Le Web: Evernote - gunning for your office software suite

 From 5m to 20m users in a year. Partnerships with companies like Orange in France, to give their users a free year of Evernote Premium. A refreshingly free way with their figures – apparently the only way to build trust with users who might store their memories in the service for a lifetime. It must be a Phil Libin presentation. He’s covering much of the same ground as last year so far. 750,000 premium users – less than one in 20, but then the don’t pressure people to upgrade. “Free” Evernote is the main product. They got profitable about six months ago, but are back in the red now, as they’re hiring as fast as they can. They’d need to put the brakes on that to go back into profitability. Oh, and they now have offices internationally – including  forthcoming one in Zurich, the first in Europe.

Two new apps:

Evernote Food

Food is one of the things Libin is capturing all the time in Evernote. Easting is one of his “core competencies”. It’s a separate app, because he believes that mobile should be simple and clear in their function. Mobile apps should be simple, but desktop apps can be unified. Capture a photo of your food – the app automatically captures the restaurant, and pulls up related notes.

Evernote Hello

Similar thing for people. Photos of people, map of where you met them, and any related notes. Uses the iPhone gyroscope to makes sure you get good photos, and grabs four to create an animated “moment”. Links to social networks are going to come in the next version.

Evernote is build for Libin – he can’t remember stuff. He likes food. He can’t remember people’s faces…

They’re up to six apps now. Where are they going? They want to reimagine what tools for the modern knowledge workers look like. Office as the model doesn’t take into account 30 years of ethnology development. What are the tools for a modern person who has narrow boundaries between home and work? That’s Evernote.