Russian venture firm Troika Ventures is announcing that it has sold its share in productivity app Evernote to fellow investor Sequoia Capital. Troika Ventures was Evernote’s first institutional investor, and backed the company with $4.5 million in 2009, and participated in Evernote’s $20 million C round in 2010. Evernote has raised a total of $95.5 million in funding. The most recent round took place last year, when Sequoia and Morgenthaler Ventures put $50 million in the company.

Troika is not disclosing deal size but the firm invested back when Evernote only had 500,000 users (that number has shot up to 20 million since then). And valuation (based on sale price) is up 10 times. Just based on Troika’s $4.5 million investment in the A round, it is safe to assume they sold their stake for more than $45 million.

Although Evernote was rumored to be joining the billion dollar valuation club in its last round, the company isn’t valued that high (but ‘still doing quite nicely”). Perhaps that possible IPO isn’t so far away?

“Evernote was one of the first companies that we invested in,” said Artyom Yukhin, the head of Troika Dialog’s venture division, in a release. “In addition to financing, we provided expertise and assistance at an early stage to bring the company to the forefront of consumer internet and mobile services…The exit, at over ten times our original commitment, was a difficult decision for Troika and for me personally, but we ultimately decided to provide liquidity to our investors at a multiple return on their investment rather than await the next exit opportunity. Evernote has an absolutely unique team and we are proud of its achievements and have no doubt that the company will continue to flourish under the leadership of its CEO, Phil Libin.”

Of course, this means Sequoia, who also participated in the company’s 2010 $20 million round as well, is upping its stake in the company and betting big on Evernote. By our calculations, Sequoia presumably just bought another $50 million-plus in the company.

It may seem strange to think of productivity app Evernote as a platform, but with 20 million users and 9,000 apps built on the client, the three and a half-year old startup is a veritable apps ecosystem. Beyond this developer ecosystem, the company released five of its own simple and unique Evernote-based apps in the past year: Hello, an app that helps you remember people, Food, an app that helps you remember important meals, Skitch, an app that lets you communicate visually, Peek, an app that utilizes the iPad cover for a novel take on tutoring, and Clearly, an app that makes content easier to read within Evernote.

To support all this app building, Evernote, which has a $95.5 million coffer from Sequoia Capital, Troika Dialog, DoCoMo Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures, has been quietly acquiring smaller companies from its talented developer pool.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin tells me that the company has scooped up four companies in 2011, including the beloved Skitch, a company called Notable Meals (which turned into “Food”), Readable (which became “Clearly”), and a startup called Minds Momentum — which will eventually morph into the company’s upcoming To-Do List app. Exciting! (No seriously, half of my Evernotes are basically makeshift To-Do Lists. This is as exciting as it gets here in Tech Town folks.).

Libin said that all of the acquisitions were relatively small, for under $10 million in stock and equity, and that Evernote’s acquisition appetite will only increase in 2012.

But don’t go about thinking that “flipping to Evernote” is a business model, Libin says he’s looking specifically for entrepreneurs who are interested in adding intelligence and data to Evernote but don’t want to cash out, “We’re not buying people to give people an exit, we’re buying companies to give people a start. Selling your company to Evernote is the beginning of 80 hour work weeks.”

Update: Tickets are now sold out. Be sure to keep your eye out for ticket giveaways and for when we release our next batch of tickets.

The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.

For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App, the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like TaskRabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.

There are some pretty good match-ups this year. Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline for Best Social App, along with the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0). The Kindle Fire is competing with the iPad 2 for Best New Device. And Pinterest, Turntable.fm, Nest, Fab, and Codecademy are all vying for Best New Startup (even though two of those were complete pivots). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is up for Angel of the Year. His seed investment in Zynga is worth 160 times what he paid for it. But AngelList founders Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi are also finalists in the category for helping to democratize angel investing, along with Conway, Rabois, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Kevin Rose (who has a killer portfolio that includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, and Square). Who will win?

Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote. The rules state that you may vote once per day, per award category, until voting closes on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:59pm PST. There are 20 award categories open for voting, recognizing the top accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. If you are one of the finalists, create a badge and get your community excited about this honor and get them to vote for you. Winners will be announced on January 31, live at the Crunchies.

In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can.

