“We have to build a consumer-grade experience,” Aaron Levie, Box’s co-founder and CEO, said at a Thursday meeting at its San Francisco office. The deal will be Box’s second acquisition; it acquired Increo in 2009, a company representative said.

Crocodoc already takes care of this type of document conversion for files on several sites, including the recruiting function on LinkedIn and document sharing on Yammer. Once a document is there, users can see the details of fancy typefaces and add comments on desktops and mobile devices, without Flash or plugins required. Other document functions, like editing, are not yet available.

“We want to bite off different pieces of that puzzle,” said Ryan Damico, Crocodoc’s co-founder and CEO. “In the end game, we want to cover all of them.”

Yammer document previewing via Crocodoc technology

Box will swap out its existing previewing mechanisms with the Crocodoc technology in the next few months. Also coming are new versions of previewing, such a carousel with pages passing by, a sliding option, a scrolling option and perhaps a page-flipping option, Damico said. Box will also enable developers to keep using the Crocodoc API to upload documents, spin them around into HTML5 and then do things with HTML5-enabled content to embed in their own websites.

“This is what Instagram is to Facebook,” Levie said. “Photos are important to them; documents are deeply important to us, and they’re deeply important to business use cases.”

While it’s been four years since the previous Box acquisition, Box does want to keep building out its product lineup. “We intend on being very acquisitive,” Levie told me. Box has raised $312 million to date, including contributions from Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and NEA. Crocodoc has raised more than $1 million, with investors at SV Angel and 500 Startups.

As Box makes itself into more of a platform than simply a venue for document storage and sharing — last month I wrote about its health care applications and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — it also needs to make sure documents show up clearly. It does seem like a no-brainer, which is why it seems like this acquisition should have come earlier.

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Crocodoc, a San Francisco-based startup that has been in business for nearly five years and has gone through some pivots, is today launching a new HTML5-based enterprise service that essentially takes a PDF, strips out the text, photos and all the formatting from it and renders it on your mobile browser within three seconds. (Of course, it doesn’t work with password protected PDFs.) The best way to experience this technology is to click here and see this PDF document.

Crocodoc is going to offer this technology as a service, mostly for large companies. It already has signed up the likes of SAP, Dropbox and LinkedIn. While Crocodoc will handle processing for smaller companies, it allows large customers such as Dropbox to run the service off their services. Dropbox has been testing the technology for a while and is using it for its recently launched web viewer and easy link-sharing service.

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Crocodoc is replacing its Flash-based viewer with an HTML5 version, which Crocodoc claims is a first. The company claims that the new viewer is significantly faster, and renders documents more accurately than Flash-based solutions. Here’s a sample of a formatted document.

Despite the “viewer” name, embedded documents can be not only viewed, but they can be marked up and forms can be filled in. Marked-up documents can then be downloaded in PDF format. The markup tools don’t allow for full document editing, but they’re probably more than sufficient for many teams’ needs.

Crocodoc’s API is also being updated, which allows users to create embeddable HTML5 document viewers that can be customized in both appearance and behavior. The company is also starting a partnership program that will allow other companies to license its technologies. Since many project management systems include components for marking up documents, Yammer, an enterprise social networking app, will be rolling out Crocodoc’s document tools in the next few days.

Mobile apps are also in development, with an iPad app coming shortly, followed by similar apps for iOS and Android.

Crocodoc is free for individuals, and the API is also free for non-commercial use. Pricing for commercial use of the API is priced based on the number of documents uploaded to Crocodoc each month, whether documents are hosted on their servers or elsewhere, and whether or not the viewer is co-branded.

The folks at Crocodoc tell me that they are out to replace Adobe Acrobat as the preferred way to display, view and mark up highly-formatted documents, and today’s enhancements are just the first step. It will be interesting to see how the service develops.

Have you used Crocodoc? How do you collaborate on document production and editing?

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Crocodoc offers two plans: Free and Pro. To an extent, the Free version feels like a souped-up demo. You can upload and share documents, as well as mark up your files and share comments, for free. However, features like protecting a document with a password and managing document histories are only available on Pro accounts. The price tag isn’t too bad, though — a Pro plan is $8 per month, or $36 per year.

Technically, you don’t even need to create an account to use Crocodoc, providing you’re only interested in using the Free version. You can upload a document immediately from the home page and use all the mark up and sharing tools without going through any sort of registration process. The only time you’re prompted to open an account is if you want to password-protect your document. If you’re looking for a fast solution to get feedback on a document, Crocodoc is particularly useful. You will need to ensure you bookmark any documents you create on a free plan, however, because you won’t be able to find them again without the unique URL assigned to each document when you upload it.

When you’re reading a document through Crocodoc, you can highlight or strike out text. You can also add sticky notes that are linked to specific phrases or sections, as well as mark up a document with red text to the point that you bring back memories of school and your teacher’s red pen. The controls are easy to use, reminding me somewhat of Adobe Acrobat’s mark up tools. As far as sharing documents go, it’s a matter of passing along the file’s URL to your readers. Once they click on that link, they can comment on the document. They can also download a copy of the original. Unfortunately, if you’re using a Free account, anyone with the link can access the document. If you are working with even slightly sensitive material, you’d best upgrade to a Pro account.

Pro accounts offer enhanced security with SSL encryption. Accessing a document on Crocodoc seems to be dependent on the password, meaning that anyone you share a document with does not need to create an individual account. Crocodoc also offers the option of creating an intranet deployment behind your firewall if you’re sharing documents with your colleagues and want the best possible security.

What tools do you use for document collaboration?

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What brings Memopal to our attention is a press release they’ve just sent out that touts their new “cloud search” capability.  They index your online document files and can search a 2 million file archive in under 50 milliseconds.  This means you can find that particular document file you have backed up online with no muss and no fuss.  That alone may make Memopal worth checking out and they have a free trial available.

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