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Evernote Raises $10 Million

J Keirn-Swanson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:05:38 -0600

It's a rare tech business that can score venture capital funding in this economy. Popular note taking service, Evernote, just managed a second injection of ten million dollars from Morgenthaler Ventures, along with Troika Dialog and DOCOMO Capital, donors from the first round of funding.

So what is in the works for this latest round of big bucks?

Improving the product and adding more options says CEO Phil Libin. More languages are in the mix, additional platforms, and general improvements to the GUI. Perhaps free users will see some additional document support and maybe some raised limits on uploads. It's a sure bet that their subscribers will begin seeing improvements.

And that's what's notable in Evernote's success in securing new funding. Unlike services such as Twitter or any number of online startups, Evernote already has a steady income stream. By signing up for a $5 per month or $45 per year premium user account, you receive a greater range of document uploading, better encryption and a much higher upload allowance. This subscriber base allows Evernote to pitch itself as self-sustaining, making the investment a more attractive use of venture capital.

According to a TechCrunch article in May, Evernote boasted almost 14,000 paying customers with a steady conversion of regular users to premium accounts. If projections hold, that ten million just might start looking like a very wise investment.

Evernote for Mac Gets an Update

J Keirn-Swanson — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:59:56 -0600

For our readers who count themselves fans of Evernote, the note taking app, there's good news. The desktop version just got a few new upgrades that fixed some things and added at least one new sweet feature.

Evernote allows you to take a voice note, snap a picture, or jot a note while you're on the go, then synch it with your desktop account so your notes are available wherever you are. On the desktop version, you can snip web pages, copy maps, take all the notes you want, then synch them back to your phone for on the go reference.

This sort of thing comes in handy when you're shopping for a big ticket item and you do your research online. Simply gather all your notes and pictures and links, synch them to your iPhone, and you have a pocket Consumer Reports when you roll up to the store.

With the latest update, Evernote's added French, German, Italian and Spanish to the application languages, broadening the app's appeal. Speaking of languages, the folks at Evernote are also working on improving their handwriting recognition apsects. So if you take a picture of a jotted down list, Evernote's search function can locate those words when you're seeking a specific bullet point. With improvements to their language recognition, they're putting out the call for handwriting samples in the above languages to get those up to speed.

Also apparently, the Safari clipper was a bit buggy, so they've ironed some wrinkles out of that browser toolbar, as well as fixed a few other little issues.

And for the bold-hearted, just as a number of other software manufacturers offer, Evernote's latest edition lets you subscribe to the beta release the moment it's available. This gives you cool new features first, but beware, these builds are less stable than the regular release, and you might find your notes disappearing into the ether.

You can download the latest version of Evernote here while the iPhone app can be found here.

Digitize Your Mental Notes with Evernote

Susie Ochs — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:29:40 -0500

Capture ideas and information instantly--and be able to find it all when you need it.

What You Need:

-- Free account at www.evernote.com
-- Evernote application for the Mac (free, www.evernote.com)
-- Optional: Evernote application for the iPhone or iPod touch
-- Optional: Twitter account (see Step 9)

What do you do when you come across some info you want to remember? If it’s a webpage maybe you bookmark it; if it’s an email or a file, you might stick it in a folder called “Important!” Evernote is a super-useful service that comprises a Web-based application, a free Mac desktop app, and even an iPhone app, all kept effortlessly synced. And it’s ready to store all your digital info--receipts, serial numbers, snippets of code, articles, photos, PDFs, audio files, recipes, you name it--with handy tagging, indexing, and searching features so you can actually find it all later. We’ll walk you through setting up Evernote, then encourage you to tinker around and discover how it fits into your personal workflow.

1. Sign Up and Download

Head to www.evernote.com and click the Register link at the top-right of the page. Then click the Downloads link at the very bottom of the page (or go to www.evernote.com/about/downloads) and grab the free Mac app, which requires Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard. Install that puppy in the usual fashion

This is all the personal info they ask for. Refreshing.

2. Look to the Menubar

The app will put a little elephant-head icon in your menubar. Click it to check out your options: New Note launches a window where you can type a new text note or drag in an attachment from the Finder. If you have a free account, you’re limited to attaching JPG, PNG, or GIF images; MP3 or WAV audio files; or PDFs. But Premium account users ($5/month or $45/year) can attach any file type.

Those hotkey combos work globally, and you can change them in Evernote > Preferences > Shortcuts.

The menubar icon also lets you paste the clipboard contents into Evernote, send a screenshot to Evernote, and launch the main Evernote window with the cursor in the Search box. Better still, all these commands can be executed with global hotkeys.

3. Web Clips, Three Ways

Most of the info we want to save comes from that ever-gushing font of knowledge and nonsense known as the Internet. Evernote’s got that covered: Firefox has a dedicated Evernote extension, which adds a toolbar button with a contextual menu for clipping the whole webpage, or just a selection, to Evernote. The Evernote app can install a similar Safari plug-in (click it to send the current webpage to Evernote, or Shift-click it to save the page to Evernote as a PDF, which does a better job of preserving the formatting).

