Whether or not you’re familiar with Crocodoc, it has undoubtedly powered many of your online interactions with documents. I first met the company’s founder, Ryan Damico, a few years ago as Crocodoc was emerging as an unstoppable service with a truly audacious goal: to reimagine documents in the cloud. Today, Crocodoc provides the absolute best way to render and view documents on the web. Its leading HTML5 technology powers online content experiences for more than 100 services and has made hundreds of millions of document previews seamless and beautiful for users.

Viewing a document on Yammer? That’s Crocodoc. Looking at a resume in Linkedin Recruiter? Crocodoc again. Reviewing an assignment on Edmodo? Crocodoc. Getting directions from Siri? Not Crocodoc. But you get the point.

It’s rare that two companies have such remarkably similar visions, philosophies and cultures. From the beginning, Box’s mission has been to make it incredibly easy to share, access and collaborate on content from any device. Crocodoc’s magic makes that content beautiful and accessible, freeing users from their desktops. We knew we had to work with them. After about a dozen meetings, a McDonald’s lunch and a Pho dinner, we finally struck a deal to join forces and bring the best document experiences to the world.

Together, we’re setting out to improve every experience you have with documents on the internet. Remember how horrible watching videos with RealPlayer used to be? YouTube came along and fundamentally remade the online video experience. Similarly, Flickr, Facebook and others have made photos beautiful on any device. But documents have yet to tip for the web. They’re still clunky and awkward, often forcing users out of their browser and into a desktop application.

But content sits at the center of every business and nearly every business transaction. When you’re working on Box, you should have a remarkably beautiful, fast and seamless experience for viewing your documents. We’re going to deeply integrate Crocodoc’s HTML5 viewing technology into our core product, creating an all-new experience for the 15 million individuals and 150,000 businesses on Box.

And perhaps even more importantly, we’re going to extend that experience to all the other applications businesses use. Crocodoc’s technology will become a core part of our platform, powering content experiences for every application that touches content, including HR software, e-learning tools, document signing solutions and healthcare applications.

We’re building the enterprise platform that will power every content interaction for hundreds of thousands of businesses and developers. Storing files is only the beginning: creating amazing experiences around those files is where the magic is. All seven Crocodocers will be joining us to make this a reality across multiple areas of our business, with Ryan serving as Director of Platform.

Stay tuned as we reimagine documents on Box and applications everywhere.

That’s why we’re proud to announce today the opening of the Box OneCloud pavilion here at BoxHQ—it’s like our very own version of the Apple Genius Bar, but meant to showcase our best OneCloud partner apps, across a variety of categories: taking notes, showing presentations, e-signing, to name a few. It’s also a chance to get hands-on with some of the latest mobile hardware. Given that Box supports all major mobile platforms and that we have so many cool partners in the device space, the OneCloud pavilion has something for everyone: the latest iPads, a Windows Surface and the yet to be released, but waterproof Sony Xperia Z. Finally, and just because we could, it also has enough ambient lighting and optical flare to make J.J. Abrams swoon. Step inside, and it’s like you’re on the deck of the Starship Mobile Enterprise, ready to take your productivity to warp speed.

With so many thousands of business apps out there, across so many platforms, it’s tough to find the one that’s right for you. At the end of the day, finding the right app is a personal decision, deeply steeped in your organizational vision of what will work for you. As long as the apps are interoperable with the business content you truly care about, picking them shouldn’t be an exercise in assimilation. So that’s why we built the OneCloud pavilion. For our customers, it means we’ll help you find, try and deploy the best integrated apps that fit your needs. Apps that will truly let you do more, from anywhere. For our OneCloud partners, it means we’ll keep on helping you place your apps in the right hands. Better yet, we’ll have you come over so that you can demo them yourselves. Because we live it.

So next time you visit, drop by the OneCloud pavilion over here at Box HQ. We’ll take you boldly where no enterprise software company has taken you before.

A couple of days ago we introduced you to some apps from our newly-added 100 OneCloud partners that are diverse across category and industry, helping you achieve productivity with Box in new ways. Here are a few more of our favorites below that we couldn’t wait to share with you.

Mobile Forms (iOS, Android, Blackberry)

Device Magic Mobile Forms allows organizations to quickly and easily build robust data collection systems using rich mobile apps. You can build forms and capture the data for any industry or job function.

Mobile Forms can also output your data to PDF, MS Word and even raw XML formats. Its integration with Box allows you to get all these documents delivered right into your Box account to share with your organization. For example, forms like work orders and invoices can be captured right in the field and then made available in standard document formats within Box.

Anywhere Pad (iOS, Android)

Anywhere Pad is an app for mobile meetings, presentations and collaboration with documents. Start a mobile meeting with remote participants using Anywhere Pad and work on shared documents together in real-time.

