Evernote for iPhone launched with the Apple App Store, and the app has ungone a number of evolutionary steps in the years since. Today Evernote is unveiling version 4 of their iPhone app and the changes, while maybe not revolutionary, are certainly substantial. The home screen, for example, is completely revamped to show snippets of notes making the app useful as soon as you launch it. → Read More
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. → Read More
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:
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. → Read More
It’s been a big year for Evernote. It raised a $20 million round from Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures and also announced that it had hit 5 million users – and that was only 83 days after reaching 4 million users. It also released an Android app.
I caught up with Evernote CEO Phil Libin at Le Web, where we talked about Evernote’s growth to date, and it’s intriguing connections with Russia, where much of its deep core algorithms are developed by its team there, before making it over to the more product-oriented half of the company in the US. → Read More
The technology press can be a strange beast sometimes. We’ll quibble over facts and quotes that were mentioned in jest or passing (oftentimes in less than 140 characters). But, inexplicably, we’re willing to regurgitate statistics that are nebulous at best and sometimes just plain misleading — usually because they sound good in a headline. Today, I’m going to single out what’s probably the most frequently abused statistic: the cumulative user count.
You see it all the time. Hell, I’ve probably written hundreds of posts that mention the total number of users a startup has without batting an eye. This often refers to the number people to ever register for a site or the number of total downloads of an app. But in reality this number doesn’t say much because it fails to take into account how many people have stopped using a service. Put another way: going by total user count, MySpace is still kicking butt. → Read More
Mere weeks after raising a $20 million round from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures, memory enhancement service Evernote is today announcing that they’ve hit 5 million users.
The news, which Evernote just announced on its blog, comes less than three months after the startup reached the 4 million users milestone. → Read More
Evernote is rolling out version 2 of their app for Android phones, and it represents the biggest update to functionality on any platform in a single release. Updated home screen, tighter integration with the Google Search widget, background synchronization, and simpler sorting with improved views are all great new features, but the most interesting aspect of this update for current Evernote users will be the marked improvement in speed. → Read More
Memory enhancement service Evernote is loved by many, including, it appears, venture capitalists. This morning, the startup is announcing that it has raised its third institutional round of funding, and it’s a whopper:
Sequoia Capital and previous backers are injecting $20 million into the company – that’s on top of the $25.5 million the company raised earlier.
Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia, will join the Evernote board as an observer. → Read More
Snaptic, which lets you capture, save and share notes, ideas, imagery, places and whatnot, has changed its company and service name to the far catchier Catch.com. Coinciding with the name switch, the company has released new mobile apps (called “Catch Notes” for Android and iOS devices.
The new Catch apps join the newly released Catch.com website, which uses mobile geolocation to help sort and find information based on locations sent from a mobile device. → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt told the audience that the next step for Google Search is to show more personalized results. It’s unclear when Google will roll out a more personalized search experience, but startup Evernote, the ‘memory enhancement’ service that allows one to capture, organize, and find information across multiple devices and platforms, is hoping to bring this to you now. The startup is releasing a new Google Chrome Extension that includes Simultaneous Search, which lets you search both Google and your Evernote account at the same time.
Here’s how it works. When you beginning typing your Google search, your Evernote notes will also show as a result on top of your Google search result. Evernote will also show you the number of notes that match your query; and you can click on the result to see a list of all your notes that matched the search. Evernote says the extension also works on other Google search portals, including Google Images and Google Shopping. And the startup is planning to expand this functionality to other search engines and browsers. → Read More
The most popular note type created by Evernote users is a webpage. It seems that people love to save webpages in Evernote! Now Evernote is making it even easier for sites to get saved into notes with the announcement of the Evernote Site Memory Button. This is something of a departure from the historical Evernote modus operandi, where the user invokes a client application or opens up the Evernote website: the Site Memory Button is a server-side implementation, and sites that want to use it need to specifically add it. Once added, though, any Evernote user can use the button to add the page to their list of notes. The note will be pre-populated with content selected by the site owner, including title, and even have tags helpfully suggested. → Read More
Evernote, the ‘memory enhancement’ service that allows one to capture, organize, and find information across multiple devices and platforms, is gaining new users at a fast clip.
