As I have noted time and again here on Gear Diary, I am a huge fan of Evernote and rely on it for everything from clipping web pages, to saving important emails to putting some of my rabbinic resource material where I know I can quickly access them no matter where I am, no matter what I am doing. Well I haven’t been all that happy with Evernote lately. No, for a little over a week Evernote has been hinting at something new and today they shared their plans. The news… overall Evernote is working to extend their system and, in one sense, becoming a platform unto themselves.
Here is what Evernote’s Phil Libin laid out today…
Phase 1
Up until now the service has been in Phase 1.
Phase 1 focused on capturing data and be able to access it anywhere, anytime. In that time they have over 3 million users and a version of Evernote on dozens of different devices.
Every minute 6 new users register. In the mobile space iPhone/touch and iPad dominate (18% on iPad already) and Android is growing quickly. Evernote is making huge investments in Android and recently doubled their Android team.
Most users use Evernote on one desktop and one mobile device. 20% use Evernote on 3 or more different devices. Interestingly the more devices a user use stay long-term and pay for Evernote. 80% of Evernote users use Evernote for both home and work. And almost everyone uses Evernote to save multiple kinds of information.
Evernote has a clear, simple business model that works. They want lots of users with some of those users becoming Premium users and paying $5 a month. And it is working! Evernote has 80,000 Premium users. That translates to $400,000 a month. And they have an 8% conversion rate from free to premium.
Today Evernote moves into Phase 2
So what is the big news? The Evernote Trunk.
The Evernote Trunk is a marketplace for Evernote-integrated software and hardware that works tightly with Evernote. There are 100 new integrated apps for Evernote already available as well as hardware and other services.
Among the featured services integrating with Evernote is Dial2Do’s new Voice2Note.
Voice2Note converts audio notes into text and then makes them searchable. In addition you can call a number, speak and it creates and audio note in Evernote that is then converted to text.
Evernote also added social integration through Seesmic. That allows you to save such things as Tweets.
The other major aspect of Evernote is the move into the collaborative/group functionality. This is something many of us have been asking for. In my case I have a personal Evernote account but my staff also uses Evernote and therefore has a separate account.
They also introduced Branded Notebooks that will set up Evernote as a system for sharing branded content.
In short Evernote’s big announcement today is the plan to extended the use and functionality of Evernote. That process starts today with the introduction of the Evernote Trunk and will move forward from there.