TECH / BUSINESS SPECIAL....EVERNOTE NOTEWORTHY

 EVERNOTE NOTEWORTHY

How Evernote may Change the Way You Do Business

Evernote devotees love storing work and personal data in one place. Will its new business click?

t happens gradually, devoted fans insist. Once you get it, they say, you live and die by Evernote, the five-year-old, everythingin-one-place personal organisation app that is hyped by its creators as your “external brain”. Joshua Zerkel came across Evernote a few years ago and was attracted to its ability to work across platforms more cleanly than the note-taking software he’d been using. Today he’s one of several dozen “Evernote Ambassadors”— power users who volunteer to spread the word about its wonders. Zerkel is a productivity consultant for businesses and individuals, and he recommends Evernote to almost all his clients; leads Evernote training sessions; and just published his second e-book about best Evernote practices, Evernote @ Work . The company pays him nothing, yet even he finds some users a little over the top. “There are definitely Evernote junkies,” he says. Ted Barnett is one of them. A serial entrepreneur who now works as COO of digital publisher Byliner, Barnett answered questions about his Evernote usage before they could be asked, with a crisp outline he’d created in Evernote. He heard of the app from a friend in 2009 and was attracted to the idea that he could enter and access his data, stored in the cloud, from any smartphone, tablet, or computer. His first entry recorded vital health statistics he entered via his phone during a doctor visit. “I have a terrible memory,” Barnett says, explaining that he used to rely largely on physical notebooks to keep track of ideas, until he started adding those to Evernote. Now, at the end of a work meeting, he’ll photograph the whiteboard, store that picture in Evernote, add some thoughts and questions, and send it around to his team.

Evernote Lifestyle

Evernote says it has 50 million users around the world (a third in the US) and is adding 100,000 a day. Operating on a “freemium” model, the company makes money primarily from the sliver of that user base that pays $45 a year, or $5 a month, for a souped-up version with more storage capacity. It has been profitable, and though it’s investing heavily now, it expects to be profitable again soon. But with $251 million in venture backing and a valuation estimated at $1 billion, Evernote has greater ambitions. CEO Phil Libin talks about reaching a billion users; others at the company freely throw around the phrase “the Evernote lifestyle”. That’s a lot of expectations for an experience that boils down to three columns in a browser window. You type, or clip or upload a new “note” (an image, a recording, or a Web page) into the right-hand column; store it in a “notebook” listed on the left-hand side; and browse or search in the middle. The promise is that Evernote saves your ideas, documents your meetings, archives articles, reminds you what your kid wants for Christmas, and coughs up the business card of Plaid Jacket Guy from that conference in Scottsdale. In addition to segregating such material into notebooks, users can organise it with tags, but don’t have to. Evernote’s search function, with optical character recognition that even picks up words within pictures, is impressively accurate and speedy. The effectiveness of this function is crucial, because the willingness to dump work and personal material in one place is central to Evernote’s worldview.

Business Acumen

Evernote recently released a version of its software aimed at the business market. It seems like an obvious pivot: signing up new users in batches of 50 or 300 instead of one at a time. The move poses an interesting challenge, however. While there are plenty of group collaboration tools targeting organisational efficiency, Evernote has always been aimed explicitly at the individual, and that’s been a core part of its appeal in an era where every new online product seems reflexively “social.” “What you put in Facebook isn’t who you are,” says Libin. “It’s what you want some people to see. And what you put in LinkedIn is certainly not who you are; it’s what you want the professional world to see.” But, “what you put in Evernote is who you are”, he continues. “We used to say in the beginning that Evernote is not social. In fact, it’s antisocial; we don’t care about your friends.” Evernote joins a long and often lucrative tradition of tools and systems for those who dream of a more efficient, productive, successful life. Evernote’s goal is to reinvent this tradition in the age of apps. And it’s easy to find enthusiasts who will explain, at length, how Evernote has achieved this. Carley Knobloch’s Digitwirl.com, for instance, offers online videos demonstrating how to use the latest technology to simplify domestic life. One of her first episodes was about Evernote. Someone at the company saw her video and got in touch, and today Knobloch, 38, is Evernote’s Parenting Ambassador, cheerfully explaining how thoroughly she depends on it—“like breathing.” If you’re going to trust vital corporate or personal information to Evernote’s cloud, it had better be safe there. Libin points out that Evernote itself doesn’t harvest or otherwise tap into its customers’ data. (The exceptions: certain customer service and beta test scenarios, but Libin says these always involve explicit permission and limited access.) Unlike, say, Google or Facebook, “We don’t need any customer data,” he says. “It’s yours, not ours.” Evernote stores data in a format that is fully exportable for users who dump the product. There’s still no bulletproof solution to being hacked, but Libin and others at Evernote see security as a never-ending process that’s as much about strict protocols and protecting physical data centers as encryption and password issues. “Security” has multiple dimensions beyond hacking, and that plays into the company’s approach to the business market, he adds. It’s one thing to get hooked on a product by an evangelising friend; it’s something else when it’s mandated by the boss as a companywide let’s-get-organised effort. In the business iteration of Evernote — priced at $10 per user per month, it can be used by an entire company, a department, or a team — users still make notes and store them in notebooks. What’s new is a category of “ business notebooks” for storing whatever is relevant to your work, and sharing it across teams or even the entire company via multi-user “business libraries.” A single worker can thus search, edit, and add to material not just in her own notebooks, but also in certain “business” notes of colleagues. Personal notebooks are in effect partitioned off, so somebody looking for that bar chart from the big Apple meeting won’t stumble across your list of the best places to meet singles in New York. Should it transpire that you pursue new opportunities, and lose access to your ex-employer’s business folders or libraries, you can keep your Evernote account and everything in it.

The Pros and Cons

Libin maintains that Evernote’s approach to creating a version for business doesn’t contradict the original “antisocial” idea. The business version still leaves decisions about what information to store in which folder largely up to the individual. “We have a point of view about companies that use Evernote Business and how they should relate to their employees — which is with openness and trust. Companies that don’t aren’t going to have a good experience.” Moreover, he continues, the business version extends Evernote’s point of view into the modern workplace by offering a tool that helps collaboration—yet also accommodates “employees wanting to do their own thing.” The company tracks how many users simply give up and how many eventually sign on for its premium version. Most “attrition,” Libin says, happens early. But after a year, 6% of those who tried Evernote have converted to premium, he continues, a rate that’s been improving over time. If that keeps up, it should be more than enough to make the company profitable again by 2014. The more time you spend with Evernote, the more you can imagine spending ever more time with Evernote: mastering the spin-off apps, scanning all manner of documents, devoting yourself (as one fan put it) to “feeding” the software. Zerkel concedes that for some, this can get out of hand. Whenever he runs a how-to seminar, there’s invariably one over-the-top Evernote junkie intent on one-upping him in the total mastery of all-encompassing hyper-organisation. “Maybe it’s their hobby,” he shrugs.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek  ET 130309