As you can tell from the graph above, the Mountain View startup needed 446 days to get its first million users, 222 days to get to its second million, and 134 days to get to its third. But it only took Evernote another 108 days to reach the 4 million users milestone. → Read More
Today at a special event in San Francisco, Evernote CEO Phil Libin unveiled Trunk, a new showcase of products, services, and hardware devices that have integrated Evernote. The idea is to help users enchance their Evernote experience with features they may want but that Evernote doesn’t offer by default, like Voice Transcription (via services like Dial2Do, pliq.me, and QuickTate), PDF annotation, and business card scanning. Libin says that at launch there are over 100 items available to users; some are brand new, and others have featured Evernote for a while.
The Trunk breaks up these integrations by category, including mobile (iPhone, Android, etc), hardware, and web service-based apps. One focus for the Trunk is to help your memories “bridge to the social web”. → Read More
Apparently information capturing and management startup Evernote is seeing quite some early success in Japan only three months after the release of its Japanese-language version.
Already, Japan is its second largest market after the United States, Evernote says, representing nearly 15 percent of the service’s daily traffic. Furthermore, over 50,000 books about Evernote in Japanese have already gone over the counter.
This popularity is in part due to a number of partnerships with leading Japanese tech companies like Sony, Canon, Fujitsu and more, the company says. And Evernote is keen on capitalizing on the current momentum it is enjoying in Japan. → Read More
Last week at the Founder Showcase, a quarterly event put on by Adeo Ressi’s TheFunded, Evernote CEO Phil Libin gave a presentation discussing some of the startup’s key revenue numbers and strategy. During his talk, Libin outlined some of the ingredients in making the freemium model work, and how long-term users actually become more valuable over time.
Evernote, for those who haven’t used it, is a great service for quickly storing and organizing ideas, photos, documents and other information that you encounter both online and in the real world. → Read More
The Evernote news just doesn’t stop, does it? Hot on the heels of Evernote integration with Lexmark printers and Fujitsu scanners comes word that Evernote will be integrating with the new P-150 scanners from Canon. → Read More
Multi-platform memory enhancing service provider Evernote (granted, you have to use it to know what that means) has added author, speaker and angel investor Timothy Ferriss to its already quite impressive circle of company advisors.
In case you’re not familiar with Evernote: its self-stated goal is to give its users near-perfect memory by allowing them to save and find their ideas and experiences whenever and wherever they like. The company must be doing something right: they’ve attracted over $25 million in funding from VCs and prominent angel investors and recently surpassed 3 million users.
PayPal co-founder and Slide CEO Max Levchin sits on the company’s board, along with Esther Dyson and others. → Read More
From now until July 31, if you buy a SnapScan S1500 or S1500M scanner and sign up for Evernote Premium, Fujitsu will send you a check for $50, basically reimbursing you for the cost of Evernote Premium. If you’ve been looking for a reason to upgrade to Evernote Premium, or if you’re in the market for a new scanner anyway, this is a pretty good deal. → Read More
The title says most of this story, but there are a couple of interesting details that are worth sharing. First, while it took 447 days to reach their first million users, it took 222 days to hit the two million mark, and only 134 days to reach three million. That’s pretty impressive. That 134 days is even more impressive when you learn that 85% of Evernote users get there by word of mouth. And 44% of new users are coming from outside the U.S., showing that Evernote has a very real global appeal. → Read More
If there is something everyone needs help with now and then, it is remembering stuff. Evernote does that very well via the iPhone, the iPad, Android phones, Blackberries, Windows PCs, and the Web. It just crossed the three million user mark in about 60 percent of the time it took to get to two million. Evernote took 447 days to get its first million users, 222 days to get to its second million users, and 134 days to get to its third. → Read More
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