Docstoc is a Beverly Hills based company that (in their own words) is "Youtube for professional documents".   Umm Okay.  Honestly that just sounds dumb.  If I was going for useless analogies, I'd say more like pdf meets Digg, or something like that.  Anyways, despite the tagline cheapshot, Docstoc.com seems like it has a few things going for it.  Although it just went live with its public release a few weeks ago, it has had quite a bit of coverage leading up to the release, most notably in its inclusion in the TechCrunch40.  The company also has secured 4 million in VC funding.

The Good
Online Document Sharing is at a relatively early stage and a service that can make publishing easy and useful for most consumers, while keeping it secure and relevant is one that will do well.  Certainly Docstoc has the potential to succeed by being in a developing niche at the right place at the right time.  They have a strong management team, which is already doing well building buzz and bringing in a growing user base by offering iPod giveaways; I'm sure more cleverness will follow.  

The Bad
Dostoc relies a lot on community and social networking type features, and I'm not really sold that this is a game changing feature for professional documents - not everything needs to be Facebook, especially in the professional space.  There is also the matter that during testing, quite a few errors were experienced when trying to register, or upload documents, or even post info in the blog section.  While its understandable these sorts of things happen during the beta release, I expect them to tighten up their services in the future with that nice round of funding they got.  And finally, there is their early lead competitor Scribd, which quite frankly I like better. 

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