The Snowtide Blog

The title says it all.  Today we’re announcing that PDFTextStream is free for academic use: read the press release, and if you are a qualifying academic developer, go ahead and apply for a free PDFTextStream license file.

Don’t worry, the application “process” will take you 2 minutes, and assuming you are eligible (i.e. a student, faculty, academic researcher, or university IT staff), you’ll get your free PDFTextStream license file within a week.  Why a week?  Well, we want to set expectations properly, as we assume we’ll get a pretty solid barrage of applications — after all, everyone likes free stuff.

I’m hoping that this will make life easier for many, especially those who are building truly cool new search, content management, and other webby and/or document-oriented processing systems.  Too often, we’ve run across university-funded researchers who have bare-metal budgets, and are forced to use substandard tools and libraries (but who still manage to build amazing technologies).  PDF is obviously important (and will only become more prevalent), so making sure those folks can get the best PDF content extraction library available at no cost to them will hopefully enable even greater, faster progress.

It’s the very least we can do to “give back”.

I just returned from speaking to a class at the Community College of Vermont in Rutland.  I was asked to speak to the Principles of Marketing class being taught there by John Hutchins, my friend, Snowtide shareholder, ex-Digital salesman, and father of a friend of my fiancée.  It was my first significant public speaking “gig” since my high school graduation, and I had a blast.

For the hour I spoke, I presented a history of Snowtide, our marketing and product positioning strategies, and then weaved back and forth between general business and entrepreneurial strategy and what I suppose could be called motivational speaking.  Rutland is a rural former mill town / railroad junction, much like the town where I spent most of my formative years (Palmer, MA), and I think (or hope!) a lot of my personal experience in how I came to believe in my potential to build a successful business is relevant to that kind of audience.  Entrepreneurial attitudes, both in business and in life, can be the key to improving one’s range of opportunities, which can sometimes seem limited when growing up or living in a smaller, more rural community.  I hope what I covered, especially in my discussions of confidence, tenacity, and the pursuit of excellence will help the students at CCV find their path to success and well-being long after they finish school.

On a personal note, I had a great time.  I really enjoy public speaking, but rarely get a chance to “stretch my lungs” — I keep meaning to look up a Toastmasters meeting in my area, but it seems to fall off the bottom of my to-do list pretty consistently.

I did record my talk at CCV, which I plan on putting online, soon.