Ask any Internet power user what their favorite tool is and chances are you’ll invariably get the same response: Evernote, Evernote, Evernote.

Why so much Evernote love? Because the app allows people who deal with a lot of online input — people like me and you, probably — and organize it. It’s a power user’s dream.

But Evernote isn’t the only productivity tool out there. Giving the note-taking service idea a go is Mammoth, a web service and browser extension (dubbed “Mini Mammoth”) that works in a manner very similar to that of Evernote — with some exceptions.

“What we’re building is something that lets you filter and save parts of the world that are most useful to you. We want to simplify your online life.” Mammoth co-founder Amit Narayanan told me.

Mammoth organizes entires into “Boards”, not notes.

At Mammoth’s core is the idea that the easier it is for users to save the bits of the Internet they find most interesting — text, photos, or even whole web pages — the better their online lives will be.

I hate to evoke Evernote again, but, well — that sounds a lot like Evernote. How does Mammoth set itself apart?

For one, there’s the collaboration aspect. One of Mammoth’s central features is that it allows users to invite others to their boards, letting them work together on projects like house buying and event planning.

And then there’s the clipping. “One of the things I’ve had a problem with with Evernote  is that it’s a great app for note taking but clipping — not so much,” Narayanan said.

I’ve had a few similar experiences. As Narayanan points out, making multiple clips from the same webpage in Evernote creates multiple entries, which never quite made any sense to me. From what I can tell so far, Mammoth simplifies that experience.

So far, reception to Mammoth has been positive, at least according to the students at Stanford and Berkley who have been  testing it out.

My take: As someone who has never quite figured out Evernote, I’m all for competing note-taking services. Mammoth — which is still in beta, mind you — is a worthwhile take on a space that we shouldn’t be quite so eager to surrender to just one elephant-branded note-taking service.

Photo: Flickr: Sam Howzit

Today, the digital notebook service announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom which means nearly 60 million of the telecom giant’s customers will be eligible to receive one year of Evernote Premium. With over 45 million users, worldwide reach, and over $250 million in venture capital, Evernote is well on its way towards world domination, of online note taking that is.

Through this offer, subscribers can request an upgrade for Evernote Premium through their Deutsche Telekom account or by launching the latest version on their Android smartphones. The deal is the latest in a string of international telecom carrier partners- Evernote has also struck deals with NTT Docomo in Japan, Orange France, KT in Korea, Taiwan Mobile, and Docomo Pacific.

These types of agreements serve to cement and expand Evernote’s global footprint by distributing it to millions (upon millions) of potential global consumers. Once they are given a taste of Evernote Premium, the hope is they will continue to pay for it after their free trial is up. Evernote Premium costs $5 a month or $45 a year. In exchange for the fee, users have access to larger upload capacity, top priority customer support, offline notebooks, PDF and document search, collaboration tools, note history, larger files and bigger notes, and hidden promotions.

Evernote’s tagline is “remember everything” and it is a useful tool for keeping track of life’s (and thee web’s) little details. The service can be used for anything from recipe documentation to meeting minutes, and CEO Phil Libin told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview that his goal is to actually boost cognitive abilities by turning Evernote into an “external brain.”

The company recently began focusing more on its business platform. Evernote Business has all the features of the consumer-facing products with additional business-only tools like an administrative console to invite, add, and manage new employees and keep all of the business notebooks organized in a shareable library. Earlier this year Evernote continued the expansion of the business product into 26 new countries in Europe, signaling a transition towards making money from businesses rather than consumers.

Evernote is the top note-taking app out there, but just last week reports came out that Google is working to release a note-taking app called Keep that would challenge Evernote’s dominance. While 45 million is a hefty user base, Google Apps has more and could steal users away from Evernote because it is already part of the Google ecosystem.

Partnering with Deutsche Telekom will help Evernote gain a hold in Germany, which is rising quickly as an international tech hub. The two companies are also co-hosting a Hackathon in Berlin in April, which will be held at Deutsche Telekoms new startup space. The event will “encourage developers and designers to imagine and create new apps” using Evernote API and Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden.

Photo Credit: momentcaptured1/Flickr 

Google has its sights set directly on popular note-taking app Evernote with today’s launch of Google Keep, its very own note service.

Keep lets you take notes with text, photos, and audio recordings, all of which are synchronized across your devices. So far Google is only launching Keep on Android 4.0 devices and the web (Keep notes are stored on Google Drive), but we’ll also likely see it on iOS before long, too. Google accidentally revealed the details about Keep a few days ago.

One nice feature Keep offers over Evernote is the ability to automatically transcribe voice notes. It’s likely using the same transcription feature that Google Voice uses for voicemails.