Here are your Finalists:

Best Technology Achievement (2010 winner: Google Self Driving Cars)
Lytro (Related posts)
NFC (Related posts)
OnLive (Related posts)
Siri (Related posts)
Tesla Flat Pack Battery (Related posts)

Best Social Application (2010 winner: DailyBooth)
Facebook Timeline (Related posts)
Instagram (Related posts)
Google+ (Related posts)
The New New Twitter (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)

Best Shopping Application (2010 winner: Groupon)
Birchbox (Related posts)
Fab (Related posts)
Gilt Groupe (Related posts)
Lot18 (Related posts)
Warby Parker (Related posts)

Best Mobile Application (2010 winner: Google Mobile Maps for Android)
Evernote (Related posts)
Flipboard (Related posts)
Pandora (Related posts)
Spotify (Related posts)
Square (Related posts)
TaskRabbit (Related posts)

Best Location Application (New category for 2011)
Airbnb (Related posts)
Foursquare (Related posts)
Grindr (Related posts)
RunKeeper (Related posts)
Uber (Related posts)

Best Tablet Application (2010 winner: Flipboard)
djay (Related posts)
Eventbrite At the Door (Related posts)
Fotopedia (Related posts)
GarageBand (Related posts)
Netflix (Related posts)
StumbleUpon (Related posts)

Best Design (2010 winner: gogobot)
Gojee (Related posts)
Orchestra (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)
Pinterest (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)

Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired)
Github (Related posts)
Imgur (Related posts)
Instapaper (Related posts)
Onesheet (Related posts)
Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) (Related posts)

Best Cloud Service (New category for 2011)
Asana (Related posts)
Box (Related posts)
CloudFlare (Related posts)
Dropbox (Related posts)
Okta (Related posts)
Twilio (Related posts)

Best International Startup (2010 winner: Viki)
Badoo (Related posts)
Klarna (Related posts)
Peixe Urbano (Related posts)
Rovio (Related posts)
SoundCloud (Related posts)
Wonga (Related posts)

Best Clean Tech Startup (2010 winner: SolarCity)
Alta Energy (Related posts)
Array Power (Related posts)
EcoATM (Related posts)
EcoMotors (Related posts)
Hara (Related posts)

Best New Device (2010 winner: iPad)
Galaxy Nexus (Related posts)
iPad 2 (Related posts)
iPhone 4S (Related posts)
Kindle Fire (Related posts)
Nest (Related posts)

Best Time Sink (2010 winner: Cityville)
Modern Warfare 3 (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)
Skyrim (Related posts)
Turntable.fm (Related posts)
Words With Friends (Related posts)

Biggest Social Impact (New category for 2011)
Charity: Water (Related posts)
Khan Academy (Related posts)
Kickstarter (Related posts)
Practice Fusion (Related posts)
Twitter (Related posts)

Angel of the Year (2010 winner: Paul Graham)
Ron Conway (Related posts)
Paul Graham (Related posts)
Reid Hoffman (Related posts)
Keith Rabois (Related posts)
Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi (AngelList) (Related posts for Naval) (Related posts for Babak)
Kevin Rose (Related posts)

VC of the Year (2010 winner: Yuri Milner)
Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz (Related posts for Marc) (Related posts for Ben)
Matt Cohler (Related posts)
Vinod Khosla (Related posts)
Aileen Lee (Related posts)
Yuri Milner (Related posts)
David Sze (Related posts)

Founder of the Year (2010 winner: Mark Pincus)
Leah Busque (Task Rabbit) (Related posts)
Brian Chesky (Airbnb) (Related posts)
Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter) (Related posts)
Susan Feldman & Ali Pincus (One Kings Lane) (Related posts for Susan) (Related posts for Ali)
Drew Houston (Dropbox) (Related posts)

CEO of the Year (2010 winner: Andrew Mason)
Dick Costolo (Twitter) (Related posts)
Daniel Ek (Spotify) (Related posts)
Phil Libin (Evernote) (Related posts)
Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Related posts)
Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) (Related posts)

Best New Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Quora)
Codecademy (Related posts)
Fab (Related posts)
Nest (Related posts)
Pinterest (Related posts)
Turntable.fm (Related posts)

Best Overall Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Twitter)
Dropbox (Related posts)
Instagram (Related posts)
Gilt Groupe (Related posts)
Spotify (Related posts)
Square (Related posts)
Tumblr (Related posts)

5th Annual Crunchies Awards
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA

7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire.

Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact Jeanne Logozzo at jeanne@techcrunch.com.

For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.

