Filed under: Cool tools, Odds and ends, TUAW Interview, iPhone, iPod touch
Phil Libin on the past, present, and future of Evernote
It must be nice to be Evernote CEO Phil Libin right now. His company's product / service, Evernote, is about to break 2 million customers, they're past the days of initial development and beta testing, and the future is looking bright.I had a chance to chat with Mr. Libin last Friday about Evernote, the service that acts as a cloud-based repository for all of the information in your life. Last year during the closed beta test of the service, TUAW's Brett Terpstra interviewed Libin, who called Evernote "universal human memory extension." Whatever information you want to put into the Evernote cloud -- text, photos, voice memos -- is available for searching and viewing from your Mac, PC, or iPhone. Handwritten or printed text runs through a recognition routine that makes it searchable text, something that I've found incredibly useful when storing my business cards in Evernote. You can send web pages to Evernote from Firefox with the click of a button, or tweet notes to Evernote by addressing them to @myEN.
Libin ran me through a short history of Evernote, mentioning that many of the first reviews and discussions of it were provided by TUAW. The Mac app and the service began a closed beta in February, 2008, moving to an open beta in June of that year. As Libin noted, "We never really told anyone when we came out of beta; we just gradually removed the word 'beta' from the site and the software." Since then, Evernote has signed up almost 2 million users.
When I asked Libin if Evernote was meeting the company's expectations in terms of growth, he replied that "we're right where we thought we'd be now." In terms of the present and near future, there's a lot going on. Localized versions of Evernote will be available by the end of 2009 for several European countries, with a Japanese localized version on tap for early 2010. Libin noted that "the Japanese market is huge! Evernote is listed in many Japanese magazines, half of our Twitter traffic is in Japanese, and we're even thinking about opening an office in Japan."
All of the client software has been recently updated. The first version of the software is always for the Mac; Libin is an unabashed Mac fan, having switched to the platform a few yeas ago. Some of the things we'll be seeing in the near term include geotagging of all notes, which provides a way to search for information by where you entered it. For example, if you attended a conference and captured a lot of information through your Mac and/or iPhone, you could search for all notes that you entered while you were there simply because they were all captured in the same vicinity.
Libin mentioned that the most requested feature for the iPhone app is the local caching of notes. To add this functionality, the app will require a total rewrite, but support for full caching will be available in a few months. What's great about this upcoming functionality is that there's no need for a network connection to be able to view your Evernotes. Instead, you'll be able to sync all, some, or none of your notes between devices. Notes that are created on the iPhone will stay there, as will notes that you view on the iPhone. Users will have the ability to specify which notebooks (logical collections of notes) they wish to sync to their iPhone. The company is still determining requirements for these user tunable features. Libin also mentioned that the upcoming changes to the iPhone app will make it much more usable on the iPod touch, opening up full usage of its feature set to a much larger audience that will no longer need to be tied to a Wi-Fi connection.
The future looks very bright for Evernote integration in other applications. Libin stated that over 600 developers have API keys, although only a handful of products are currently shipping. Existing partners with Evernote include EyeFi, the JotNot and Readdle Scanner Pro iPhone apps, ReQall, and Pixily, among others.
Pixily's service could be especially useful for Evernote users who have boxes full of documents that are cluttering up their lives. They can send those paper documents -- bills, magazine clippings, recipe cards, handwritten journals -- to Pixily for scanning, and have then automatically transferred to their Evernote account for future reference.
Libin ended the call on a high note as well, mentioning that the company has recently received a new round of funding. For TUAW readers who haven't yet tried out Evernote, you can register for the service here, download the Mac or Windows PC software here, or even try out the iPhone / iPod touch app [iTunes Link].
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
NutMac said 2:45PM on 11-16-2009
I like the idea of Evernote and have used it since it public beta period. One thing the article didn't mention, and one that interests me the most, is whether the UI would be getting much needed update as well. Let's face it. Evernote, whether it be web app, iPhone, or Mac OS X desktop client, just plain stinks from both appearance and usability aspects.
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ericsr said 2:56PM on 11-16-2009
Did anything get asked about Android support?
