The First of Many

Welcome to the Looking Into The Future blog, where you will find the latest ideas on document management best practices. We’ll discuss topics such collaboration, security and workflows, and examine the impact of technologies such as mobile, cloud and machine learning.

I am Eugene Xiong, founder and chairman of Foxit Software. We started Foxit in 2001 because I was unhappy with the PDF software on the market back then and felt there had to be a better alternative. We were successful because we were able to design software that required less memory and rendered much faster.

It was a surprise, and a pleasant one, that our earliest successes were with some household names – Foxit’s PDF rendering engine is as the heart of platforms such as Google Chrome, Google Gmail and the Amazon Kindle.

The Popularity of PDF is Almost Overwhelming

In the early 90s, Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF) to ensure documents were rendered the same, independent of application software, device or operating system. This was a great advance, and one that was quickly embraced by businesses and individuals. Yet Adobe created the PDF specification in an age before the internet, when people worked in relative isolation, creating and printing documents, and sharing hardcopy versions.

Today, there are estimated to be 2.5 trillion documents in existence (some have even put the number as high as 4 trillion). People create and share almost all these documents online. And this happens on a global scale, at home, in the office and on-the-go. It’s an almost unfathomable challenge, one that even the most forward-thinking companies would have been hard-pressed to imagine.

At Foxit, we come at PDF a bit differently. We look for opportunities to innovate and streamline. After all, our goal is to enable everyone, from individuals to enterprises, to share knowledge anywhere, on any device, intuitively and securely.

An Exciting Future

We’re putting more money than into our research because we’re never content with the status quo. In 2016, for example, we introduced ConnectedPDF, an innovative technology which turned the passive PDF into dynamic, protected and networked content. ConnectedPDF brings new levels of accountability, collaboration, and productivity to the creation, sharing, and tracking of PDF documents. This breakthrough is providing organizations, including one of the largest insurance companies in the world, with opportunities to transform the way workforces operate.

And we eagerly evaluate new trends and technologies, such as machine learning, voice search and so on, in order to identify ways to help businesses manage documents better.

Although I will be the primary contributor to this blog, I will be joined by my colleagues on the executive team from time to time. I hope you will enjoy the ideas that we share and incorporate many of them into your business.

Feel free to post a comment or suggest a topic.

Talk soon.