I just wanted to pass along another example of Shoeboxed in the news. Tech Journal South did a great write-up of Shoeboxed and our Receipt Mail-In scanning service today.

Shoeboxed is such a new idea and people seem to be really intruiged by it. To see more example of press articles about Shoeboxed from The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TechCrunch and others, visit our press page.

Here are some excerpts of the review that Tech Journal South did of Shoeboxed today:

Currently, it invites users to send Shoeboxed their paper receipts via mail in a prepaid 9X12 envelope, then scans and uploads them to a user’s account.

Shoeboxed provides software that helps users organize them once they’re uploaded. The software can connect to a variety of record-keeping and accounting programs such as Quicken. Englander notes that with a few minor exceptions, the IRS has accepted digital receipts since 1997.

Englander says the company is highly aware that some users might have security concerns, so it takes serious precautions both digitally online and in its physical location to insure privacy and security. Receipts generally have less personal information on them than many people think, he notes. “Most don’t include your name and by law cannot have more than 5 digits of a credit card number,” he says.

If you are a journalist and you would be interested in learning more about Shoeboxed, let me know by sending an email to dan@team.shoeboxed.com or give me a call on my cell at (919) 943-5322.

A lawyer at one of the larger firms around here sent us a pretty funny email the other day that was definitely worth sharing. It’s about his experience at our local airport, RDU.

I just hit the men’s room at RDU before hopping on my flight tonight. Each urinal had a shoeboxed.com business card on top of it.

Don’t really have anything else to add, except that the guy at the urinal next to me took the card off his urinal. I didn’t stick around to see if you guys have someone nearby that runs in an replaces the cards. : )

Hope all’s well.

First of all, this is absolutely hysterical and a testament to our off-the-wall marketing team. Secondly, we may or may not have been passing out flyers at the airport. It is possible that there are some Shoeboxed fans roaming the terminal bathrooms at RDU leaving flyers in unsuspecting places. Who knows where they came from :).

With regard to the runners who come in and replace the cards: that’s one of the funniest mental images I’ve had in a while, so props to our lawyer friend who literally made me laugh out loud.

I wonder if the guy who picked the card up at the urinal ended up signing up. If you’re the guy and you can somehow prove it, we want to hear from you!

I always enjoy it when journalists write about the emerging innovative economy that we have here in Durham. We’re certainly excited to be a part of it here, and we hope it continues to expand! One particular article was written today in the Miami Herald, where Shoeboxed was featured a few months ago. The article was written by Jerry Haar and details the steps needed for Florida to revive its economy to avoid slipping into the recession looming on the country as a whole.

If we survey the nation’s most competitive regional economies, we find Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, Seattle, San Diego and Raleigh-Durham. All are characterized by emerging, innovation-based businesses and highly skilled knowledge workers.

Great article; just wanted to share it with you.

I just wanted to share with you a review of Shoeboxed in The Herald Sun, the newspaper of record here in Durham, NC.

Just in time for the tax season, Shoeboxed.com, a “Netflix for receipts” Web site by a Durham start-up, is now compatible with Quicken and TurboTax. Shoeboxed helps customers organize receipts, and compatibility with the two leading desktop programs in money management and tax preparation was a natural move for the business.

Monica Chen, Herald Sun

Thanks for the great review, Monica!

Well, we’ve never been shy about our obsession with Duke University. Most of us are Duke graduates, and some of us are current students there. So it made a lot of sense that when we wanted to get some photos taken of the team that we turned to Duke students. I mean, it was without question that we’d find a talented photographer from the obscenely talented and involved Duke student body. We were very impressed with what we found. Chase Olivieri, a freshman at Duke, took us all around downtown Durham today and took some great shots of us.

To check out some more of our photos, check out our Flickr account. There are photos from pretty much our whole history, including our summer in Berlin and our team trip to Jordan.

I like finding stuff on the internet about Duke and its burgeoning entrepreneurship scene. Shoeboxed is certainly a part of this movement toward encouraging entrepreneurship, so I like spreading the news as well.

Jim Roberts, the founding executive director of the Blue Ridge Entrepreneurial Council and the Blue Ridge Angel Investors Network, wrote a column the other day for WRAL, a local news source here in Durham. He was talking about the organizations and technologies that he thought were creating buzz in the Southeast tech community as 2008 begins.