But if you want to avoid bloating your browser with extensions or plug-ins, there’s also a “bookmarklet” you can drag into your bookmarks toolbar for one-click clipping. Find it at www.evernote.com/about/downloads.

Mouse over the Evernote button in Safari for a reminder of what it does.

4. More Ways to Add Notes

If the Evernote app is running, you can also drag supported file types right onto its Dock icon. If you’re using someone else’s computer when inspiration strikes, just log in at www.evernote.com to view your notebooks and add new notes through the Web interface.

And the app also has a button labeled iSight Note that lets you snap a shot with your Mac’s iSight—and it even flips the image horizontally before saving it to a notebook, so any text that’s visible in the image doesn’t appear backward.

Normally when you hold something with writing up to your iSight, the text is backward.

5. Search for Text in Images

“Who cares if the text is forward or backward?” you may ask after reading step 4. Well, you do. The genius of Evernote is that it finds text in your notes—even text that shows up in a photo, scanned document, screenshot, or PDF, and even if the text is handwritten. When you click the Sync button in the Evernote app, the notes on your Mac are synced with Evernote’s servers, where the text recognition is performed. Once that info is synced back to your Mac (which happens automatically, or you can click Sync again after a couple of minutes), you’ll be able to search for words contained inside any of your notes.

Our search for "Mac" found the image we took in step 4. Smart!

6. Tag Notes

Evernote lets you create multiple notebooks, but we prefer to dump everything into one notebook and then use tags to keep it all organized. You can tag notes as you write them, and as you type a tag, the app will suggest tags you’re already using that contain those letters. For tagging after the fact, just select one or more notes from the list and drag them onto the desired tag, listed in the sidebar—it’s the quickest way to tag multiple notes at once. And of course, each note can have as many tags as you need.

Drop multiple notes onto one of your tages to apply that tage to all of them.

7. Add Notes from Your iPhone

...or iPod touch, naturally. The free Evernote app is a lifesaver for capturing inspiration on the go, letting you create new notes by typing, taking a snapshot with the camera (iPhone only, of course), using an image that’s already on your device, or even recording a quick voice note. You can read all your notes, mark some as favorites (which saves a copy to your device, so you can read them offline), and search your notes too.

Notes you make on the phone will sync back to Evernote on the Web and on your Mac.

Bonus: Tap the magnifying glass icon to the right of the Search box for the Advanced Search page, where you can search for notes based on where you made them (within 1, 5, or 25 miles of your current location)—great for finding the note you made about where you left your car, once you get back to the parking garage.

8. Export or Share

The Evernote app can export your notes as ENEX files, which lets you back them up locally, but only the Evernote app can read the ENEX files. The app can also print your notes (including the ol’ print-to-PDF trick) or email them via Apple Mail. Evernote’s Web application also lets you print and email, and even publish your notebook online—you’ll get a URL you can share with friends.

Share your notebooks to let anyone (who knows the URL) read them.

9. Add Notes via Twitter

If you have a Twitter client open all day anyway, it can double as a fast way to send short notes (140 characters or less, duh!) to Evernote. First, you have to follow myEN (twitter.com/myEN). You’ll get a direct message with a URL for linking your Twitter and Evernote accounts—make sure to sign in to Evernote before you click the link. Then just add @myEN anywhere in your tweet to have a copy sent to Evernote. You can also direct-message myEN (start the tweet with D myEN) if you want your note to stay private.

To get started, go to twitter.com/myEN and click Follow.

10. Go Premium?

Evernote’s Premium account ($5/month or $45/year) boosts your upload limit to 500MB/month (a free account is 40MB/month), syncs your files between multiple computers running Evernote--even across platforms--and supports more file types and SSL encryption. (The small ads in the bottom-left corner of the Evernote app and webpage disappear too.) We don’t want to discourage anyone from upgrading to the paid service (we’re sort of Evernote fanboys, OK?), but we have to admit that in our months of using the service, we’ve yet to have an “Oooh, I wish I was Premium!” moment. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Evernote Makes Sure You Never Forget!

Leslie Ayers — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:33:31 -0500

They say an elephant never forgets, but I bet even the brainiest pachyderm would have trouble keeping up in the modern world.

Enter Evernote, a Web 2.0 site that's similar to Backpack, but just a little smarter. The primary purpose of Evernote is to enable you to capture and save tidbits of digital info in an organized, searchable collection that’s accessible from any Web browser. The smartness of Evernote lies in its ability to index your collection of notes (which you create by clicking New Note, giving it a name and pasting the contents of the Clipboard into it.) If you want to search the contents of your notebooks, just type the keywords into the search bar and click Search. When you click on individual notes, the keywords will be highlighted in yellow—so cool.

Evernote is a sweet way to keep track of stuff you might normally jot down on random Post-its or just try to remember, usually without much success. It’s a smart way to share digital ifo, too. You could, for example just create one Evernote user account for everyone in your family (or even a workgroup) to share. The site is still in beta. Visit Evernote.com to sign up to receive your free invitation to join.

Our family isn't visiting Maui until September, but I'm already thinking about where to scope out the freshest sushi. When I search for Maui menus in Evernote, it highlights all the instances of the phrase in my Maui notebook, so I can easily find the note I saved that houses Maui restaurant menus.