Nitro plans cloud-based personal document manager

Stephen Withers
Friday, 11 November 2011 14:50

Nitro is building on the success of its PDF creation, reading and editing software. A cloud-based personal document manager is under development for a mid-2012 launch.

With over two million Nitro Reader users and at least 400,000 paying customers for Nitro Pro, the Australian born software company (though now San Francisco based) Nitro PDF claims one of the largest user bases among independent PDF software vendors other than Adobe.

Nitro recently released Nitro Pro 7, its $US119.99 (but currently $US99.99) alternative to Adobe Acrobat for creating, editing and sharing PDF files. New features include redaction and the ability to edit text in paragraph chunks (especially handy for making minor changes). The user interface and overall performance were improved.

And unlike Adobe Reader, the free Nitro Reader includes the ability to create PDF files, save PDF forms with entered data, and easily 'stamp' a signature onto a document.

Nitro PDF is now working on a cloud-based personal document manager codenamed 'Milo' that COO Gina O'Reilly said will be the easiest way to create, store, share, find and sign documents in the cloud. When it launches in mid-2012, Milo will hook into Nitro Reader and Nitro Pro, and she suggested that by that time those programs will be available for other platforms such as Mac OS X - they are currently only for Windows. There was also a hint of support for mobile devices.

The idea is to combine the features of existing services such as Dropbox and YouSentIt with other document management functions. Basic functionality and a certain amount of storage will be free, but users will need to subscribe to get the full feature set plus extra storage.

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