Tom Paine
Philadelphia-based The Neat Company, the pioneer in providing technology for scanning and digitizing information from paper sources such as receipts and business cards, today announced the general availability of NeatCloud and NeatMobile, two products that could potentially be transformative for its business, said Neat Company Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Garton in an interview with Philly Tech News. The products had been previewed in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and have been in private beta since.
NeatCloud will be priced at three tiers between $5.99 and $24.99 per month depending upon the number of users. It is intended to be a cloud-based digital filing system not only for data that originates from paper sources but also for other data that comes directly from digital sources. It will run off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 platform.
NeatMobile, which will initially be available for iOS only (an Android version is scheduled for August, the company says), will enable users to take photos of paper documents with the cameras in their mobile devices, from which the content can then be converted into digitized information fields using optical character recognition (OCR). It is available for download from the Apple App Store and is available free of charge to those subscribing to the two highest tiers of the NeatCloud service.
Among the features of its Digital Filing System Neat emphasizes are its abilities to sync Neat data across all devices, to share files or folders with whomever one chooses, to create Neat email addresses through NeatCloud and request vendors or others send receipts or documents directly into your Neat Digital Filing System, and secure backup.
Another feature of NeatCloud is its expanded search capability, through which Neat users can now find information they may have stored in multiple cloud services including Google Docs, Dropbox and Evernote. Users can search across their different cloud services from a single Neat interface.
Neat is also introducing NeatVerify, a subscription service somewhat like that provided by LinkedIn's CardMunch. Blurry or faded images that can't be deduced through OCR receive human verification if necessary.
These new offerings by no means replace Neat's existing NeatDesk and NeatReciepts scanner products, although I could see the possibility of that eventually largely being the case. NeatDesk retails for about $400, NeatReciepts for about $200. The company says it has sold about 1 million of the two devices combined. The aspect that would be difficult to replace would be NeatDesk's capability for scanning a large volume of documents. But for many smaller customers, NeatCloud and NeatMobile could provide the complete solution. Overall, the new offerings should make Neat more hardware independent and more retail channel independent in the long run, and give it greater potential for broadening its customer base.
Garton said while there are other larger players in the Cloud document repository and backup market, Neat planned to focus primarily on the applications it (and its software) know best: receipts and business card information. However, moving into the Cloud should give Neat considerably more ability to integrate that information with other sources and collaboration tools. Garton also said Neat would continue to concentrate on the Soho (small office, home office) market.
After hitting a brief trough in 2009 following several years of rapid growth, The Neat Company's 2010 revenue was $33.3 million, according to its listing in the 2011 Inc. 5000. An article in the Philadelphia Business Journal in late 2011, citing CEO Jim Foster, said 2011 sales were expected to reach $65 million with additional growth of 40% anticipated in 2012. However, the turn towards mobile apps for handling the types of things Neat Company does in turning paper input into digital information has been dramatic in recent years, presumably necessitating Neat's response with the new offerings.
Edison Ventures has been the primary investor in The Neat Company, along with MentorTech Ventures.
Neat press release
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