Shop Talk: Vuzit grows up

A little more than a year after graduating from DreamIt Ventures, document sharing site Vuzit is growing up.
“It’s feeling less and less like a startup everyday,” says CTO Chris Cera.
The company has hired its first non-founder employee, a sales person to help expand sales, and has recently released the 3.0 version of its DocuPub Platform. As a result, the company is having to rapidly add and plan features while trying to keep its service humming along smoothly.
After the jump we take a look at what makes Vuzit tick, some new features of 3.0 and the super secret deal Vuzit has up its sleeve.
Vuzit describes itself as an enterprise B2B company and the only 100 percent AJAX-based document sharing system on the Web. It counts over 30 customers that use its document sharing form, especially its “Enterprise On-Demand” service. Essentially, the company offers their document sharing technology to businesses looking to roll it into existing products.
So if you, as a consumer, wanted to share the funny short story you have written, Vuzit may not have typcially been your first choice. The service is more intended for business owners that need a way to securely exchange documents.
That is, until now.
Part of its growth includes a push to the application sphere where the company hopes to attract more business and consumer users that will become familiar with the service, and ultimately purchase its B2B services. Vuzit has even �stealthily� launched iPhone support and looks to be butting up against its web application competitor, Scribd.
To support these ambitious plans, Vuzit does all of its work in the cloud, using Amazon’s web services to host all of its computing. According to Cera, the company uses the s3 (storage) and ec2 (computing) services, which helps the company in its plans to begin expanding.
“I can have a new server up in 10 minutes,” says Cera who also noted that Amazon allows Vuzit to sell its services on dedicated servers for companies who don’t want the risk of sharing space. “Since we have done that, our sales have rapidly increased.”
However, despite its focus on growth, Vuzit is unlikely to look for more funding and is content with its $355,000 in seed money.
“We didn’t raise a [large amount] of money,” says Cera, “we wanted to grow the company slowly and intelligently.”
Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.