With the seamless integration between Anywhere Pad and Box, both App-to-App and Web, Anywhere Pad lets you access and use the files in your Box account conveniently.

You can choose to open a Box file from within either the Anywhere Pad app or Box app and it will automatically import to be shared in meetings and discussions.

iPaxera (iOS)

iPaxera is a fast and easy to use picture archiving and communication system for medical imaging on mobile. iPaxera allows users to retrieve DICOM format studies and view them with an iPhone or iPad.  You can see use processing tools, distance measurement, panning, zooming, free rotation, and snap shot capture when viewing images.

Medical providers can do a diagnosis remotely, write the report via the reporting tool, and send it by email or save it with the study. With Box’s integration, users can save their DICOM files to Box to be shared or viewed for a second opinion.

These are just a few of the many partners who are helping simplify and extend your productivity workflow, wherever you might be. Check out more apps that integrate with Box in our OneCloud showcase.

When we first starting working with partners to build out our OneCloud ecosystem, our vision was to bring mobile adoption in the workplace.  In March, we launched with iOS app partners, and added Android to the mix in June… With that momentum, broad, industry-agnostic productivity apps emerged as our first partners to integrate – note taking, editing, annotation and digital signature, among others.

We’ve worked to continue expanding our footprint with the best core productivity apps. In addition, we’ve also begun partnering with apps that are honed to more specific use cases to continue building out an ecosystem that fits any and all user workflows. In this recent wave of partners, we have added not only more core productivity apps for Box users, but also new categories – business intelligence, mobile-first CRM and sales presentation tools – as well as apps specific to verticals – construction, healthcare and real estate.

We’ve highlighted some of our favorite ones below that recently integrated and showcase the continued growing diversity of our OneCloud partners.

PaperDesk (iOS)

PaperDesk is an easy-to-use notebook replacement on iPad. Type, draw, import photos or PDF reports, and export your notes via Box.  The app mimics all the benefits of a simple pad of paper, but with all the benefits of note taking on the iPad.

Imagine a lawyer needs to consult with another attorney in the firm about his newest client. After uploading his PaperDesk notebook on the case to Box, he adds his colleague as a collaborator and assigns him a task – to “review client’s background.” After, he is able to surmise his thoughts on the case in a few comments.

SurfBI (iOS, Android)

SurfBI Mobile platform enables enterprises to deploy a variety of essential apps that deliver business intelligence, transactions and multimedia content on mobile devices. SurfBI allows users to save the contents of any mobile transaction form to their Box account as a PDF. Users can then access and share these documents.

Let’s say a field engineer is using the SurfBI app. He can access a Service Request (SR) assigned to him on his mobile device. After resolving the complaint in the field, he can get his customer’s signature and close the SR on the mobile device, which will save to the engineer’s Box account as a PDF. He can then access and share this document with management. The field engineer can also email this signed document to his customer from his mobile device for confirmation.

Open House Manager (iOS)

Open House Manager is an iPad app designed to streamline the process of collecting information from potential real estate buyers.  Open House Manager also makes real estate agents more productive by making communication with buyers easier – for group follow-up emails, text messaging or calls.

It makes entire agencies more efficient by leveraging Box to share the collected information.  Open House Manager uses Box to store spreadsheets of visitor information, share listing flyers and standardize the questions asked by agents.

We’ll have another post tomorrow about more apps we love, so stay tuned!

That objective could not resonate more with what we’re doing on the platform side of our business. On Tuesday, in addition to our news around Box Embed and the new Box experience, we announced more than 100 new Box OneCloud apps. This brings the total number in our mobile partner ecosystem to 200+. We couldn’t be more excited to bring into the fray exciting new partners like Mindjet (mind-mapping), Roambi (business intelligence) and Evidence Pix (secure mobile media management). Each of them let you put the content you need at the center of your mobile world.

And speaking of mobile, we also shared some recent takeaways from what we’re seeing across our user-base of over 140,000 businesses. 50% of Box traffic emanates from mobile devices. Think about that for a second. It reiterates that knowledge workers will never be tethered to their desks or office environments again, and that BYOD is the new normal. According to analysts, more than half of them use 3+ devices for work, and the number of enterprise-relevant mobile apps has doubled in the past year. It’s no surprise then to see that 37% of the Fortune 500 have already adopted OneCloud apps.

You might wonder what app categories are the most prevalent… well it turns out we have a pretty good idea of that too—document editing, note-taking, file management, PDF annotation, scanning and mind-mapping are the most popular mobile enterprise use cases we’re seeing, and we have apps for all of them.

So where can you go from here? In a world where the content you need can be accessed and worked on from any device in real-time, the answer is anywhere. That’s business without boundaries.