Aside from that, it doesn’t look like there are many surprises with Keep — it’s exactly what you’d imagine a Google note-taking service would be. I hope it means some consolidation for Google’s note- and task-tracking services though, as the company already has Tasks integrated within Gmail, as well as Scratchpad on Chrome. I’ve avoided using these services because they simply don’t talk to each other.

On Android, Keep is available both as a standalone application and as a widget (for easy note-taking). I’ve been testing out the app for a bit now, and it seems to work as advertised. I haven’t been able to log into Keep on the web though, likely because of an onslaught of other curious testers.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is working to release a new note-taking app called Keep and it could seriously challenge Evernote, the king of note-taking applications.

On Sunday, Google appears to have accidentally released Keep and then immediately pulled it, according to Android Police. The app was available at “https://drive.google.com/keep/” but it was taken down quickly. This official Keep image is still live.

Based on accounts by those who used Keep briefly, the app is a lot like Google Notebook used to be. It offers a list of notes and tools to color-code your notes, make checklists, and save important photos. An Android app is apparently also in the works.

Evernote is the top note-taking app, and it has more than 45 million users. It recently started offering services for businesses, and it will likely IPO in 2015 or 2016. But Google Keep could steal some users away from Evernote because it is conveniently part of the Google ecosystem and Google Apps.

Check out a few photos of Google Keep captured by Android Police below.

Google Keep logo via Google

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Note-taking service Evernote has named a new chief operating officer and launched its Evernote Business product in another 26 countries in Europe, a sign it is getting more serious about making money from businesses rather than consumers.

Evernote, based in Redwood City, Calif. and Paris, has attracted more than 45 million users to its service to date and was mostly focused on helping consumers until recently. Evernote launched its service for businesses in seven countries back in December.

New COO Ken Gullicksen will help the company manage its transition from focusing entirely on consumer needs and to helping both consumers and companies. Gullicksen was formerly the VP of Corporate Development for Evernote and before that, he was a general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures for over 10 years.

“Ken has played a key role in Evernote’s strategy and execution including heading up our five acquisitions to date and the successful rollout of Evernote’s China-based service Yinxiang Biji,” Evernote CEO Phil Libin said in a statement. “As COO, Ken will be instrumental in continuing to foster strategic initiatives, building on the momentum we’re seeing with Evernote Business and developing efficient services to support our entire global operation.”

As of today, Evernote Business is available in these countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S. On Feb. 12, Australia and New Zealand will also be turned on. That will bring Evernote Business to a total of 33 countries.

Evernote said it expects the business service will be available in more than 50 countries by the middle of 2013, including key markets in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

Elephant head photo via NATTHAPRAPHANIN JUNTRAKUL/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hot on the heels of raising $85 million in funding last Friday, popular note-taking service Evernote has launched a new product called Evernote Business that will connect small and medium-sized companies with improved note-taking and sharing tools.

Evernote, based in Redwood City, Calif. and Paris, has attracted more than 45 million users to its service thus far and claims that two-thirds of those people already use it to increase workday productivity. Ideally, the new features from its business-class product will make the service even more valuable for employees that need to collaborate around important knowledge.

Evernote Business offers up the following feature set:

• Business Notebooks: Individuals can place work documents, projects, and research into Business Notebooks, which they can then share with coworkers or publish to the company’s Business Library. Business Notebooks and personal notebooks are visually distinct from one another.

• Business Library: The Business Library is a single destination for Business Notebooks shared by individuals, as well as important company information posted by administrators. As the company grows, so does its accumulated knowledge in the Business Library, making it a useful resource for new and existing employees.

• Improved Sharing: Evernote Business allows employees to share important information within a team, across a department, with the entire company, or with outside clients. Permissions are simple to set, and if an employee leaves the company, personal notes go with them, while Business Notes remain, enabling complete knowledge continuity.

• Knowledge Discovery: The new Related Notes feature allows for serendipitous discovery of valuable information by displaying relevant content from a company’s collective knowledge. Browsing, searching and creating a new note triggers the display of Related Notes from an employee’s own account and from any joined Business Notebooks.

• Simple Deployment: The centralized Admin Console allows IT administrators to easily grow the deployment size as well as review and manage user access and permissions for the entire organization. Billing is straightforward and handled by credit card or invoice.

• Higher Monthly Upload Allowance: Evernote Business users can create up to 2GB of new content each month in their personal notebooks, which is double the Evernote Premium allowance. The company receives an additional 2GB per month for each user that is shared among all Business Notebooks.

