History The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Trip Adler was at Harvard and h ad a conversation

with his father, John R. Adler, about the difficulties of publ ishing academic papers. He teamed up with cofounders Jared Friedman and Tikhon B ernstam and they attended Y Combinator in Cambridge in the summer of 2006.[citat ion needed] Scribd was launched from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007 and quickly grew in traffic. In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20 social media s ites according to Comscore.[4] In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store,[5] an d shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scrib d.[6] Over 150 publishers including Random House, Wiley, Workman, Houghton Miffl in Harcourt, Pearson, Harvard University Press and Stanford University Press are now associated with Scribd. ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December 2009. In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCr unch and MediaBistro. [7] Over 100 media companies now use Scribds branded reader to embed source material into their stories. In August 2010, news stories began to break and documents and books began to go viral on Scribd including the over turned Prop 8 and HPs lawsuit against Mark Hurds move to Oracle Corporation. Adler is currently the CEO of Scribd, where he is responsible for the product an d strategic direction of the company. BusinessWeek named Adler one of the Best Yo ung Tech Entrepreneurs 2010.[8] [edit]Awards/recognition In September 2009, BusinessWeek named Scribd one the Worlds Most Intriguing Startu ps.[9] In December 2009, Forbes named Scribd one of its 10 Hot Startups. [10] Fast Company named Scribd One of its Top 10 Most Innovative Media Companies in February 2010.[11] In May 2010, Scribd was recognized as one of the 2010 Hottest San Francisco Compa nies by Lead411.[12] On September 1, 2010, the World Economic Forum announced the company as a Techno logy Pioneer for 2011.[13][14] After the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Award, Time Magazine named Scribd one of the 10 Start-Ups that Will Change Your Life.[15] [edit]Timeline In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smart phones. [16] In April 2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast"[17] w hich allows automatic sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter.[18] Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its integration of Facebook social plug-ins at the f8 Developer Conference. [19] Scribd rolled-out a re-design on September 13, 2010 to become according to TechCrunch, the social network for reading.[20] [edit]Financials The company was initially funded with US$12,000 from Y Combinator, and received over US$3.7 million in June 2007 from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Gro up.[21][22] In December 2008, the company raised US$9 million in a second round of funding, led by Charles River Ventures with re-investment from Redpoint Ventu res and Kinsey Hills Group, and hired as president George Consagra, former Bebo COO and managing director of Organic Inc.[23] Consagra left Scribd and became CE O of Good Guide in August 2010. David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribds board of directors in January 2010. Scribd hired Robert Macdonald, former head o f media and publisher partnerships at Google, in July 2010 as its SVP of busines s development and opened a New York office.[24] Scribd also utilizes Google Adve rtisements for revenue generation.[25] It also makes revenue from Scribd Store s ales.[26] In August 2010 it began beta testing premium services. Prior to the $9 million round, Scribd was valued at $10 million. Their current v

aluation is likely much higher.[3] [edit]Technology Scribd used iPaper, which is a rich document format similar to PDF built for the web, which allows users to embed documents into a web page.[27] iPaper was buil t with Adobe Flash, allowing it to be viewed the same across different operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash installed (although Scribd has announced non-Flash support for the iPh one).[28] All major document types can be formatted into iPaper including Word d ocs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument documents, OpenOffice.org XML documents, and PostScript files. All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be private or open to the larger Scribd community. The iPaper document vi ewer is also embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple to embed docume nts in their original layout regardless of file format. Scribd iPaper requires Flash cookies to be enabled, which is the default setting in Flash.[29] If the requirements are not met, there is no message; the white o r gray display area is simply blank. Scribd launched its own API to power external/third-party applications. However, only a few applications use this API. [30] Its revenue model has gained coverag e on numerous blogs such as TechCrunch. On May 5, 2010, Scribd launched the largest implementation of HTML5 to date at t he Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. [31] TechCrunch reported that Scribd is migrating away from Flash to HTML5. "Scribd co-founder and chief technology offi cer Jared Friedman tells me: We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically bett er reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page. "[32] In July 2010 Publishers Weekly wrote a cover story on Scribd entitled Betting the House on HTML5.[33] [edit]Reception Scribd has been praised by several newspapers[which?] and has been dubbed as the potential "YouTube for documents".[34] Notable users of Scribd include Virginia senator Mark Warner.[35] Former Califor nia gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, New York Times DealBook reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, All Things D Reporter Kara Swisher, the U.S. Federal Communication s Commission (FCC), Red Cross, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, United Nations Econ omic Commission for Europe, The World Bank, Ford Motor Company, HewlettPackard, Samsung and the Living Torah. Scribd has currently more than 50 million users and it hosts more than tens of m illions of documents. Scribd s documents are embedded more than 10 million times across the web and more than 1.8 million searches are conducted on Scribd s web site everyday.[36] [edit]