Paul!

If you’re curious, here’s what Paul had to say on his blog.

]]> http://blog.nitropdf.com/2011/09/welcoming-newest-member-nitro-team-paul-kim-chief-marketing-officer/feed/ 2 http://blog.nitropdf.com/2011/08/european-software-feud/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=european-software-feud http://blog.nitropdf.com/2011/08/european-software-feud/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:43:05 +0000 admin http://blog.nitropdf.com/?p=2011 Despite the growing unrest in London this past week, the software world is focused on the United Kingdom for a different reason.  The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and other activists will meet this weekend in Manchester to try to stop government websites from recommending a single proprietary software for an open format despite the availability of alternatives, both proprietary and open source.  ”Every time that state websites link to non-free applications and encourage visitors to use them, they needlessly ask citizens to throw away their freedom,” says Karsten Gerloff, president of the FSFE.

PCWorld’s Jennifer Baker recently published an article detailing the extent that European governments have limited software options and the work the FSFE have been doing to counteract that.

The PDF file format is an International Standards Organization (ISO) open format and many different PDF viewers have been released since its conception in 1993, both paid and free.  However, many European countries fail to let consumers know of the free alternatives on their websites deterring them from making an informed choice.

According to Baker, the FSFE is setting out to remove these advertisements and has since convinced 172 government institutions to do so.

Nitro Reader 2 is available as a free download and allows you to not only view PDF documents but also can create, add text, QuickSign, and much more!

In this post, we’ve got some handy tips to help you stay safe with your PDF files, and keep your private information, well … private.

Protection, passwords, and permissions: control and restrict common user actions to safeguard confidential information

There are a number of ways to mitigate against the risks inherent in electronic distribution, the most simple being password protection — an effective way to reduce the chances of someone other than the intended recipient being able to view the document. Always provide the password separately to the document itself — ideally over the phone or in person — and try to think of something more challenging to guess than “password.”

You can also set permissions with PDF files using Nitro Pro, enabling you to specify what a user can actually do with your document. File permissions are an effective way to prevent manipulation or unauthorized sharing — allow or deny big-ticket items like printing or editing, and even block individual actions like copying text or images.

• Download the free Nitro Pro trial to set and manage permissions in your PDF files.

Hidden layers and active content: maintain authenticity and prevent manipulation by flattening your documents

Layered content in PDF files often holds information relating to the text and images it displays, which often remains after the visual component has been deleted. “Live” text (such as form field data or annotations) can be easily manipulated when active in the annotation layer. Luckily, Nitro Reader allows you to Save as Flattened PDF, “baking” annotation-layer content into the PDF.

Certain industry bodies standardize and regulate document practices to safeguard against similar incidents — an example being the legal sector and its usage of the TIFF format — to preserve the integrity and authenticity of legally binding documents after publishing. Most desktop PDF solutions enable you to create image-based PDFs, ensuring that vector objects, text, annotations, and everything else that exists as an independent element is baked into the page as an image.

• Download Nitro Reader free today 

Check out this video for a quick preview of Nitro Reader’s browser integration in action!