Evernote Business costs $10 per user per month, and it’s available today in seven countries — the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan.

Like regular Evernote, the business product will also run across the Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android platforms.

“We’re really excited about Evernote Business because it solves one of the biggest challenges that growing companies face: discovering the knowledge of individuals and groups,” Evernote CEO Phil Libin said in a statement. “Evernote Business addresses this by making it easy for every employee to collect their own knowledge, while also helping them instantly discover what their coworkers know. We’ve been using Evernote Business ourselves, and it has completely changed the way our company works.”

Take a look at the photos below for more views of Evernote Business:

Elephant head photo via NATTHAPRAPHANIN JUNTRAKUL/Shutterstock

[Update, 10 a.m. Pacific: Evernote says it's not killing the Skitch brand and points out that the Skitch app will remain independent from the Evernote software. We've changed the headline and corrected the text to reflect that.]

Evernote acquired Skitch a year and a month ago, and today, it’s taking the another step toward incorporating Skitch even more deeply into Evernote.

Evernote is a note-taking service, and Skitch lets users annotate photos and other images. Together, the two are a pretty seamless fit.

In fact, Evernote CEO Phil Libin told VentureBeat at the time of the acquisition that Skitch was the one app he used as much as he used Evernote.

The Skitch.com website will soon be archived, with Skitch sharing folded into the Evernote product. Skitch images will be saved, synced, and searchable on any device where the user has installed Evernote.

This looks like the first steps toward killing off the Skitch brand. However, Skitch will continue to be an independent app, and Evernote representatives say that the Skitch brand will remain prominent.

The big changes will take place exactly one month from today on October 10. At that time, Skitch.com will shut down, and users won’t be able to log in. However, all data, excepting private files, will be archived to Evernote. Evernote is advising current Skitch users to download their private files and re-upload them to Evernote.

Evernote also recently launched a business service for the enterprise.

“Our definition of who we are keeps expanding,” said Libin at the Evernote Business launch event, where he called the new service a “cognitive tool to make you think.”

The growing company, which just this past spring took a huge $100 million round of funding at an even larger $1 billion valuation, is set to be IPO-ready by 2013. However, in the current tech IPO climate, we’re sure there’s more than one reason Libin would prefer to keep the company private.

“This is the time the company can take the most risks, for the next couple of years,” Libin said at an investor even in Tokyo this May.

“Once you’re a large public company, it’s also very difficult to take big risks, because you have to take report to the market every quarter and the market will punish you for failure.”

Top image of Keith Lang, Evernote CEO Phil Libin, and Skitch CEO Cris Pearson by Regina Sinsky

While seemingly every other popular tech startup is aching to go public, Evernote is playing it slow and steady.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin said he hoped to make the company “IPO-ready” by the end of 2013 while speaking to a group of developers and investors in Tokyo yesterday, the New York Times reports. Once that happens, he still wants to wait several years before going public to truly take advantage of the freedom being private allows.

“This is the time the company can take the most risks, for the next couple of years,” Libin said. “Once you’re a large public company, it’s also very difficult to take big risks, because you have to take report to the market every quarter and the market will punish you for failure.”

The company has 30 million users now, but by the end of next year Libin hopes to reach more than 100 million users and have near $100 million in revenues, the NYT reports.

His statement comes a little over two weeks after the company landed a massive $70 million funding round, which valued it at $1 billion. At the time, Libin said that he could see Evernote being worth $100 billion or more as a public company. Now though, he seems more interested in taking the company places public investors wouldn’t allow.

“Our goal is to take those risks now, and once we figure out the best business model, then we’ll go public, we’ll I.P.O.,” he said. “The whole point is not to be forced into an I.P.O.”

Libin’s stance is particularly interesting today, as Facebook’s IPO dominates the news cycle. Facebook’s offering will earn it billions, but this morning’s surprisingly weak stock performance is already raising questions. By staying private, Evernote can continue to innovate without the scrutiny of the public.

Evernote offers a suite of digital note-taking products with the goal of letting you remember everything. The core Evernote app lets you save pretty much anything — including text, pictures, and other files — to the cloud, which is then accessible from desktop and mobile devices. All of Evernote’s apps are free to use, but the company offers premium features at $5 per month (or $45 per year) rate that gives you larger upload capabilities, offline access, and more.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Evernote has now raised around $166 million.

Photo: Libin at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit 2011/Devindra Hardawar

Evernote confirmed its rumored massive funding round this morning, though it wasn’t the $100 million whopper early reports indicated. The digital note-taking company raised $70 million at a valuation of $1 billion in its fourth round of funding, led by Meritech Capital and CBC Capital.