Skitch, the popular photo editing Mac app acquired by Evernote in August, is now available on the iPad. The release follows the launch of the Skitch for Android app earlier this year, and is the first iOS-compatible version available. Using the new app, you can annotate just about anything – a new photo, one from your camera roll, a screenshot, a map or you can just draw on a blank canvas.

And, of course, when you’re finished with your creation, you can save the photo to Evernote for safekeeping.

After choosing your starting point (a photo, screenshot, etc.), you can edit your creation using a number of built-in tools that take advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen interface. Objects you draw on the screen can be moved around with your finger or pulled into the trash. A pencil tool lets you draw freehand. You can add text. And you can drag, pull and adjust other objects like arrows, circles, squares and lines.

None of this is entirely ground-breaking stuff, but Skitch does what it does very well. It’s a pleasure to use.

In addition to the Evernote integration, your creations can also be tweeted or even – and this is pretty cool, too – mirrored to any Apple TV connected screen via AirPlay. It’s DIY Powerpoint with free tools. Nice.

But I know what you’re thinking: WHERE IS SKITCH FOR IPHONE ALREADY?

Evernote says its “in the works,” which is what they’ve been saying since August. According to the company blog post, they launched on iPad first because it’s “the ideal form factor for tactile annotation.” What about the nearly four-month-old Android app then?

You can grab the new iOS version of Skitch from here.

Today at the Le Web conference in Paris, Evernote is debuting two new applications for iPhone and iPod touch devices. The first one is called Food, and is designed to help people easily save and ‘relive’ all of their favorite meals and food experiences.

The second app is dubbed Hello and basically wants it easier for users to remember people after meeting them, as well as recording thoughts about and experiences with those people.

Evernote Food (download link)

The Food app is essentially giving users ways to document dishes and drinks they’ve had, build a catalog of custom recipes, review restaurants and record food experiences in their neighborhood or abroad, and even manage their diets. It also comes with handy sharing options, of course.

The application lets people capture all aspects of a meal through pictures, location, text and photo captions. All this information about the meal is automatically synchronized with Evernote, making it easy to track down later. More information is available here.

Evernote Hello (download link)

The Hello app is a tad more sophisticated. Basically, the mobile application aims to make it easier for people to remember everything about encounters, shared experiences and impressions they have when meeting other people. More information is available here.

From the pitch:

Evernote Hello aims to modernize the standard greeting ritual. With the app, when two people meet, they exchange phones and quickly create a basic profile. Once added to Evernote Hello, individuals are displayed within a swipeable mosaic of faces.

When tapped, a face becomes a profile that displays a history of every encounter the two people have shared, along with other people who participated in the same meetings, location information and any related content from the user’s Evernote account such as notes and photos.

Sounds really cool, save for maybe the ‘exchanging phones’ thing …

As with the Food app, people and encounters are automatically synched to Evernote.

Both applications are available on the App Store now and free of charge.

Also read: Evernote Clearly Knows How To Make Web Reading, Clipping Easier

Evernote is today introducing its first stand-alone product since Peek: a browser extension called Clearly that enables “distraction-free online reading”. Only available as a Chrome add-on for now, Evernote Clearly removes ads, links, navigational elements and whatnot from any block of text you’d like to read on the Web and lets you easily save it to Evernote to read later.

If that sounds a lot like the core functionality of the likes of Readability or Instapaper, you’re probably thinking in the right direction.

Evernote Clearly works best when you’re on a page with a single article, like this one. With one click, you can isolate the text block for comfortable reading, and ‘slide’ right back when you’re done.

The extension also lets you change the appearance and the size of the characters, so you can somewhat customize the experience (see first screenshot below). In addition, you can clip articles to Evernote with the click of a single button to save articles or later reading. Also, a ‘print’ button.

According to Evernote’s blog post, Clearly will even automatically turn a multi-page article into a single page so you no longer need to click from one page to the next anymore, but that didn’t work out for me, as far as the extension I was sent goes (I tried with this post).

Evernote Clearly will soon be available for Firefox, too.

We caught up with Evernote’s Phil Libin after his talk at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing and delved deeper into a theme that he’s touched upon many times when describing his vision of Evernote’s future — the idea of building a hundred year old company in the age of the acqui-hire and the quick flip.

