Drawloop Blog

Posted by SoftwareCEO

This month Intel opened a new website called CoolSW that uses “crowd sourcing” to highlight software. “The CoolSW site is an online community of people passionate about software,” says the site. Members post information about an interesting software company, and site visitors vote on whether that company is “cool.”

If you sometimes need a PDF but don’t want to spend $299 for Adobe Acrobat, this free service could be the answer. LOOP is a SaaS offering that creates PDFs from MS Office files, graphics, or web pages. It can even combine numerous files into a single PDF.

One obvious use: Packing a mess of files into a single attachment that’s easier to send and receive by e-mail. LOOP doesn’t offer all the advanced features of the full Acrobat package, but how often do you need those anyway?

This free PDF-making software comes from Irvine, Calif.-based Drawloop Technologies, which claims 30,000 users. The company provides more powerful document packaging services for a fee. This is one example of the kind of disruptive technology that established software firms need to watch out for. Note to Adobe: Consider buying these guys before you-know-who discovers them. Copyright (c) 2007, Computing Technology Industry Association, Inc.