“This financing brings us another small step closer to our long-term goal of building a hundred year startup that can be everyone’s second brain,” Evernote CEO Phil Libin wrote on the company blog today. He noted that the company didn’t really need the funding but it’s “a crucial component” of remaining an innovative and durable company.” And of course, it’s a helpful valuation bump as Evernote plans to go public.

Libin says the company will use the funding to increase product improvements, make future acquisitions, and expand internationally. Mostly though, it seems the money will help Evernote weather market conditions and remain focused on its product.

Evernote offers a suite of digital note-taking products with the goal of letting you remember everything. The core Evernote app lets you save pretty much anything — including text, pictures, and other files — to the cloud, which is then accessible from desktop and mobile devices. All of Evernote’s apps are free to use, but the company offers premium features at $5 per month (or $45 per year) rate that gives you larger upload capabilities, offline access, and more.

The company is close to reaching 30 million registered users, and more than 25 percent of them pay for the service today. Evernote acquired four small companies last year, including the image app Skitch, and launched a few standalone apps, like “Hello” and “Food.”

Always looking ahead, Libin says the future of Evernote is far beyond its current $1 billion valuation. “I agree with our very wise investors,” Libin told TechCrunch in an interview. “I think that Evernote as a publicly traded company could be worth $10 billion, $100 billion or more.”

While going public will certainly be a major new step for Evernote, Libin tells TechCrunch that he doesn’t want the company’s focus to change much. He wants Evernote to spend all of its energy making the product better, and he wants users to trust the company enough to use it for the rest of their lives.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Evernote has now raised around $166 million, including today’s funding. The company apparently still has much of its previous $96 million in funding left in the bank, according to TechCrunch. But it never hurts to have a $70 million safety net.

Ever since the note-taking startup Evernote launched, it has been on a quest to capture and organize every bit of data from your life. In a quest to make meeting new people as streamlined as possible, in December 2011 the company launched Hello, an iPhone app that captures contact information and photos of new acquaintances.

While it was a promising idea – eliminate business cards and organize all your contact information in one place — the app didn’t catch on well. The primary design of the app encourages you to hand your phone over the to person you just met so they can enter their contact info. Most people found this to be too invasive, and as CNET pointed out right after the app launched, it encouraged the sharing of  ”cooties.”

Hello also asks you to snap a few pictures of your new acquaintance. Evernote included this feature to help you remember both names and faces, but critics pointed out how awkward it is to interrupt the flow of a new interaction by snapping a picture. In one-on-one situations this isn’t such a huge issue, but when meeting a new group of people it can be tedious to stop, snap a photo, and enter the contact information for each person, as ReadWriteWeb pointed out after after Hello’s release.

Enough of why Hello took off like a lead balloon; lets talk about Evernote’s strategy to fix its flaws. In the next few weeks, Evernote plans to roll out a few new updates to the app that will make it work more seamlessly in social interactions. When we first covered Hello in December, we pointed out that it would benefit from Bump-like features – the ability to ping information between two phones in close proximity to each other. Libin agreed; in an interview with CNN Tech he said Hello may soon be able to transfer information wirelessly between phones, just like Bump. Libin also mentioned Hello should be able to take photos of business cards and import the data — perhaps we’ll see this in the new version of Hello.

One feature coming in the new update is the ability to input contact information manually, without handing over your phone. The mosaic of pictures won’t be going anywhere, though. Libin believes alphabetical contact lists are outdated and that our brains remember people better with photos.

Be on the lookout for Evernote’s Hello updates in the next few weeks. Perhaps it will finally become the  ”contact killer“ it is promised to be.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Multi-platform note-taking startup Evernote has now reached more than 20 million users, CEO Phil Libin said at the LeWeb conference this morning in Paris.

Evernote made our list of “10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about” because the company has taken to solving the simple problem of effective note-taking in an innovative, cloud-based fashion. Just yesterday, the company launched two free iPhone apps, “Food” and “Hello,” which help you better keep track of meals and people.

Back in June, Evernote reached 10 million registered users, with more than 400,000 of those paying $5 a month for a premium plan that enables larger uploads and better collaborative tools. It’s unclear how many of the current 20 million users are paying, but Libin did say that about 27% of users who continue to use the service for 40 months pay for it.

Libin, as first noted by SiliconFilter, also said Evernote now has nearly 9,000 third-party apps using its API.

Mountain View-based Evernote has raised $95.5 million in total funding to date, with a massive $50 million round in July led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. Evernote became a profitable company 6 months ago, but due to recent hiring and expansion the company is now back in the red. Libin expects the company to go back to black soon.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In its grand quest to help you remember just about everything, note-taking startup Evernote today launched two free new iPhone apps, “Food” and “Hello,” which will let you better keep track of great meals and people, respectively.