What’s Startup Camp? Quick, I’ll pretend I’m pitching you at TechCrunch Disrupt:

“Startup Camp is like a Genius Bar for aspiring cloud entrepreneurs. Got a wicked cool idea for an enterprise app or SaaS business? Run it by us. We’ll have a dedicated team of  experts from Box ready to listen to you and provide advice based on our years of expertise. Whether it’s about Design, UI, Marketing or Selling, come to BoxWorks Developer Day on October 9^th and get ready for some serious 1:1 enablement. Startup Camp is free of charge for anyone attending BoxWorks Developer Day. Register today.” 

Not bad, right? Now that you know what Startup Camp is, let me tell you why we’re doing it. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been to a lot of conferences where you attend a boatload of sessions and walk away with lots of insights, only to have your ideas relegated to a notebook that’s stashed away in your desk, or perhaps in an Evernote, never to be read again. What if you could walk away with something more valuable? What if you could take an app concept or a spark of an idea and vet it 1:1 with Silicon Valley experts? Well, that’s what we’re going to do at Startup Day! And to make things extra fun, we’ll have a giant whiteboard table where you can brainstorm and flesh out your ideas with the Box crew.

Startup Camp is the newest addition to our already jam-packed Developer Day. We’re kicking off Dev Day with a fireside chat featuring Marc Andreessen and John Donahoe, and will follow that with a keynote from our own Aaron Levie. We’ll then have over 15 sessions of content featuring technology partners like Stripe, Parse, Firebase and Appcelerator, as well as shared experiences from Box partners and customers like Crushpath and Netflix. And this is all in addition to dedicated sessions on how to leverage the Box platform and API.

So go ahead, register today and use the special code BXDEV100 for $100 off. We look forward to seeing you there!

For me, the most exciting change (for obvious reasons) has been the growth of our platform. A couple of fun stats for the sake of illustration: from the time that I joined to today, the number of developers on our platform has gone from fewer than 2,000 to more than 15,000, and the number of applications that integrate with Box has gone from a couple dozen to more than 250. I’m excited about Developer Day because it’s an extremely tangible reflection of that growth.

That growth hasn’t just been in numbers – we’ve also worked hard to make our platform more powerful, and we’ve reflected that in our sessions at Developer Day by having our own experts teach about features like Instant Mode and Event Notifications. We also wanted our sessions to reflect the other principle we hold dear on the platform team – the importance of working with the greater tech community to help evangelize best practices in software development and promote the tools that make developers’ lives easier. That’s why we’ve brought in folks like Des Traynor, COO of Intercom, and Matt Wilkinson, CTO of Crushpath, to provide lessons in development and design based on their own experience.

I’m also incredibly excited about the partners that will be joining us, because they represent the growth of not just an industry, but the entire idea of APIs and other third party development platforms. Just this week, AT&T announced that Twilio will be powering their Advanced Communications Suite – that partnership shows how far Silicon Valley startups have come in the eyes of industry giants and validates that APIs can be robust and reliable enough to be trusted as crucial pieces of infrastructure.

The greatest thing about my job is that it sits on the forefront of a rapidly developing area of technology – one that I believe will have enormous effects on the way the next generation of businesses operate. Like everyone else in the space, we’re learning quickly, and the prospect of sharing the lessons that we’ve picked up along the way is an exciting one.

To me, that’s what Developer Day is about – bringing together a lot of innovative, forward-thinking people and sharing knowledge, so everyone walks out having learned valuable lessons. Join us and register today.

It was only a few years ago that those first few companies represented Tech City in its entirety. Since then, there has been explosive growth in the area, fueled by a host of factors ranging from the arrival of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies to direct government support. We had the privilege learning about what drives Tech City from the folks who sit at the center of this community, and I’d love to share some of my thoughts on that with you.

Government Support

One of the most unique factors helping Tech City grow is government support. The United Kingdom Tech and Investment organization (UKTI) is a department that helps UK businesses grow by helping them make the connections and get the support they need to work with overseas companies and expand internationally. UKTI actually has an office in San Francisco, and they were immensely helpful in connecting us with companies in Tech City before our trip.

Recently, UKTI spun off a smaller organization, the Tech City Investment Organization (TCIO), which helps spur investment, collaboration and community in Tech City. TCIO connects local entrepreneurs with all the people and resources they need to succeed, and it also holds a number of local events to help build a sense of community. During the Olympics, TCIO opened up a temporary event space called Hackney House in the heart of Tech City. During our trip, it was the venue for an event they dubbed the Startup Games, where about 70 startups got on stage to pitch their products to judges and one was crowned Best Startup in Tech City.

The Arrival of Silicon Valley Giants

Another interesting factor helping Tech City grow is the arrival of Silicon Valley’s tech giants. Amazon and Facebook, for example, have both recently opened offices in London, and as these companies begin to plant roots in London, they’ll bring awareness of the community and, more importantly, resources.

