If you’re a developer building an app on the Evernote platform, probably pretty good — and pretty possible.

Today, Evernote is launching Evernote Accelerator, an extension of the company’s extensive existing developer relations program.  It’s a no-equity program that Evernote, with Docomo and Honda, is setting up to promote and build the Evernote platform.

“We pay all the expenses,” Evernote’s Rafe Needleman told me yesterday. “You might be a team in China … we’ll fly you out, give you a place to live, provide office space, feed you — the Evernote lunches are awesome — put you through a startup curriculum, give you both private and public work group sessions with our developers, and even set up a Demo Day for local Silicon Valley investors and press.”

The Evernote platform currently handles six billion API calls a month and is the common backend for all eight official Evernote apps: the original note-taking Evernote, the recently-acquired draw-it-quick app Skitch, and others. Third-party apps in Evernote’s app store — The Trunk — use the exact same API.

And the company wants more of them.

“There’s a million different ways to store, use, and get access to personal and private data, and so far we’ve only built eight of those apps,” Needleman says.

So Evernote wants developers to add to its growing catalog, which currently features apps integrating if this then that, the Bamboo drawing tablet, read-it-later Android app Pocket, and blogging software Squarespace, among others, into the Evernote ecosystem of all the details, ideas, and clippings that you want to remember.

The process usually starts with Evernote hackathons held around the world, and used to culminate in what the company calls DevCup — a challenge to create the best apps for Evernote, coming up this year on June 28.

For 2013, however, Evernote is adding the accelerator program, in which the company will pick six winning teams from the DevCup to join them at Evernote headquarters in Silicon Valley to spend a month polishing their app and building an actual business from it.

For developers, it’s a complete win.

“We’re not taking an investment stake,” Needleman told me. “A good Evernote integration is the best possible win for us.”

Of course, one of the concerns developers have when building on another company’s platform, using their API, is what the terms and conditions are. Twitter, which restricted how developers could access and use its platform last year, recently shut down Ribbon’s in-stream commerce technology just 90 minutes after it launched.

That will not be a problem with the Evernote platform, said Needleman.

“The more cool things people do on the Evernote platform, the better it is for users and the better it is for us,” he said. “Developers can do whatever they want. We don’t mine Evernote users’ data, and we don’t make money from Evernote users except for the premium service, so anything goes, pretty much.”

Teams that enter the Evernote Accelerator will also be working with Docomo Innovation Ventures and Honda Silicon Valley Labs, so any apps that have mobile or transportation capabilities have the opportunity to rub shoulders with those innovators and investors, and potentially have a path to distribution or monetization.

What kind of apps is Evernote looking for?

“I have no idea what we’re going to see,” Needleman said. “Last year we saw a bunch of stuff we’d never expected, including an Evernote client for feature phones for Brazil.”

In other words, anything goes. Bring your creativity, and you might just have a shot at building a business.

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That’s impressive growth, and it’s along the lines of other top software-as-a-service players who are household names in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“We’re kinda matching Zendesk and Evernote in user growth curve,” HootSuite CEO Holmes told me this morning. “Our progressive cycle to each additional million is getting shorter and shorter, which is a good thing.”

The Vancouver-based company, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, also continues to excel at enterprise sales. Sales to enterprises under $10 billion in value grew 272 percent in the first quarter of 2013, HootSuite said, and sales to enterprises over $10 billion grew 900 percent.

See HootSuite’s swanky new offices

The company also added a major client just in the past few days which I cannot disclose, but is a massive consumer-focused company with almost 17,000 global locations.

While a strong focus on sales and marketing has helped the company grow quickly in enterprise — which former Yammer exec Dee Anna McPherson will help accelerate — Holmes says that viral, social, and content marketing have actually been more important.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s new offices in Vancouver, Canada.

“We’ve seen a very nice progression of users from our free to premium product,” he said. “Often organizations of 100+ people are on board, all at the free level, and then when they become a paying client we’ll help tie all their accounts together.”

The big new features coming in the next month are in security and analytics, Holmes told me, as HootSuite puts more technology in place to prevent hacking or phishing attacks. One of the most problematic security issues, of course, is via internal users who go rogue. To limit this risk, HootSuite is enhancing its account provisioning and LDAP support so that internal users’ social media account access can be easily and safely managed.

“If you give them direct account access … you’re giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Holmes said. “Then you’re relying on social networks to turn them off, and that can take days. We’ve seen that with McDonalds and Burger King recently.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluegenieart/7045869337/

The HootSuite bus at SXSW

In terms of analytics, HootSuite is capitalizing on the fact that its members send out over three million social media messages each day to help brands become more viral.

