AllThingsD » Evernote

Phil Libin and the Refusal to Pivot: Evernote Now Valued at $1 Billion

Liz Gannes — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:28:25 +0000

Today, 30-million-user strong Evernote announced it had received $70 million in Series D funding from Meritech Capital, CBC Capital, T. Rowe Price Associates, Harbor Pacific Capital and Allen & Company at a valuation of Dr. Evil proportions: One billion dollars.

Unlike many other companies of this era, Evernote has known exactly what it was since the beginning — it just took some time for users and investors to catch on.

A while back I interviewed Evernote CEO Phil Libin about Evernote’s steadfast strategy for both its product and business model. On the occasion of Evernote’s sky-high valuation, Libin’s experience seems particularly compelling — and unusual.

“It’s almost like if you don’t pivot three or four times you’re doing it wrong,” he joked about today’s tech start-ups.

But in fact, Evernote had the tagline “remember everything” on the first day the company was formed in 2007, and it planned a freemium payment model from the beginning, Libin said.

“We said we wanted to make an external brain for everyone,” Libin said — as he has said many times in the past five years. “The driving force was no one is really happy with biological memory.”

But a good idea and a business model weren’t enough. Libin tried to raise money in the summer of 2008, a few months after Evernote launched and before it had much traction. He had a funding deal set up, set to close the day Merrill Lynch went bust. The investors told him they’d just lost 60 percent of their value so were pulling out.

At that point Evernote had four weeks of money in the bank.

Libin looked around for other investors for a week. Some potential investors told him they would fund Evernote if the start-up switched its business model from users paying for premium features to selling advertising about users’ interests.

“They said if you’re successful, you will have the holy grail of targeted adverting because people are telling you what’s important to them,” Libin said. “We considered that very briefly but I was never comfortable with that model. I always thought it would undermine the trust. We turned that down. We’d said we’d rather shut the company down.”

Other investors suggested an enterprise product, but Libin thought that would be odd because Evernote is, by design, made for both professional and personal use. Splitting the product into two versions felt false.

With three weeks left before forced shutdown, Libin was awake at 3 am. He said he told himself, “I’m going to go into the office and act like an adult for the first time in my life” and tell the staff it’s over so the company could close down on its own terms.

Sitting at his computer thinking his company was done, Libin noticed a new email from someone he didn’t know. Turns out it was an Evernote customer from Sweden saying how much he loved the product and wondering if the company was looking for any outside investment.

“Twenty minutes later we were on a Skype call,” Libin recalls. “He wired us half a million dollars within two weeks.”

The Swedish investor has asked to remain unnamed, Libin said, describing him as a computer nerd who started and sold a company. The two men have never met face to face.

The emergency funding from the mysterious benefactor paid off. A few months of keeping the company alive delivered the data to show that Evernote’s product and freemium model were working. It was able to raise its first institutional funding from Troika Ventures (which earlier this year sold its stake to Sequoia Capital for what’s estimated to be more than $45 million).

“I think if that email had come 10 minutes later I probably wouldn’t have seen it, and I probably wouldn’t have opened an email from a name I didn’t recognize in the morning,” Libin said.

Libin believes the fact that Evernote was saved by a happy customer was a proof point, in and of itself. “The guy from Sweden might not have fallen in love if it was an advertising company,” he said.

Why was Evernote, at the brink of being shut down after barely getting started, able to brush off potential investors who wanted to change its core premise? Libin said he could think of two reasons.

First, Evernote put a ton of work into building its own analytics tools and figuring out what to measure.

“I think the most important thing for us was really having a set of metrics and measurements so we didn’t have to make any blind, panicked major turns,” Libin said. “If you can’t see where you’re flying, it’s easier to start panicking and turn the flightstick around.”

And second, Evernote is not Libin’s first company — he’d previously sold two others — so he had confidence in himself and his convictions, and he didn’t necessarily need the job.

“It was easier to say ‘no one is forcing me to do this,’” Libin said. “We don’t want to get into targeted advertising? That’s fine.”

“I think if this was my first time around I’d be a lot more eager to please the market and the investors,” he added. “Maybe that’s a luxury.”

Photo credit: @jibees for LeWeb11 Conference

Digital Pen Maker Livescribe Lands New Funding, Taps Ex-HP Exec as New CEO

Ina Fried — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:00:13 +0000

Digital pen maker Livescribe has quietly replaced its longtime chief executive with former HP executive Gilles Bouchard.

Bouchard has been on the job since last month, but Livescribe is just now announcing that he has taken the helm from Jim Marggraff. Marggraff will remain on the company’s board and will be a part-time adviser, Bouchard said.

Among his goals, Bouchard said, are strengthening the company’s partnerships and building wireless connectivity into future pens. All of its current products have to be docked with a computer to share data.