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jho said 3:02PM on 11-16-2009
I love evernote but I still maintain a yojimbo library because yojimbo supports webarchives. Although the webarchive is a something unique to mac/safari the concept is not new. I would love to switch completely to evernote but I hate the way web pages lose their formatting after they are "clipped". Maintaining the original look and feel of a webpage is really important to me. Making everything a PDF is a sort-of-kind-of okay solution but no thumbnail preview of the PDF is really annoying. The inability to truly "save" a webpage is the only thing holding me back from switching entirely to evernote and paying for premium membership. Also it would be nice to have special note types for passwords and serial numbers.
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agdr.online said 3:13PM on 11-16-2009
I'm with you, jho. Evernote's web-clipping tool is pretty bad. My particular bugbear (as a Premium member) is the lack of nested folders. I have dozens of folders now clogging up the menu.
fxer said 3:19PM on 11-16-2009
I think Evernote already does local caching of notes on the iPhone, you just mark them as a favorite. Not sure why the whole app would need to be rewritten to just make "mark favorite" the default behavior.
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Eddie said 3:59PM on 11-17-2009
I think what he's getting at is actually a "fix" for the cached notes. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a meeting where there's no signal and I *know* that I've starred a note on my iPhone only to have it unavailable during the meeting. I finally gave up on Evernote because it was just too embarrassing to have to excuse myself from a meeting to go where signal existed just to get a note that should've already been on my iPhone.....
Steaps said 4:39PM on 11-16-2009
Did this full article really need posted on the home page?
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Irreverentech said 7:56PM on 11-16-2009
Notice how they casually mention at the end of the article that Evernote just got another round of funding - and that it was a good thing?? Evernote is the town slut... they give it away for free, and hardly anyone is paying for it. I use the service daily and have never come anywhere near pushing enough data to require a paid account. It is a FANTASTIC service and they need a little more self confidence. Or perhaps a Pimp.
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Shunnabunich said 8:01PM on 11-16-2009
Having used the iPhone client for a little while, one feature I'd really like to see is rich text editing. Other (writing) apps have that ability, usually via a toolbar above the keyboard, so with some work it should be possible to implement in Evernote. Right now, the moment you so much as italicize one character in a text note, you can no longer edit it on your iPhone/iPod touch. Now, with 3.0's text selection, there's no really good reason for that.
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xcmpx said 11:10PM on 11-16-2009
Caching of notes is the critical feature for me. On countless occasions Evernote was not a extension of my memory because I had poor service. I've got 32GB waiting...
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rauckman said 11:29AM on 11-17-2009
I've tried to get into using evernote over and over, but as someone who also uses OneNote, I just don't get Evernote's popularity.
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Connie said 4:06PM on 11-17-2009
Evernote's popularity I think comes from the fact that it can be used in more places than just Windows. OneNote (just like Windows Mobile) has languished for many years without any significant progress. I've got most of my life in notes and attachments in OneNote and just can't give it up yet. HOWEVER, I'm getting more and more frustrated that I can't have my OneNote notes on my MacBook (well, they technically are, but I have to run OneNote in Windows to get at them) or in the cloud or on my iPhone like with Evernote. I played around with pulling my OneNote folders into Evernote, but the attachments get left behind unfortunately. Tech support says it's a known issue. Hopefully Office 2010 will give us the OneNote that's not stuck only in Windows.....
Cuby said 10:38AM on 11-18-2009
Agree, OneNote is undoubtedly superior to Evernote. Evernote is very far from it when it comes to usability. And there is also an iPhone client for OneNote called MobileNoter. Hopefully 3rd parties will close the gap that OneNote have with support of different platforms. It looks like Evernote main way to make money is by raising funds, not from their end users. While they use their growing user base to raise more funds, how long will this continue :-)
pk said 6:30PM on 11-17-2009
I use Evernote, but I think the Yojimbo interface is more intuitive and more customizable. For instance, it would be great if Evernote allowed me to at least colour code notebooks or allow for different icons and grouping. Seems like such a small thing but for me it would make it much easier to find the right notebook rather than sorting through an alphabetical list.
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