“We wouldn’t sell it for a billion, or for 2 billion,” Libin told me. “There’s basically no price that we would sell it. There isn’t a price at which I would prefer to sell the whole company rather than, you know like 10% of it at the same evaluation. So, if somebody came to me tomorrow and said, ‘Yeah. I’ll give you $10 billion. I’d go to investors and say ‘You guys give me a $10 billion evaluation and 10% of that amount.’ I would be much happier to sell 10% than to sell the whole thing. So, as long as the secondary markets or the public markets allow us to have the right kind of valuation then there’s really no reason to sell.”

Libin went on to drop his top three tips for building a hundred year old company:

1. Do something that you love enough to devote the rest of your life to.

“If you’re not completely infatuated with the idea with the company, why would you want to spend a hundred years doing it? So If you’re going to attempt something like this, it’s got to be in the field that you feel you can devote the rest of your life too, which is just a good idea anyway whether you want to do it for a hundred years or not.”

2. Make sure that all of your investors feel the same way.

“If your goal is to get the craziest possible person to pay you the most amount of money for your company, you can do that and you can maximize some short-term gain, but then you’ll have a crazy person on your board. And that’s not going to be consistent for being around for a hundred years. You’ve got to make sure you have fully aligned interest with the investors — That they’re along for the ride. And you should be up front while raising, ‘Hey, we want this to stick around.’”

3. Surround yourself with people you want to spend the next hundred years with.

“It’s all about getting the team. So the whole secret of Evernote is we have this fantastic team. Many of the people I’ve been with for 10, 15, 20 years. Others are new. The first two companies we made, we sold.  We sort of felt like we build them for somebody else. Then we said, ‘Okay, the third one is the one for us.’”

Evernote just this summer raised another $50 million+ smackers to stick it out through the next century. Good luck Phil!

The sun has set on our first ever TechCrunch Disrupt conference outside U.S. soil. The Beijing event ended this past Tuesday, as OrderWithMe won the Disrupt Cup. With the 12 to 15 hour time difference between the U.S. and China, watching it live wasn’t the easiest option. We produced more than 60 videos. But here’s a look at some of the highlights you might have missed:

Disrupt Cup Winner OrderWithMe’s Demo

OrderWithMe won the Disrupt Cup, emerging to victory from a field of 15 companies. Learn more about their business model, offering wholesale group buying to small businesses and watch a backstage interview with the winners.

Pony Ma, Founder and CEO of Tencent

Tencent is China’s largest and most used internet services portal. Read more about this rare interview with Tencent Founder Pony Ma.

Lei Jun, Co-Founder of Xiaomi, On How He Plans To Take On Apple In The Mobile Phone Industry

Lei Jun is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in China. Read more about Xiaomi Tech’s ambitious goals.

Kai-Fu Lee on his start-up incubator InnovationWorks

InnovationWorks is a Chinese incubator that helps early stage Chinese internet companies. Read more on what they looking for when making investment decisions.

Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh: An Entrepreneur is Someone Who Doesn’t Understand The Word No

Ben Huh, CEO of icanhascheezburger.com, gave a powerful and inspirational talk on internet culture and entrepreneurship. He also explained his mission to make everyone in the world happy for five minutes a day. Read more.

Phil Libin, Evernote CEO on How Freemium Products Can Work

Evernote CEO, Phil Libin, spoke about building a successful freemium product that people will love and will eventually give you money without you having to ask.

TechCrunch Staffer Greg Barto Spins Around In A Barrel

The TechCrunch team and local partners had some time to explore adventures in Beijing. Here’s a ride Greg won’t ever forget.

You can find all the Beijing Disrupt videos here and all the posts here.

More news from Disrupt can be found in our posts on the Complete Guide to Disrupt Beijing Day 1 and Day 2.

In addition to our regular Disrupt Music, which you can download here, we added a new track just for China. [download link]

I’ll admit it right off the bat: Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. I consider myself an actual “fan” of very few living business men, but he’s one of them.

Phil joined Sarah Lacy on stage today at Disrupt Beijing for a quick fireside chat, and, along with explaining why he plans to stay with Evernote for the long haul, offered up a bit of sage advice for the budding entrepreneurs of the world.

First: design for yourself, and love what you do. While Phil openly admitted that this wasn’t the most original advice, he dived a bit deeper into his logic:

“I’ve had three companies, and it took until the third to figure out some really basic things… My first company [Engine 5] did systems for retailers; we weren’t retailers. My second company [Core Street] built infrastructure for the government sector. With Evernote, we are the end-user. It feels like cheating. If I had to do it all over again, Evernote would be my first company.”