“We have to be a step function from where we are in terms of cross-device support,” Bouchard told AllThingsD. In addition, he said that the product is still too hard to explain to consumers.

By writing on special paper, Livescribe’s “smartpens” are able to capture all of the data written, as well as syncing that data with recorded audio notes. This “paper replay” feature allows students, reporters and others to move easily between different parts of a class or meeting.

The pens have found something of a niche, big enough to find their way onto shelves of Best Buy and Staples, but not yet enough to get the five-year-old company out of “investment mode.”

The company had said last year that it expected to sell its millionth digital pen before the end of 2011. A Livescribe representative said the company fell “just shy” of that goal, and expects to hit the mark early this year.

As part of taking the job, Bouchard said he knew the company would need more resources than it is generating from its current digital pen business. Bouchard said the company has raised a further $10 million in commitments from existing investors — payments that will be made over the course of 2012.

“I ended up voting with my feet and they ended up voting with their wallets,” Bouchard said in an interview.

Spool Raises Funding to Help You Take the Web Offline

Liz Gannes — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:00:02 +0000

Spool, which offers a nifty service for saving Web videos and articles for later viewing offline on Android, iOS and HTML5-compatible devices, has raised $1 million in funding from SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Vivi Nevo and others.

The Spool service is made for commuters, travelers and people with limited mobile data plans. It automatically downloads and syncs content between devices when possible. It’s still in limited beta testing, but Spool co-founder Avichal Garg said to expect broader availability in the next few months.

This isn’t just a storage service. Users can store links for their own private use, and also in the process send them to one or more of their Facebook friends.

While Spool might be most easily compared to services like Readability, Read It Later and Instapaper, Garg made other comparisons.

“We’ve built more network effects than Dropbox or Evernote,” Garg said. He added, “This is like a Path for content. It’s not about broadcasting.”

If users install a Spool plug-in for easier saving and sharing, they can also optionally see Spool buttons scattered throughout popular aggregators like Google Reader, Twitter, Quora and Hacker News.

Garg said he is prepared to fight for users’ rights to keep a personal copy of Web content for their personal use. Spool doesn’t work with content from services like Netflix that require a log-in, for instance, and it limits saved videos to 90 minutes in length.

Plus, the San Francisco-based company’s investors include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and former YouTube VP Kevin Donahue, and the company is already working with attorney David Kramer, who led YouTube’s copyright defense against Viacom.

Fetchnotes Wants to Get Your "To Do" List Out of Your Head

Drake Martinet — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:00:30 +0000

You’re walking around out in the world and an idea strikes you. How do you best trap that random neuron and save it for later?

Fetchnotes, a small start-up out of Ann Arbor, Mich., is hoping to be your answer to those pesky, brain-leaking notes.

The service, still in closed beta, is pretty simple thus far. Basically, users register for an account and then are allowed to text a note to a special phone number.

The notes are saved on the Fetchnotes Web app, where they can be “auto-organized at the point of capture,” said Fetchnotes co-founder Alex Schiff.

The notes are arranged based on hashtags inserted in the notes themselves, and will eventually be automatically available for sharing using Twitterlike @ symbols.

But, according to Schiff, tomorrow’s Fetchnotes will look a lot different than today’s.

“We’ve only built in about 10 percent of the functionality we want,” he said. “The goal is to be able to get notes into Fetchnotes any way you want.”

Next, he said, the start-up will add the ability to call in notes, instant-message them via tools such as Google Chat, and link notes with dates in them right into Google Calendar.

It’s a pretty ambitious road map for a bootstrapped start-up outside Silicon Valley — although less so, when you consider that all of the things Fetchnotes hopes to loop together are really just hooks into everyone else’s APIs.

When I asked about competitors in the space — and there are a lot — Schiff was quick to address the elephant in the room: Evernote, which currently dominates the mobile memory space.

Schiff said that while Evernote wants to be your digital memory, Fetchnotes wants to be how you commit things to memory.

“In Evernote, it takes 12 steps to add a note with a tag on their mobile apps,” said Schiff. “That’s too much for short things.”

Fetchnotes came out of a collaboration between Schiff and Chase Lee — both juniors at the University of Michigan’s start-up incubator, called TechArb.

The team is now nearly 10, and Schiff said the company isn’t yet interested in taking money, although it has been approached.

The big question about these sorts of memory-helpers has to do with the battle between native tools and the cross-platformers.

Apple recently added the Reminders app, with its iOS 5 release, to the creatively-named Notes app that has shipped with every iPhone since the start.

Clearly, there is some mindshare they are after — enough to warrant the famously target-specific Apple building another OEM app.