The best example of resources comes from Google, who not only opened space for their own use, but also created the four-story Google Campus, which is not a traditional Google office, but rather a center for the community. It houses London’s best-known accelerator, SeedCamp, two co-working spaces, Central Working and TechHub, along with an event space available for use by the community.

Accelerators, Incubators and Coworking Spaces

These are all excellent examples of another driving force behind Tech City’s growth – the presence of community spaces that bring expertise and resources to early-stage startups. Coworking spaces like The Trampery are the most straightforward of these – large, open buildings that rent desks to startups on a monthly basis. This not only helps to make office space affordable for small groups, it also brings together many startups in one place, fostering a sense of community.

Accelerators and incubators go one step further, offering more organized programs to help startups progress both with regard to their product development and business model. Many accelerators also offer seed-stage funding as well as demo days – chances for member startups to show their products off to local investors. While SeedCamp is the best known accelerator in the area, many others are also seeing success and making names for themselves – Springboard and Oxygen Accelerator are a couple of examples, but new ones are sprouting up all the time. In a relatively new community, organizations like these help pool knowledge and foster collaboration, which will certainly drive growth in the long run.

With factors like these driving it, Tech City feels much like a startup itself – relatively early in its lifecycle, but seeing explosive growth, fueled by passionate people willing to work day and night. Getting the chance to meet with local entrepreneurs and community members has only increased our excitement about what’s happening in London, and we’ll definitely be back soon.

We had an excellent keynote that featured Drew Olanoff of The Next Web interviewing first Adam Pisoni, CTO and Cofounder of Yammer, and Jason Green, General Partner at Emergence Capital, then Jeff Lawson, CEO and Cofounder of Twilio. They offered insight into what it takes to create a great enterprise software company and the power of APIs in building the next generation of business applications, which left our developers inspired and ready to start hacking!

And hack they did, many of them straight through the night. Fueled by pizza, waffles, corn dogs and a 4am visit from our CEO Aaron Levie, they produced projects that were demoed live to our panel of judges – Our CEO Aaron Levie; Danielle Morrill, Cofounder of Referly; James Yu, Cofounder of Parse and Jai Das, Managing Director of SAP Ventures.

They selected our winner – OMGHelp, an application to improve the technical support business. By allowing the customer to use their smartphone’s camera to show the tech support representative what they’re doing, OMGHelp has the power to speed up calls and improve customer satisfaction. Its feature set is even deeper than that – you can see more by checking out their demo video.

Aside from being a fun way for developers to learn about new APIs and spend their weekend building cool projects, hackathons teach us a larger lesson, which Jeff Lawson summarized perfectly in his keynote. He referred to Twilio as a tool in the developer’s toolbelt, enabling them to quickly and easily add telephony to their application. Every one of the other companies that joined us provided another tool to our hackers – video chat from TokBox, real-time interaction from Firebase and of course document management and collaboration from our own API.

Each of these tools saves the developers from having to recreate these pieces of functionality if they want to include them in their own app. This saves time, and not a trivial amount – the difference in time between a developer having to build telephony themselves versus use the Twilio API isn’t hours, it’s weeks. Those are weeks that can be spent innovating instead of reinventing the wheel. That, above all, is why we decided to host this hackathon – it gives developers a chance to spend a full weekend being creative and innovative, and that’s something that we’ll always get behind.

For more on our hackathon and the results, check out our partners’ blogs:

TokBox: http://www.tokbox.com/blog/redefining-work-hackathon-by-box/

Iron.io: http://blog.iron.io/2012/08/ironio-box-hackathon-redefiningwork.html

Neil Mansilla of Mashery’s Storify: http://storify.com/mansilladev/redefine-work-hackathon-box-hq

We’re only tackling one piece of the puzzle, though – there are countless other problems left for enterprising developers to solve by creating the next great piece of innovative software. To give you the opportunity to build the next great piece of business software, we’re throwing a hackathon called Redefining Work.

We’ve partnered with some of the Valley’s best companies – TokBox, Firebase, Mashery, Twilio, Iron.io and Parse – to provide you the tools you need. And they’re providing more than just that; each partner will also be giving out a prize, so there’s plenty to take home.

Finally, we wanted to inspire you to build something truly great and long lasting, so we’re going to kick off the hackathon with some keynote speakers who have done just that to the tune of $1.2 billion. Adam Pisoni, the CTO and Co-founder of Yammer, and Jason Green, a General Partner at Emergence Capital (and one of the lead investors in Yammer), will talk about what it takes to build a successful enterprise software business. When they’re done, we’ll also hear from Jeff Lawson, CEO and Co-founder of one of the best API companies out there, Twilio.

It’s going to be a great event, so be sure to check out the full details at http://sites.box.com/redefiningwork/. We look forward to seeing you there!