Evernote is a web and mobile based application that allows you to capture any piece of information anywhere and archive that piece of information in a secured location (your Evernote account). Although Evernote was founded six years ago in 2004 by Stepan Pachikov it has been a slow burn for the company. There has been a dedicated, loyal user base that has been using this for a few years now and although I only signed up to this in October it has already become my new favourite app.
Nevertheless Evernote has grown steadily over the years and on the 10th of November this year reached 5 million users. Driving this success is the philosophy that everybody should have “the ability to easily capture any moment, idea, inspiration, or experience whenever they want using whichever device or platform they find most convenient, and then to make all of that information easy to find”. Such a simple idea that people should have a way to save, find and reuse data that appeals to them caught the attention of some very wealthy and influential venture capitalists including Sequoia Capital who funded YouTube to the amount of $11.5 million before it was acquired by Google. Evernote also has advisors like Tim Ferriss who is the author of “The Four Hour Work Week” and more recently “The Four Hour Body”.
The beauty of Evernote is that it is effectively limitless. There is nowhere you can’t use it or nothing you can’t capture and archive. It exists on the internet, on your desktop and your mobile device and now the iPad. It is extremely easy to use. All you have to do is download the software to your PC or phone and start recording anything and everything that takes your interest. It downloads best to Internet Explorer but supports Chrome and Firefox extensions and runs on all the major mobile operating systems. A really great feature of Evernote is its ability to capture real world information and store it online as well as making it searchable. A good example of this is one Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) made on episode 11 of the Random show (a video blog done with Tim Ferriss). Say you’re out for dinner and order a really nice bottle wine that you want to remember for another occasion. All you have to do is take a photo of the bottle using your Evernote app. Evernote will then convert all the text in that image into searchable data and store it in your account. It will then be there any time you want to reference it. This goes for anything, like text on a chalk board, the menu at a restaurant or even photos and images.
Evernote have also set up a new Twitter account, called @myen. If you follow @myen it will follow you straight back and then any direct message you send to that account or any public tweet that mentions @myen will be saved to your Evernote account for you. This is explained in the video below.
I started using Evernote because there were so many occasions where I wished I had book marked a blog post or an article that I know I will never find again. It’s a really cool app that I suggest you check out. Even if it’s just cool images you want to save, I really think you’ll find it useful. Let me know what you think!