Both apps are still tied to the existing Evernote service — entries are synchronized and viewable from any device that can access Evernote — but they offer useful bits of functionality suited specifically to their purposes.

Evernote Hello, for example, is built around your encounters with new people. The app taps into the way our brains naturally remember people by focusing on faces, time, and context. It certainly sounds more useful than just trading business cards with people you’ve just met, especially for people who typically have trouble remembering new faces, like this reporter.

Instead of a boring list of contact info, the Hello app displays an attractive list of faces. To add a new person to the app, you can either hand over your phone to let the person take a photo (using your phone’s front-facing camera) and add in their contact information, or take a photo and add in the details on your own. The app takes four quick photos of the person, which it uses to create simple animations on its home screen.

Once on the app, you can add an Encounter with the person, which basically is a quick note of when and where you met up. The Hello app is smart enough to display relevant notes from Evernote or the Food app when viewing particular contacts, Evernote says.

I love the concept of the Hello app, though it’s certainly going to be a bit awkward to take photos of people you’ve just met. It may be a bit more efficient, and less awkward, for Evernote to implement contact sharing technology similar to what Bump offers, which lets you trade profiles with people by holding your phones near each other. Still, I can see the value in Evernote’s approach, since it doesn’t require other people you’ve met to set up the app, or even have smartphones.

The Evernote Food app takes a similar approach to charting the meals you’ve had with friends and family. You can create individual meal entries, take photos and notes, and also easily share entries to Twitter and Facebook. It sounds particularly useful for keeping track of new recipes, or documenting a foodie road trip.

While you can access entries from both apps in Evernote’s desktop and web version, you won’t be able to change any data outside of the apps. Eventually, Evernote will likely open up the ability to edit those entries outside of the apps.

In search of a distraction-free way to read the day’s web news? Evernote, the ubiquitous note-taking service, has released a Chrome browser extension called Clearly made with you in mind.

Evernote specializes in mobile and web applications for taking and saving notes, and has more than 16 million users. Clearly is Evernote’s first original product launch since it released Peek, the iPad 2 Smart Cover application.

With a single click of button, Clearly slides in and strips out everything extraneous — including ads, navigation and URLs — from the article you are reading, presenting you with just the text and images for a reading experience free of interference.

The clean, clutter-free view has been embraced by an increasing number of other products, including Apple’s Safari browser (with its Reader mode) and, earlier, by such browser tools as Readability and Instapaper. It’s even becoming a bit of a web design fashion, with sites like Pictory and even MSNBC minimizing extra design “furniture” like sidebars and widgets, leaving the text and photos to hold center stage surrounded by lots of white space.

Of course, because it’s an Evernote product, you can clip and save the naked version of articles to your Evernote account.

What may be even more enticing, for those of you who like long reads at least, is that Clearly also works on paginated web articles. A five-page marathon read, replete with URLs ready to interrupt your focus, becomes a single page article that (ideally) you’ll be more likely to finish.

So what’s the point here, and what makes this different than other apps out there? “Clearly is .. a ‘right now’ thing,” an Evernote spokesperson told VentureBeat. “It’s really about setting the right mood and environment for reading right now.”

This all sounds great for you and we writers certainly love our online reading, but publishers might not take too kindly to someone stripping out their URLs and interfering with their pageviews. Will media companies attempt to block the browser add-on? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Evernote Clearly is available for Chrome today. Versions for additional browsers are said to be coming soon.

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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Multi-platform note-taking program Evernote on Monday announced it had reached more than 10 million registered users.

The 10 million mark is a significant bump from the company’s reported 6 million users in January. It also reported that more than 400,000 of its customers pay $5 a month for a premium plan that enables bigger uploads and better collaborative tools.

“Ten million users seemed like an inconceivable number when we were getting ready to launch the service into open beta less than three years ago,” founder and CEO Phil Libin wrote on the company’s blog. “Well, it wasn’t literally inconceivable; we actually put it on business plans and investor pitch decks and everything.”

Evernote launched less than three years ago and helps customers keep notes in sync across different computers and mobile devices. In that time, the service has pushed itself on to an impressive number of platforms, with apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Mac, and more.

Libin’s blog post notes that 75% of its customers access Evernote on two or more platforms. The graph below details customer usage in better detail.

Recently Evernote significantly revamped its website and its Android app. The company has raised around $45 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, DoCoMo Capital, Troika Dialog, and others.

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