Kdan Mobile wants to fill the space between Adobe’s mobile products and Evernote by providing cloud-based creativity and productivity apps for iOS and Android, like Animation Desk and NoteLedge, that are targeted toward amateur users and students.
Kdan Creative Cloud allows users to access their content on different devices and in the near future founder CEO Kenny Su says the startup, which is currently raising closing its Series A, plans to parse data from all of its apps to help people organize their content more quickly based on file formats.
“Currently our marketing position is to try to complete the whole mobile content creation experience between Adobe and Evernote. Evernote’s business strategy is to help people keep everything in the cloud, but if people create something more, they don’t have the tools. Adobe has always been targeted to professional users, not mobile users who are amateurs,” say Su.
Two of Kdan’s apps, NoteLedge and Animation Desk, have gained traction through a partnerships with Samsung and Microsoft. The apps are currently pre-installed on several of Samsung’s mobile devices, including the Galaxy 3 and Galaxy tablet, in 13 Asian countries, as well as Microsoft’s Lumia series in Taiwan.
Now Kdan faces the challenge of striking additional partnerships, getting additional users outside of those partnerships, and convincing existing users to sign up for Kdan Creative Cloud. Su says Kdan has already signed partnerships with carriers in North America, but can’t currently talk about them because of a non-disclosure agreement.
In total, Kdan’s suite of apps Kdan Creative Cloud currently has 100,000 registered members and adds an additional 2,000 to 3,000 users per day. The company’s goal is to have one million subscribers by the end of 2015. Su says the company plans to encourage people to subscribe the Kdan Creative Cloud by offering promotions as well as special features to unlock.
Currently eight apps are connected to Kdan’s cloud: Animation Desk ($4.99 in the App Store), NoteLedge ($4.99), PDF Reader ($4.99), PDF Connoisseur ($9.99), Pocket Scanner ($3.99), Write-on Video ($3.99), PazteUp ($4.99), and EleEditor ($2.99).
Of these, Kdan Mobile considers PDF Connoisseur, NoteLedge, and Animation Desk its flagship products.
Animation Desk, which lets users turn drawings into animations on their iPads, is meant as an alternative to Adobe’s Edge Animate for students and amateurs who don’t need all the features of pricier software. It supports four frame rates (or FPS, frames-per-second) from 3FPS to 24FPS and includes pre-loaded dynamic or static backgrounds, so users don’t have to draw their own. Animation Desk is optimized for use with Adonit, Ten One Design, and Hex3 styluses.
PDF Connoisseur includes a scanner that turns documents into PDFs, a PDF reader, a file converter, downloader, and file transfer tool. Additional features include a text-to-speech reader that supports six languages (English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean); an optical character recognition (OCR) tool that recognizes 12 languages and turns text from scans into a searchable .txt file; and a PDF editor.
NoteLedge is an EverNote competitor, but geared towards younger users with options like different notebooks, stylus styles that include crayon and watercolor, and in-app sticker purchases. Like EverNote, NoteLedge also supports audio and video recording.
A subscription to Kdan Creative Cloud currently costs $2.99 a month or $9.99 a year for individual users, and $5.99 a month or $29.99 a year for businesses.