Today at the Evernote Trunk Conference, Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced that the company has acquired Skitch, one of the best-selling apps on the Mac App Store. The app used to cost $20 currently in the app store, but Evernote will offer it for free. “We really expect this to become a fundamental part of Evernote going forward.”
Also announced at the conference was the launch of Skitch for Android, which is available for free today. Versions for the iPhone and iPhone are already in the works. “We will put Skitch everywhere,” Libin said.
“For years, one of our most requested feature areas has been related to improved handling of images and annotation capabilities,” Libin wrote in a blog post about the motivation behind the acquisition. “Our users take and share millions of photos and screenshots already, but the experience isn’t as good as it could be. We debated about whether to add the improved functionality into Evernote or build a separate app to handle it. Finally, we decided to do both.”
Libin began this morning’s talk by giving some statistics about Evernote’s growth today versus a year ago; Registered Evernote users are today at 12.5 million versus 3.9 million a year ago, the number more than tripling at 213%, Evernote 30 day active users are at 4.5 million today versus 1.2 million a year ago, a 271% increase.
The company is also bringing on 42K new people a day versus 11K a year ago, a 277% increase. Evernote uses a freemium model and its paying users are at 568K versus 92K a year ago according to Libin, a 513% increase.
Libin says that the longer people use Evernote the more likely they are to pay — while 1% of people are using the product’s paid version after a month, 8% are paid after a year and after 3 years 25% of users are converted to paying customers. “We want to be a 100 year company,” Libin said. “We’re dedicated to creating new types of tools that are simple, elegant, delightful and that will change your brain forever.”
Libin said that Evernote still has plans to acquire more properties. The company recently received $50 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital which means it has probably has room in the coffers for a couple of small purchases. Libin, obviously, didn’t reveal the price of today’s buy.
Evernote allows users to capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms. Users can take notes, clip webpages, snap photos using their mobile phones, create to-dos, and record audio. All data is synchronized with the Evernote web service and made available to clients on Windows, Mac, Web, and mobile devices. Additionally, the Evernote web service performs image recognition on all incoming notes, making printed or handwritten text found within images searchable.
Skitch.com is a webservice that works hand in hand with our application Skitch to give you 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing.
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