The other side of this niche market includes services like Evernote, which try to be as cross-platform as possible, and collect everything into the cloud, where, theoretically, it will be safe.

Schiff’s company comes down in the Evernote camp, but he said he sees his real competition as “native apps like Notes, and more ‘lifehack’ stuff, like emailing yourself.”

I will add that the API-powered note-taking idea isn’t a new one. In fact, it’s nearly a demo product for what is possible with Internet telephony-based APIs. In fact, Fetchnotes is currently powered by an Internet telephony-via-API service.

Schiff and Fetchnotes may not be the only way forward, but light, fast, feature-oriented companies like his make a compelling argument for competing with the big boys by adding even more ease of use.

Here is a video I did with the Fetchnotes team:

[ See post to watch video ]

Evernote Plans Hiring Binge This Year and Next

Ina Fried — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:48:17 +0000

Aiming to grow his company’s ranks significantly, Evernote CEO Phil Libin joked on Thursday that he should just lock the doors and force the roughly 400 attendees at its Trunk Show conference to join the company.

While he didn’t do that, the note-taking software company was heavily recruiting at the event and is looking to hire at a torrid pace, increasing its staff from a current 85 to 400 by the end of next year, including another 45 hires in 2011. The privately held Mountain View, Calif.-based company started the year with just 45 employees.

Libin told the crowd that he is aiming to build a company that is around for the next 100 years and said he has no plans to sell the company. That, he said, is part of the reason the company has raised more financing than it might otherwise need, including $20 million raised last year from Sequoia and others.

“We are asking people to believe us that we will be around and be a trusted service,” Libin said in an interview, talking shortly after he finished his keynote speech at the San Francisco event where the company announced its growth plans, including its acquisition of drawing app Skitch. Libin said the company has other deals in the pipeline.

While lots of bigger names offer cloud-based document storage, a big part of Evernote’s pitch is that it is not tied to any one company’s agenda and will work on any device the user has handy.

That’s important, Libin said, if people are going to trust a company with their memories.

“You have no idea what kind of computer or device you will be using in five years,” Libin told AllThingsD. “In 20 years you have no idea what devices will even be like.”

Mobile is a huge focus, Libin said, noting that while 85 percent of its 12 million current users have a PC or Mac as their primary device and a mobile as a secondary device, a similar percentage of the next billion users won’t use a PC at all. As a result, Libin said, he is pushing to open more offices in emerging markets, where mobile growth is leading the way.

“We cannot figure out how to do that here,” he said. “We have to do it in Brazil. We have to it in Singapore.”

Evernote Scoops Up Mac Drawing App Skitch, Makes it Free

Ina Fried — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:42:31 +0000

Online note-taking service Evernote said on Thursday that it has acquired Skitch, a program for drawing and making annotations on screenshots.

“Skitch is part of the Evernote family and a fundamental part,” Evernote CEO Phil Libin said, announcing the deal at the Evernote Trunk Show — the company’s first ever conference in San Francisco.

Skitch, an early partner of Evernote, is currently only for the Mac. “That’s going to change soon,” Libin said, noting that such a program has even wider uses on tablets and other emerging devices.

Evernote is also making the app, which had sold for $20 on the Mac App Store, a free product.

Skitch’s founders also announced that the company has a free Android version ready and is planning versions for iOS and Windows, among other platforms.

Separately, Libin said that the company will have an update in the next couple of weeks for the iPhone and iPad versions of Evernote, adding rich-text editing and other oft-requested features.

Livescribe Connects Its Digital Pen With Google Docs, Evernote

Ina Fried — Mon, 23 May 2011 04:00:33 +0000

Livescribe, which is on pace to sell its one millionth digital pen this year is now making it a little easier to send its digital notes to other computer programs.

The company’s signature product is a “smartpen” that writes with standard ink, but captures audio and uses special paper so that, in addition to showing up on paper, the notes are also recorded digitally for transfer to a computer. The new Livescribe Connect service, being announced on Monday, allows the digital notes and audio recordings to be sent from to a variety of other programs and services, including Evernote, Google Docs and Facebook. Users will also be able to mark their notes to be sent as a PDF document via e-mail the next time the pen is docked.

CEO Jim Marggraff said at an event for reporters that the shift to smart wireless devices has highlighted the fact that, although his company’s product has helped allow handwritten notes go digital, “the Livescribe smartpen remains a disconnected device in a connected world.”

The Livescribe Connect service is designed to take a step toward addressing that, but still requires the pen be docked to a computer in order to send notes via e-mail or transfer them to another program. Though not sharing any details, Marggraff acknowledged that a wireless connection from the pen would be the next logical step.

Livescribe, which demoed its first smartpen back at D5 in 2007, is also adding a 2GB, $99 version of its Echo smartpen.