New tools in HootSuite will help brand managers know not only how they’re doing on one network versus another — which content is successful on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere — but also which of their social media managers is more effective at engaging social media users. And then, of course, sharing those lessons so all can benefit.

All of that growth requires more head count, which ballooning 250 percent last year — partially due to acquisitions such as Seesmic — and will grow another 60 to 80 percent this year, Holmes said. Which, of course, necessitated new offices, that HootSuite built in a former police station in east Vancouver.

It’s also something that reminds me of Holme’s comments a year ago about not selling out too early. He felt at the time that HootSuite could become a billion-dollar company.

Those feelings haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve increased:

“We’re getting closer all the time,” Holmes said. “I’m not interesting in selling out … we have a huge opportunity looking ahead, and the billion-dollar number is just a stick in the sand. Hopefully we’ll run right through that and keep going!”

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This past month, Google Maps lost its position as the most downloaded app on Apple’s iOS store — to one of Google’s other apps, YouTube. And mobile messaging app WhatsApp continued its meteoric rise to messaging supremacy.

Those are just two of the quirks and insights in App Annie‘s February index of what’s happening in mobile apps, which has just been split from its game index to provide more insights into which companies and apps are doing well on Google Play and Apple’s iOS app store.

Here’s a selection of the most interesting insights:

Google still owns top spot on Apple’s app store

Source: App Annie

Top downloaded iOS apps

Months after YouTube and Google Maps were unceremoniously booted from Apple’s core iOS offerings, they continue to be the top downloaded apps on the App Store, swapping first and second position in the past two months.

Essentially, users are speaking with their fingers and telling Apple they want these apps.

Google Play is more diverse than the iOS app store

Source: App Annie

Top apps by platform

There’s more variety in the top apps on Google Play than on Apple’s iOS app store. While the top 10 apps on iOS are all from just five publishers, most notably Apple itself, the top 10 apps on Google Play are from eight publishers.

Aside from Apple, Google, and Facebook, there’s just one small company (Keyloft) on the iOS top 10 list and one individual (Jessie Tao). On Google Play, there’s WhatsApp, Adobe, Viber Media, and Outfit 7.

Gree and WhatsApp are completely killing it

Source: App Annie

Google Play top publishers by revenue (excluding games)

Gree, the mobile social gaming company, is tops in monthly revenue on Google Play. And WhatsApp jumped an astounding 93 spots on App Annie’s index to slot in at number seven.

That’s not all WhatsApp has done — it’s also fifth in the iOS app story by monthly revenue, fifth on Google Play by downloads (for both of its apps), and it took the second spot on Google Play’s most-downloaded list for its main WhatsApp Messenger app, which is also the sixth highest-grossing individual app on Google Play. By any measure, that’s impressive.

Other highlights?

TurboTax by Intuit jumped into the top 10 list on both iOS and Google Play as tax season is upon us, and Evernote nudged into the top 10 list on iOS, jumping 45 spots.

Find more details and info at App Annie’s index page.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you take and annotate screenshots on a Mac, chances are you use Evernote’s recent acquisition, the super-simple Skitch. Today, Evernote released Skitch for iPhone, and the mobile version of the software has exactly the same ease of use and personality, perfectly adapted for smaller screens.

The Stitch iPhone app joins the already-released Android app, which, in just over a month, already has over five million downloads.

Source: John Koetsier

I am not, actually, there.

(Little confession: I’ve used Skitch for years and love it. So yes, this is a bit of a fanboy moment.)

Similarly to its desktop cousin, Skitch for iPhone allows you to annotate an image. The app allows you to start from a new photo taken within Skitch, an existing photo or screenshot from the phone’s library, a live map via Google Maps (soon to be, presumably, Apple’s replacement), or a live web capture.

Alternatively, you can start with a complete tabula rasa.

Skitch shines not so much as a sketching tool or a prototyping tool, although you can use it for both those purposes (and I have), but as a quick annotation utility to highlight or illuminate a key fact.

Particularly helpful for Evernote users is that you can sync your Skitch images to Evernote, which keeps all your documents neatly organized in one place. In addition, because Skitch is now part of Evernote, the app benefits from the same image recognition and word detection that makes text within images — even handwriting — searchable.

The Android version lacks the live web capture feature. For those who have the latest version of Android — 4.1.x Jelly Bean — that’s not a huge problem. They can simply take a screenshot, access it in their photo library, and annotate away.