It wouldn’t just be his first company — it’d be his only company. Libin thinks of Evernote as a 100 year company, joking that he guesses he “has to be comfortable with the idea that [he] may not be the CEO in 100 years.” As for why he’s so open about this (and most things, really; Libin is often recognized for his transparency): “Evernote is asking you to trust us. If we’re going to do that, we have to tell you what we plan to do, how the numbers work, and how the technology works. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t get the trust we do.”

Next: don’t use crazy bidders to inflate valuations.

“Valuations in private companies are a really strange thing. In the public market, valuations are kind of the average of lows and highs across all sales. With a private company, you really only have one seller: the company. You base your valuation on the highest bidder. You can chase up your valuation by getting some crazy person to bid some insane amount — but then you have a crazy person as your boss.”

Finally: if you’re building a freemium product — as is all the rage these days — focus on the “free”, not the “emium”.

“People tend to highlight the ‘emium’ part. We value the ‘free’ part. The free version of Evernote IS the full product — but as long as you keep using it, the perceived value just keeps going higher and higher.”

In other words: make people fall in love with the free product, and they’ll be all the more willing to give your their money without you even having to ask.

As we announced last week, we’ve been busy securing some of the most exciting names in China for our Disrupt Beijing conference this October including Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma and Chinese entrepreneur and angel investor Lei Jun. But it wouldn’t be a TechCrunch event without bringing a little of that Silicon Valley magic too.

In selecting people to bring to China we wanted a mix of some people who are new to the country and others who have a long experience doing business there; people who are existing successes and those who have a fast-growing, tiger-by-the-tail right now. We also wanted a few people who could speak to the culture and whimsy that makes the Valley so unique.

We’ll start things off with Peter Vesterbacka the mighty eagle of Rovio, maker of Angry Birds. Vesterbacka is no stranger to China, where he says Rovio is busy building a $100 million business by the end of the year. That business spans everything from games to desserts to plush toys. I last saw Vesterbacka at the Next11 Conference in Berlin and the more he told me of his strategy for China, the more I insisted he be at Disrupt. He may even have some news to announce…

Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, will also be joining us on stage. Chen is an expert in a good problem to have: A company growing so fast it could bankrupt you. YouTube is one of the biggest phenomena the Web 2.0 world has ever seen. It’s played a pivotal role in everything from US presidential races to the rise of Justin Bieber. And it was the first Web 2.0 to have a $1 billion-plus exit.

The Valley isn’t all about fun ways to waste time. Phil Libin of Evernote calls his company “the anti-Zynga” because it seeks to make you smarter during the little holes in your day. Evernote has a rabid following among its users and is one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley right now, fresh off raising a recent funding round. Evernote rivals Foursquare in downloads, and unlike Foursquare it has no monetization problems, as Libin explains in this video.

These are just a few of the Valley names joining us in Beijing this October. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements and remember to buy your tickets and apply for the Startup Battlefield today. As a reminder, we’ll have translation headsets for all attendees so all speakers and startups competing can do so in their native language, and our global audience won’t miss a thing. Battlefield applications are available in English and Chinese as well.

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.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about Evernote’s new rumored venture round. It was a big one, said one source, putting them in the billion dollar valuation club.

Today they’ll officially announce that deal – $50 million in new funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. And while they didn’t quite get that billion dollar valuation people were whispering about, the company is still doing quite nicely, thank you.

As part of the round, Roelof Botha at Sequoia will join the board of directors. He was previously a board observer. The new round is partially secondary, meaning founders will be taking some money off the table. The majority of the round, though, is a primary venture raise. They’ll use it to fuel growth, including upcoming acquisitions. Since the company is already quite profitable (they haven’t spent any of their previous $20 million round), they now have quite a warchest.

The company continues to grow like a well loved weed. In June they had 10 million users. Now it’s 11 million. 75% of users access the service using more than one platform – a desktop and a mobile phone, for example. 50% use more than two. And new, fun, applications like Peek continue to drive new user awareness of all that Evernote has to offer.

Which is a lot. Snip a picture, save a web page, type a text note. Heavy users come and organize that content later, adding tags and other metadata to keep things tended properly.

And that’s exactly what the company wants to see. Zynga is a place that encourages people to spend a 5 minute break playing one of their fun new games. Evernote says a lot of people want to spend that 5 mins doing something productive, like tending to your growing Evernote personal library. “You can really feel like you’ve accomplished something,” says CEO Phil Libin.

Interesting sidenote, Morgenthaler loves Evernote so much that they not only invested in the company again, but they also sent over partner Ken Gullicksen to head Evernote’s corporate development efforts. Most venture funds get a little snippy when a company poaches a partner. But Morgenthaler just doubled down on their investment instead. Nice

Sarah Lacy sat down with Libin yesterday to talk about the round, and how Evernote’s doing in general. That fascinating conversation is below. And the meaning of that thing he’s holding in his hand in the picture above becomes clear. I love that his goal is to create “a 100 year company.”

The company is profitable with 70 employees, and has revenue of more than $1 million per month. Profitable enough, in fact, that it’s rumored they haven’t spent a penny of that $20 million venture round.

Even so, they’re close to raising a new round, we’ve heard from multiple sources. It’ll likely be in the $50 million range, and Sequoia Capital will once again lead. Our guess (and this is only a guess) is that at least some of this new round will be secondary, allowing the founders to take money off the table.

One source pegged the valuation at a billion dollars or more, which would put Evernote in the billion dollar valuation club. But a different source said it would be “substantially lower” than $1 billion.

Either way, things are looking good for Evernote. The company declined to comment on this post.

Read the full Evernote Windows Phone 7 release for more details and screenshots.

One of the best parts of the iPad 2 is the colorful, magical smart cover that comes as a peripheral. Lift the cover and your iPad turns on, drop it and it goes to sleep. It’s kind of addictive. But what if someone actually built an app around that fidgety behavior?

Well, Evernote just did. It’s called Evernote Peek, a free app for the iPad 2 that is designed around the smart cover. It is the first smart cover app, and it may even make you smarter.

Evernote Peek is a simple Q&A quiz app. You lift the cover a little and to see a question like “How fast does light travel?” or “Who was the fifth President of the United States”? Then lift the cover a little more to see the answer. Yup, people are going to be killing a lot of time in coffee shops with this app.

The general trivia questions don’t't really have anything to do with the main Evernote apps, other than the fact that it reinforces its slogan, “Remember Everything.” But you can also connect the app to your own Evernote notebooks and turn them into study guides. Your note titles become the clues and the text of the notes becomes the answers.

May 2009: Evernote hits 1 million registered users
December 2009: Evernote hits 2 million registered users
May 2010: Evernote hits 3 million registered users
August 2010: Evernote hits 4 million registered users
November 2010: Evernote hits 5 million registered users

Today (6 June 2011): Evernote hits 10 million registered users

As you can tell from the numbers copied above, that means Evernote attracted about 4 million users since the beginning of this year, but more importantly, the number of premium (paying) users has more than doubled in the past 5 months (from ~200,000 to ~425,000).

The startup owes a lot of that growth to its cross-platformness: it offers native apps for Mac, Windows, Web, iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, HP WebOS — with support for more apparently on the way according to today’s company blog post.

According to Evernote, 75 percent of its user base uses 2 or more platforms to access its service (some power users apparently use as many as 10).

Late last year, the memory enhancement service (or versatile notetaking app if you want) raised a $20 million round from Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures.

Part of that money will be spent on buying a new iPad 2 for every one of its employees – that was Evernote management’s promise if they were able to reach 10 million users by their three-year anniversary (24 June). Happy unpacking to (the more than 60 of) them.

The Evernote extension works in Chromium as well as Chrome, for those that prefer their browsers open source.

I’ve been playing with GimmeBar recently, too, which does pretty much the same thing as the Evernote extension. GimmeBar uses a bookmarklet, rather than an extension, so should be browser neutral. GimmerBar doesn’t have the smarts to intelligently determine the relevant portion of any particular page, though, so you’d need to highlight it manually. Manually! As if!

I kid. GimmeBar is cool, and you should sign up. And you should install the Evernote Chrome extension. And don’t forget to floss.

The changes to the home screen look great. Most of the time when I launched Evernote I wanted to look at a note I had previously made, so being able to access this information immediately is a huge time saver.

Creating a new note in Evernote version 4 has been upgraded, too. You can type text as normal, but from the same screen you can now embed images from your photo roll, take new pictures, and record audio. Multiple media types can be added to the same note at the same time, which makes Evernote notes much more useful. From the Evernote blog: “So, if you’re sitting in a meeting or lecture, you can have notes, recorded audio and a whiteboard snapshot all in a single note.”

For folks that use multiple notebooks, you can now view a list of notes in a specific notebook. You can also view a list of all the tags you’ve assigned to notes across all notebooks, so you can find that note you made three months ago tagged “Important” but have since completely forgotten what you titled it.

iPad owners may be a little disappointed that Evernote 4 is currently only for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The changes should trickle into the iPad version soon, though.

I think it’s important to note that almost all — if not all — of the Evernote 4 features are the direct result of user feedback. The folks at Evernote listen to their users, and incorporate useful feedback into a better app for everyone, even the freeloaders like me using the free version.

We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.

—email attributed to Steve Jobs

There’s been so much confusion in the wake of Apple’s new subscription billing policy for apps that Steve Jobs felt the need to issue the proclamation above via his preferred method, a personal email. (It’s his version of the burning bush). While Apple’s new policy clearly states that all subscriptions for purchasing “content, functionality, or services in an app” must go through Apple, Jobs suggests that Apple will make a distinction between “publishing apps” and “SaaS apps” (software as a service). Apps like Salesforce or Evernote, for example, operate under an SaaS subscription, and are available to the same subscribers on the Web and other devices besides the iPhone.

Apple appears to be backtracking here. As I suggested on Friday in a Fly or Die video with Rhapsody’s president Jon irwin (who offers a music streaming subscription app on the iPhone), Apple’s initial broad-stroke rule may very well have been a trial balloon. The subscription billing system was obviously designed with media apps in mind, particularly publications. Maybe Apple won’t apply it to other types of subscription apps. Indeed, this latest email from Jobs appears to signal that Apple is adjusting to the market reaction.

The stakes here are very high. Apple cannot afford to alienate the mass of developers with existing or future subscription apps. As Instapaper founder Marco Arment writes:

A broad, vague, inconsistently applied, greedy, and unjustifiable rule doesn’t make developers want to embrace the platform.

The line now seems to be drawn between publishing apps and other kinds of subscription apps that are more like software. For the most part, that does make things clearer. Salesforce probably doesn’t have to worry about pulling its app from the iPhone.

But the next question is: What exactly isa publishing app? Obviously, apps that look like traditional print publications like The Daily, magazine apps, or the New York Times app once it goes to a subscription model all fall under the new rule. So too do apps like the recently-rejected Readability, which serves up repurposed content from across the Web without ads for a subscription. By that logic, any news reader apps that charge a subscription would fall under that rule as well.

But what is a news publishing app? They are clearly news-reading software. And what if Twitter or a Twitter client started charging subscriptions? Are those publishing apps or a communications apps? Just think about Flipboard or Pulse, which transform Twitter and other feeds into a dynamic, realtime, personalized publication. If those apps started charging subscriptions (both are currently free), I bet they would have to go through Apple’s subscription system just like Readability.

Okay, so any app that involves reading the news is a publishing app. Maybe. What about other media apps like music (Rhapsody, Rdio, MOG) or movies (Netflix) which require a subscription? Rhapsody doesn’t “publish” music, it just streams it. Netflix doesn’t make movies, it just delivers them. Apple still hasn’t clarified how it will treat these types of media subscription apps. But in my mind those are not publishing apps and thus should not be subject to the new rules.

Finally, what about personal publishing apps delivered as a service? One example of a popular app that offers both free and subscription versions is Evernote, which could be considered a form of personal publishing. Evernote lets you publish photos, notes, Web clips and other digital detritus to your own personal stream, which can remain private or be shared. It charges a subscription for extra features such as supporting larger uploads, more file types, and better collaboration tools. Those are all software features, but the end result is a personal publication of sorts. The difference is that Evernote isn’t charging for the content, it is charging for the software features.

And maybe that is the line Jobs is drawing, but it is a line that won’t last long. The most successful publishing apps will look increasingly like other apps, with software features that take them beyond glorified PDF readers. Smart publishers might even start charging subscription fees to unlock those extra features—3D photos, social news filters, augmented reality layers—instead of for the content itself.

Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, which is currently the No. 5 app in the Mac App Store. It also didn’t hurt that the app has been prominently featured by Apple.

We just finished our first week on the Mac App Store and it might have been the most important week in Evernote’s history. Here’s how it went and what we learned:

1. Meritocracy is sweet

I remember one of the first computer articles that I ever read (maybe it was in Byte Magazine in the early 80s while I was in junior high). It had a little survey aimed at my fellow nerds. “Do you buy software for your computer?”, was the first question. The choices were, “A) Yes, frequently. B) Yes, sometimes. and C) Rarely, I prefer to write my own.” The fact that C was a viable choice pretty much sums up the early euphoria of the consumer software industry. You just had to make something great and the rest would follow. That was a long time ago.

