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

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s travel-note app, Pinwheel, has changed its name to Findery, following a legal battle with similarly named startup Pinweel (no “h”).

The tussle between the two startups began just after Fake launched Pinwheel in February. Pinweel argued in court that Pinwheel had engaged in “trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition, and dilution.”

Pinweel, a photo-sharing app for the iOS, was launched in the Apple App Store on Feb. 14, 2012, but it filed for the Pinweel trademark in March 2011. The company made its first notable appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC conference back in May 2011, and its goal is to help people create photo albums and share them with friends and family.

Pinwheel, now Findery, is still in beta and has been described by Fake a way to “leave notes all over the world.” Notes left on top of locations can be public, private, or shared, and available to one person or to an entire group. Users can organize their notes into sets, making travelogues or journal entries. The company is backed by $2 million in funding led by Redpoint Ventures.

Fake addressed the name change on the Findery blog. She writes:

Because of a name conflict in the United States, today we are changing our name to Findery! We will be serving the site at http://findery.com and beside our name change, the service will remain the same — finding and leaving notes around the world.

Where did the name “Findery” come from?

We had been planning on calling our ‘Explore’-type page “Findery” and last year I’d registered some domains with that name. It’s descriptive of what our service does — Finding and discovering things about the world around you. We love the name!

Hopefully the two companies will soon be done with the legal drama and be able to focus on improving their products. Personally, I like the Findery name better than Pinwheel because it helps better convey what the service is about.

Bruce Linn was sitting on a surfboard just outside his favorite surf break in Costa Rica when the idea came to him.

He wanted a way to collect and save everything he was interested in — notes, pictures, web pages, what have you — that also made it easy to dive into different topics and share those things with other people. In other words, he wanted something like Evernote, except with better tools for sharing and topic exploration; or something like Pinterest, except with better organization and presentation tools.

He told the idea to his friend Juan Carlos, a wedding photographer. The response was positive and immediate: “Bro, my wedding clients need that!”

So when Linn returned to his home in Mountain View, Calif., he went into his garage and set to work, together with his friend (now chief technical officer and co-founder) Palak Chokshi. About a year later, they debuted their startup, NotesCloud, at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

“Imagine a tool that is always at hand when you stumble upon or dream up something interesting,” Linn, the chief executive and cofounder of NotesCloud, told VentureBeat. “A tool that takes but a moment to collect, a moment to organize, and a moment to share all the these nuggets as compelling curations that can really tell the whole story.”

NotesCloud uses the metaphor of a multi-section notebook to organize snippets and notes. People can create their own hierarchies of notebooks, sections, and pages as they curate their topics. They can then organize, arrange, present, and explore these notebooks as they fill up with content. Unlike Pinterest or Evernote, NotesCloud’s structured storage metaphor encourages some organization, so it’s not just a “shoebox” full of random clippings.

It’s also easier on the eyes than Evernote, with a rectangular, content-centric approach to design that’s reminiscent of Pinterest and of some Tumblr themes, and also has some things in common with the Metro interface found in Windows 8.

To achieve that look, NoteCloud uses a dynamic layout engine that renders notebook pages in various views, including magazine style, basic grid, or cover note, depending on the content and the device used to view it. It’s accessible from tablets and smartphones as well as desktop browsers.

The tool includes browser-based clipping tools for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, so you can easily save anything that you’re looking at online with just two clicks (see screenshot to the right).

Linn acknowledges that the rapid growth of Pinterest has lapped his own startup’s efforts to get people focused on the “interest graph,” otherwise known as the a company’s ability to track and measure what people are interested in.

“When I first pitched NotesCloud ten months ago and said, ‘The interest graph is hot, look at Pinterest,’ people looked at me as if I was speaking in tongues,” Linn told VentureBeat. “Now, they hear our focus on the ‘interest graph’ and say, ‘But isn’t that what Pinterest does?’”

At DEMO, Accel Partners’ Ping Li was impressed by the service “NotesCloud has a very nice implementation of what making a very complex experience, very easy to use.” Cheif executive of Flite Will Price concured, “It’s beautiful, prettier than Evernote.”

In other words, NotesCloud is going to have a hard time competing with established players like Pinterest and Evernote. But if design matters — and the recent $1 billion acquisition of Instagram by Facebook shows that it often does — NotesCloud is off to a good start.

NotesCloud is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Screenshots courtesy NotesCloud.

The service — which offers desktop, mobile, and Web applications to save notes, pictures, audio, and video to a readily accessible cloud location — has been growing like gangbusters. In the past two months, it’s signed up 10,000 new users every day, and has grown to more than 4.7 million users in less than two and a half years. Revenue from its premium subscribers ($5 a month or $45 a year for more features) has risen to the point where it can fund Evernote’s day-to-day operations.

In a blog post, Evernote CEO Phil Libin makes it clear that the money will go directly towards expanding the service. The funding will help the company improve the service in ways “that would have taken years to achieve organically.” Libin continues: “. We’ll build more features, add more devices, fix more bugs, expand into more countries, and make Evernote indispensable to more types of users (including corporate and educational folk).” He says that the company will combine today’s  funding with the $9 million from its second round last year and “put it all back in the product.”

Sequoia’s Roelef Botha, who served as PayPal’s CFO and backed YouTube and EventBrite as a venture capitalist, will join Evernote’s team as an advisor and board observer.

Speaking in grander terms, Libin says that the company is going to grow from a service that helps you remember everything to a “global platform for human memory.” Evernote’s goal is to become the “trusted, permanent, and ubiquitous destination” for your lifetime memories.

As a longtime user of the service, Evernote has effectively become my primary digital scrapbook. Now that it’s a well-known property among tech-savvy users, the company would do well to attract general users who may need a bit of memory augmentation of their own.

Earlier this year, Evernote introduced an app store called Trunk, which now contains over 100 apps or add-ons that can extend the functionality of the service.

Based in Mountain View, Calif., Evernote has raised a total of around $45 million with today’s funding. Existing shareholders, a group which includes Morgenthaler Ventures, DoCoMo Capital, and Troika Dialog, will also participate in the round.