The Snowtide Blog

This morning, we put some limited-time-only discounts into place for PDFTextStream to celebrate the new year. You can now purchase PDFTextStream server deployment licenses for as little as $999 USD (optionally with Premium Support). These licenses carry no CPU restriction, so you can use them on your 1CPU development box or your 64-CPU Superdome. And, as always, you can use the same license under Java, Python, or .NET. This sale starts today, and ends on January 31, 2007. You can place your order here (with payments handled by Google Checkout).

This is quite a deal — these unlimited-CPU server licenses usually cost $13,750 USD. That’s quite an insane discount, but I thought it was worth the chance. Theoretically, this will create a little buzz, increase our customer list by quite a bit, and maybe expose a different class of users to PDFTextStream that might have previously written it off because of its admittedly high (normal) price tag.

This is also a decent pricing experiment. We’ve never done much experimentation in the area of pricing, so we’ll now have one more data point on our demand curve (as described brilliantly by Joel). I don’t think that this particular experiment will have any lasting effect on our pricing for PDFTextStream, but it will be an interesting exercise nonetheless.

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.

We’ve finally recovered from our harrowing experience of being discovered via digg (so horrible to have the problem of too much attention!).  PDFTextOnline is back online, and greatly beefed up.

Also, the new interface I promised earlier is now in effect as well.  It’s simpler, easier to understand, and provides some new features as well (such as being able to choose the font used to display extracted PDF text, and being able to choose which layout mode should be used when performing each extraction).  Let us know what you think.

Finally, we’ve brought in Adsense ads.  I guess we’ve sold out now, eh?  Of course, it’s the smart thing to do given the pretty significant waves of traffic we continue to get from around the web that was prompted by the digg post.