Those with older versions of Android who have not rooted their phones for screenshot capability may miss this feature, although it doesn’t seem to have hurt the Android download numbers.

Here’s Evernote’s typically whimsical intro video of Skitch for iPhone:

photo credit: jcsizmadi via photo pin cc

That’s all well and good, but data mining is a fairly standard means to generate revenue for Silicon Valley’s tech companies. And Evernote, an astronomically well-funded company with $166 million under its belt, has board members and investors to answer to that expect to see solid return on investment.

Aside from the fact that data mining and targeted advertising is one of the major ways that tech companies make money, this is a particularly surprising guarantee given that the company anticipates massive growth, and is ramping up plans to move into the enterprise.

Read more about today’s launch of new tool: “Evernote Business.”

I caught up with CEO Phil Libin at the annual Trunk Conference to find out more about the company’s guarantee to keep its fingers out of the honey pot. He told me the first criteria is to create a system where users would never have to surrender any private information.

When asked about whether he faces pressure from investors, Libin claimed that they’ve been deliberately selective. ”We refuse to do anything in the short term that would give us money but destroy value,” he told me. “Good investors understand that.”

In the interview, Libin hinted at the company’s potential to IPO in the coming years. At this point, he claimed that a buyout is highly unlikely, considering that they have turned down a number of offers.

But Libin would not rule out a potential acquisition.

If M&A is in the company’s future, it would leave user’s data in a vulnerable spot. Evernote is sitting on a goldmine of unstructured data: our day-to-day musings, and most private thoughts.

Libin reassured me that Evernote has already grown so large that it’s unlikely a potential acquirer would fork over much more than an investor (“Why would Google think that we are worth 10 times more than Sequoia does?”).

This isn’t the first time the company has made the promise not to interfere with user data. Evernote makes the guarantee in its terms of service and in company blog posts. “If someone buys us, or if there is some evil CEO without a goatee, we would have to notify users and they can decide if they want to stay or leave,” said Libin.

Ultimately, Evernote is asking you to trust them. “Trust isn’t something you can write in a contract,” Libin explained.

Integrating with Zendesk will enable users to easily move a customer service-related tweet or status update to a ticketing and tracking system, Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integrations, told VentureBeat.

The integration with Storify could be used by marketing personnel to create comprehensive, auto-updating lenses into evolving issues or projects. And connecting with Evernote helps anyone working with social to quickly save an important post into their own personal database.

The new integrations are a big step for the Vancouver-based company in two directions.

First, they take HootSuite deeper into the enterprise, integrating into corporate systems like Zendesk, and pushing the reach and impact of social beyond the marketing and customer service teams to product management, development, or fulfillment teams.

Secondly, they’re the first integrations that are not third-party-created apps that operating solely within the flow of social messages inside HootSuite. Instead, they are plugins that take content from the stream of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ messages inside HootSuite and deliver it to external, third-party applications.

In a statement Ryan Holmes, HootSuite’s chief executive, said that “with the addition of app plugins, we’re making it possible for our users to monitor their social media properties from the dashboard, then delegate messages for additional handling in external, third party applications.”

HootSuite is excited by the potential, Holder says, and these will soon be joined by more plugins that can take advantage of additional tie-ins with external applications. New apps would likely be in the areas of customer support, CRM, digital marketing, publishing, and content curation, the company said in a statement.

I asked Holder how many of those almost five million users he expected to start using the new integrations.

“What we’ve seen on all our integrations is that we get enormous pickup – 10-15 percent of new HootSuite users install apps within the first week, and I would probably expect 10-15 percent of our users to install these apps within the first week.”

Some screenshots of the new integrations:

And an explanatory video:

Image credit: VLADGRIN/ShutterStock, Andre Blais/ShutterStock

The Mountain View, California-based startup said it plans to use the new funds to aggressively expand its operations and acquire companies that will increase growth of its note-taking service.

Evernote’s service, which allows individuals to easily capture notes on a variety of devices, has 11 million users and a community of over 5,000 third-party application developers. The service has nearly doubled its user base since January 2011. Also, over 400,000 of its customers pay a $5 monthly fee for a premium Evernote subscription that enables larger uploads and better collaborative tools.

“Even though we’ve built a profitable and successful business in the past three years, we still have a long way to go to achieve our goal of becoming everyone’s second brain,” said Evernote CEO Phil Libin in a press release.

Founded in 2007, Evernote has raised $95.5 million total funding to date. The latest $50 million round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures.