Phil Libin, Evernote CEO, at LeWeb

 

Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving. A "note" can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten "ink" note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched and exported as part of a notebook. Evernote supports a number of operating system platforms (including OS X, iOS, Chrome OS, Android, Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and webOS) and also offers online synchronisation and backup services.

 

Founded by Stepan Pachikov, the Evernote web service launched into open beta on June 24, 2008 and reached 11 million users in July 2011. In October 2010, the company raised a $20 million USD funding round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures and DoCoMo Capital. Since then, the company has raised an additional USD $50 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures, and another USD $70 million in funding led by Meritech Capital and CBC Capital. On November 30, 2012, Evernote raised another $85 million, in funding led by AGC Equity Partners/m8 Capital and Valiant Capital Partners. Cumulative Financing by all above fundings is $225 million.

 

Evernote is available in a paid version or a more restricted, advertising-supported, free version. Use of the online service is free up to a certain monthly usage limit, with additional monthly use reserved for paying subscribers.

 

Data storage and access

On supported operating systems, Evernote stores and edits the user's notes on their local machine.

 

Users with Internet access and an Evernote account can also have their notes automatically synchronized with a master copy held on Evernote's servers. This approach lets a user access and edit their data across multiple machines and operating system platforms, but still view, input and edit data when an Internet connection is not available. However, notes stored on Evernote servers are not encrypted.

 

Where Evernote client software is not available, online account-holders can access their note archive via a web interface or through a media device.

 

The Evernote software can be downloaded and used as "stand-alone" software without using the online portion of an Evernote account (online registration is required for initial setup, however), but it will not be able to upload files to the Evernote server, or use the server to synchronize or share files between different Evernote installations. Also, no image or Image-PDF (Premium only) recognition and indexing will take place if the software is used entirely offline.

 

Data entry

As well as the keyboard entry of typed notes, Evernote supports image capture from cameras on supported devices, and the recording of voice notes. In some situations, text that appears in captured images can be recognized using OCR and annotated. Evernote also supports touch and tablet screens with handwriting recognition. Evernote web clipping plugins are available for the most popular Internet browsers that allow marked sections of webpages to be captured and clipped to Evernote. If no section of a webpage has been highlighted, Evernote can clip the full page. Evernote also supports the ability to e-mail notes to the service, allowing for automated note entry via e-mail rules or filters. 

 

Where suitable hardware is available, Evernote can automatically add geolocation tags to notes.

 

The online service also allows selected files to be shared for viewing and editing by other users, and allows integration with Twitter for storing or forwarding "tweets". Users can also use Twitter to add notes to Evernote remotely, by sending tweets from any Twitter-capable device. 

 

Free" and "Premium" accounts

The free online service has monthly usage limitations (60 MB/month as of 2012), and displays a "usage" meter. A premium service is also available at US$5 per month or $45 per year for 1,024 MB/month usage as of 2012. As well as the larger per-month upload limit, the premium service features faster word recognition in images, greater security, and text searching within PDF files. Another advantage of the premium service is more options in the sharing process. Both free and premium Evernote users can share notebooks privately with other Evernote users. However, notebooks shared by premium users have the added benefit of allowing the premium user to give even non-premium users the permissions to edit the contents of the shared notebook. Non-premium users can share notebooks---but cannot give others permission to also edit the notebooks. The free service is supported by advertising, on both the web interface and in the application. The premium service allows the user to disable this advertising. The free service does not make files available offline on iOS and Android devices; while sometimes they are available from cache, editing these files can cause conflicts when synchronising. All Evernote accounts, both free and premium, have a maximum limit of 100,000 notes and 250 notebooks. 

 

Supported platforms

 

Evernote for iOS icon
 

Evernote clients are available for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, WebOS, Maemo, BlackBerry (including BlackBerry Playbook), and Google Waveplatforms as well as a beta for Symbian S60 5th Edition. There are portable versions of Evernote available for flash drives and U3 drives. There is currently no officially supported native client for Linux or BSD (see below for unofficial clients).

 

There is substantial variation in supported features on different platforms: for example it is possible to edit rich text and sketches on Windows; on Mac it is possible to edit rich text, but only view sketches; and on the iPad only plain text could be edited prior to version 4.1.0 (August 2011).

 

Web clipping support is installed by default on the Internet Explorer and Safari browsers when the Evernote software is installed under Windows or OS X. Evernote web-clipping plugins are also available for theYandex Browser, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome browsers, and need to be downloaded and installed separately from the respective browser.

 

The Evernote email-clipper is automatically installed in Microsoft Office Outlook if the desktop version is installed on the same computer. There is a Thunderbird email plugin, which must be installed separately from the Thunderbird client.

 

Unofficial clients

There are some third-party clients for Evernote:
 

• NixNote. An open-source, cross-platform clone of Evernote written in Java, which runs on any OS with desktop as a Java virtual machine (Java SE) including Windows, Linux, and OS X, among other OSs. It was named NeverNote before. 

• People's Note. People's Note is a Windows Mobile note taking application with full-featured Evernote integration. Supports offline notes storage.

• Ploze. Ploze lets you read, search and create notes on your Windows Mobile phone whether or not you are connected to the Internet. 

• Everpad for Linux, including Ubuntu. 

 

Skitch

Skitch is a screenshot editing and sharing utility for OS X which was originally developed by Plasq. The app permits the user to add shapes and text to an image, and then share it online. Images can also be exported to various image formats. Skitch was acquired by Evernote on August 18, 2011. Evernote offers the app free of charge for OS X, iOS, Windows 8, and Android devices. 

 

Security breach

On March 2, 2013, Evernote revealed that hackers had gained access to their network and been able to access user information, including usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. All users were asked to reset their passwords. Following the password reset, Evernote accelerated plans to implement an optional two-factor authentication option for all users.