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Evernote: The next app to take over the world
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: November 14, 2014
Evernote has been around for about 10 years as a go-to information storage app. Very popular, with 100 million users, Evernote has been a desktop/device app for note taking and storing audio and video clips and web pages for future reference.
But over the next few months, Evernote plans to become a multifunctional power app, starting with their cloud page, and then going where no apps have gone before.
On Oct. 2, Evernote launched a web client with a “distraction-free interface” that simplifies itself as the user writes notes, so that the user’s input is the only thing in sight.
At the same time that that interface was announced, the company announced numerous power functions that will be rolled out over the next few months.
Here are some of them.
A function for premium users called Context will create a news feed from limited sources (like WSJ, etc.) in your Evernote app, keyed to content you create. It will also related work you or a colleague have done in the past. Evernote says that the technology to power Context is based on artificial intelligence (although my own personal opinion is that there’s no such thing as artificial intelligence, but that’s a different discussion).
The presentation feature of Evernote will be upgraded to be more “respectful” of the participants (as, apparently, opposed to PowerPoint’s in-your-face sales-y approach).
ScanSnap, Evernote’s scanner app, will be made more powerful with the addition of Scannable, which will allow you to take photos of receipts, etc., and dump them into Evernote, and allow multiple users to share the scanned material.
The company is also expanding the functionality and cleaning up the appearance of its handwriting note-taking app Penultimate (for iOS).
There will be a new instant messaging system called Work Chat, which is designed to take the place of inter-office email. There are a few independent apps like this that have been developed in the last few months, so this is a trend.
Another trend, which Evernote is bucking here, is “unbundling.” Here, we have an entire suite of office functionality coming our way from this tiny little note-taking app. Should be worth checking out,.