In his write-up he gave a shout-out to Duke and the growing entrepreneurship economy in the area surrounding the university. Shoeboxed is definitely a part of this, and we are happy to see people talking about this great area!

Duke University will have a bigger influence on the Triangle entrepreneurial economy. Duke has expanded its entrepreneur program with the addition of a friendly face, Howie Rhee, formerly of the CED. Of course we all know Duke has the potential to be even more of an economic powerhouse with the brains and the resources. Will the university put it all together in 2008?

Hopefully Shoeboxed will get a mention in the Top 10 Buzz Creator list for next year!

I just used Shoeboxed in a fantastic way, and because I am really proud of myself, I thought I’d share. What else is blogging for, anyway?

And so I continue. Cory, the fantastic author of this blog last spring and summer, is in charge of Innovation at Shoeboxed, meaning he works with lots of complicated features on the site that I don’t understand. He also happens to be my roommate.

So when he went home for a few days for the holidays, he left me to take care of his car, an oldie-but-goodie that just needs to be driven regularly to keep it working. I was obliging him, and driving it back and forth between our apartment and the Shoeboxed offices (about a 1 minute drive). As it turns out, though, I don’t pay too much attention to parking signs, and parked on the street longer than the signage allowed.

After finishing up my work one night, I was headed home, and found a parking ticket on his car. I was a little worried, because I didn’t want to seem irresponsible, or worse, have to pay a big fine. Luckily, since Durham is so awesome, the parking ticket was for 10 dollars, and I could easily pay it.

But how to tell Cory? Well, they let me pay my parking ticket online, and I Shoeboxed my receipt. Then I made a note on my receipt telling Cory what had happened, and forwarded it to Cory. The day has officially been saved…

View the Receipt!

Sorry Cory!

First of all, I just wanted to say Happy New Year, as this is our first entry of 2008!

In the first few days of this year, lots of people in the U.S. will be focusing their attention to Iowa, watching with great interest what will happen in Thursday’s caucuses. But today, I’m thinking more about Idaho. And North Carolina of course.

According to the Idaho Statesman (”Idaho’s #1 website for news and information”), Boise has had a hard time attracting businesses to the area because of what one businessman called “the lack of entrepreneurial culture” there. In this particular piece, the author says that Boise needs some entrepreneurial spark in order to attract new business and stimulate the economy.

So why am I talking about it here? Well, the author gives a shout out to Durham, Shoeboxed’s home base.

What does it take to build the culture? Look a the Stanford/Silicon Valley connection or Highway 128 around Boston and Harvard University. The Research Triangle in Raleigh/Durham near Duke University has that intangible culture… “It” is a combination of a strong university, either engineering or management oriented; an incubator area for new technical ideas to develop economically; and venture capital to fund it. You also need like-minded, competitive, risk-taking individuals who want to do their own thing and who are willing to share experiences and knowledge.

Durham is an awesome place to start up a company, and we’re happy to be a part of the “it.”

It’s been about a week and a half since most of us left Berlin, and we have finally settled down in Durham, NC. We spent the first week trying to find a new Shoeboxed office (that doesn’t double as an apartment, like our last two have), and expanding our team.

Our new office is located in Brightleaf Square, one of the coolest areas in Durham. When I first enrolled at Duke as a freshman, this area was kind of dead, but since then, it’s been revitalized into a vibrant and popular (not to mention beautiful) destination. There are at least 10 restaurants within 100 meters of us, and it’s cool to have all the people, entertainment, and, well, food that come along with them. Two blocks from Duke’s East Campus, it’s also very convenient for the current students working with us.

We spent the whole day yesterday getting all our new furniture set up, and now we are enjoying our fully-functional and lively workspace. Needless to say, we are very happy to be in Brightleaf, and to be located in Durham! We look forward to being actively involved in both communities.

The office we have now is larger than the last apartment we were working out of (even though 12 people lived there…) so we figured we should have more people on the team. Well, okay, that’s not the only reason we brought them on. We are excited to have this new group of talented, smart, and extremely motivated people working on everything from marketing to server administration. It’s really exciting to see the team growing so quickly!