The following twenty or thirty years brought us monopolies and barriers to entry and this happy state of affairs became a dim memory. Then came the mobile app explosion.

Over the past year, about 70% of Evernote’s new users came from mobile app stores, mostly iOS and Android. This led us to the understandable conclusion that mobile was the crucial thing that made a platform attractive to independent developers. Last week made us realize that the reality is a little bit more nuanced. It isn’t mobile that’s overwhelmingly important, it’s the app store. Until a week ago, all the good app stores just happened to be on mobile devices, but someone with a shiny new Macbook is just as eager to get the best apps as someone with a shiny new iPhone.

A platform without a well-formed app store presents a huge challenge to developers. To succeed on such a platform, the developer has to spend as much time and money on channels, logistics, partnerships and advertising as on actually making a great product. Once an app store takes hold, the software market on a platform starts moving towards a meritocracy. This is imperfect, of course, but focusing on building a great product is the best strategy for succeeding on an app store. This is a huge boon for software nerds of all types, and has resulted in the explosion of mobile apps and services in the past two years. It’s about time that desktops joined the party.

2. Desktop software is viable again

It took a few weeks of non-trivial effort to get our existing Mac application ready for the app store. There’s never a convenient time to take a few weeks out of a busy development schedule, and December is as inconvenient as it gets, but Apple’s developer relations folks were helpful and the approval process itself worked reasonably well once we’d worked out the kinks.

The results speak for themselves. About 320,000 people downloaded Evernote in the first week of the Mac App Store. Of this number, about 120,000 had never used Evernote before, and created new accounts. This represents more than 50% of all the new Evernote accounts created last week. The Mac platform—which used to be in fourth place for new user registrations behind iOS, Android and Windows—has now jumped to first.

It’s obvious in hindsight, but the presence of a well-formed app store is the single most important factor for the viability of a platform for third party developers. If you want to take this a step further and say that a robust third-party software market is the most important factor for the success of the platform overall, well…

I hope Windows gets a good app store soon.

3. Multi-platform users are the best kind

Not only is the Mac App Store getting us new users, it’s making our existing users more valuable. Neat, but how?

So 320,000 people downloaded Evernote in the first week and 120,000 of them became new users. What happened to the rest? Well, about 80,000 people were either switching their Mac client from our direct-download version to the app store version or had simply downloaded the app and didn’t complete registration. Another 100,000 people were existing users who had previously used Evernote from other platforms (mostly the iPhone) and added the Mac version for the first time.

This is both interesting and important. Interesting because the vast majority of these people must have (1) already had Macs, and (2) known about our Mac version from previous interactions with Evernote but hadn’t bothered to install it until the Mac App Store appeared. Important because people who use Evernote from multiple devices are much more likely to stick around and to eventually pay for the premium version. This makes intuitive sense and the data is clear: in a Freemium model, people choose to pay for what they love and the more devices they use Evernote from, the more likely they are to fall in love with it.

The Mac App Store effect works the other way as well: many of the new users who first found us on the Mac App Store went on to also download Evernote on their mobile devices. Our iTunes downloads for iOS devices were up by 54% during the same week that the Mac App Store came out and that’s without any new versions or noticeable change in iOS app visibility.

4. A strike against lowest common denominator

If Evernote’s desktop clients were written in Adobe AIR, I’d be worried right now. The immediate popularity of the Mac App Store, and the iPhone App Store before it, reinforces my belief that in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.

As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.

Does this mean that web apps are doomed? Not at all, but the most successful web apps will be the ones that emphasize unique benefits—sharing, communications, integrations—that are better implemented on the web than in native code. This is the main design goal for the next version of the Evernote web client, by the way.

Lost among all the gloomy economic news of the past few years is the fact that there’s never been a better time to be in software. Sure, the emergence and inevitable dominance of app stores will permanently disrupt existing industry practices—I’m glad we’re not in the business of preventing people from making copies of bits, shipping shrink-wrapped boxes or charging people for periodic upgrades—but a company like Evernote simply could not have attained a fraction of our current momentum even three years ago. App stores, cloud services, cross-platform users and Freemium economics made it all possible. The download numbers are certain to decline a bit as the excitement of the first week finds a sustainable steady-state, but the launch of the Mac App Store will have a major, and permanent, positive impact on developers.

It was worth the wait.