The Livescribe Connect service will work with all of the companies Echo and older Pulse pens. Most of the connectors will be free for all pen owners, while connections to Google Docs and e-mail will require the purchase of a $15 upgrade for owners of the older Pulse pens or those who buy the new entry-level Echo pen.

Apps for Androids

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 12 May 2011 01:00:19 +0000

Is there software available to allow one to run Apple-compatible apps on Android tablets?

None of which I’m aware. However, bear in mind many of the most popular apps for the iPhone are now available in versions for Android phones. My guess is that, over time, if Android tablets start selling in large numbers, the same phenomenon is likely to occur, with at least the top apps for the iPad being issued in versions for Android tablets.

I subscribe to 10 magazines. When I want to save an article I tear it out and file it away. I was wondering if there is another way to save articles by faxing/photocopying them and sending them as an attachment to a remote site accessible anywhere in the world. I would be willing to pay for the site but it has be easy to use.

The answer is yes, but not exactly in the way you envision. If you’re starting with paper, you’d have to scan the articles into digital files and then upload them to a service or site that’s universally accessible. One good candidate is Evernote, at evernote.com. It allows you to file away a wide variety of digital files, including the PDF files you’d likely create from scanning, and then access them from any PC, or Mac, or from many smartphones and tablets. In fact, some scanners can directly send the files they create to Evernote, or you can email attachments directly to your Evernote account.

The other option is to read your magazines digitally, and save the articles directly from the digital editions, skipping the scanning step. Evernote can handle this approach, but there are other options.

A service called Instapaper can save Web pages for later reading, and works on computers, iPhones, and iPads.

I have a MacBook Pro for personal use—mostly Web browsing, emails, calendar, Facebook, etc. I want an iPad 2 but need to sell my MacBook in order to fund the purchase. If I do this, what will I miss most about my MacBook Pro?

All of the things you say you do on the laptop can be done very nicely on the iPad 2. However, you will lose some significant advantages that any laptop offers. These include a built-in physical keyboard; a larger screen; the ability to view Flash videos in the browser; and direct connectivity to external devices like hard disks, wired Internet connections, and wired printers. Also, though you didn’t mention it, you might miss the option of using a wide variety of much more powerful productivity programs than exist today for the iPad.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Xobni Launches App Market Using OpenSocial

Liz Gannes — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:00:10 +0000

Xobni, the email-as-a-platform company, is opening up its Microsoft Outlook sidebar app to other developers. The sidebar will now include a “Gadget Store” with free and paid apps like Evernote, Yammer, Facebook and Salesforce.

What’s funny is many of these developers (in fact, all the examples I just used) run their own app platforms. So everybody’s an app, and everybody’s a platform.

Xobni’s offering has two distinctive aspects: it offers developers access to the millions of corporate Outlook users, and it is built using the open standard OpenSocial APIs so Web app developers will be able to easily extend their products to the desktop.

Xobni said it plans to bring the Gadget Store to its own Web and mobile products, but did not give a date.

Early Adopter: Connect Your Personal Data Pipes Together With Ifttt's Digital Duct Tape

Drake Martinet — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 17:00:11 +0000

Early Adopter is all about emerging trends and the chewy little companies that creep in to define emerging spaces.

For a couple of years, I’ve been watching companies expand the conception of what APIs can be used for.

As the complexity and utility of those data pipes grow, companies have been adopting another trend: One that places graphic and interface design at the center of a new product, as much as the engineering and programming that makes it function.

This is a trend that ifttt founder Linden Tibbets has been thinking about as well.

Ifttt, (pronounced “ift”) stands for “if this, then that,” which über-geeks will recognize as a foundational logic and programming action.

The concept is simple. When one state is reached, an action will automatically be triggered.

For example, there is an “if” function inside the computer that controls the automatic wipers on a car. If rain is sensed, then the wipers turn on.

Ifttt pulls a user’s Web services out of their silos and allows those automatic if functions to take place across several services at once–essentially allowing users to easily connect several APIs end-to-end.

In the case of Tibbets’s ifttt Web app, the user chooses from channels to create the if situation, and then from other channels to have the output, or the then-that action. All of the ifs and thens are gathered from the growing API-driven Web.

Got it?

Although bootstrapped and still in private beta, ifttt is already building up an impressive set of services that can help users connect to and semi-automate.

As of today, ifttt already connects to and enables actions between several Web clipping services, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Evernote, Flickr, phone–both voice and text–and even craigslist.

Each channel has its own set of action choices, depending both on what the service is used for and what actions are acessable via that service’s API.

Actions can be as simple as automatically sending the user a text message when the weather changes to rainy (not a new trick), or as complex as automatically uploading an image to Facebook whenever the user uploads that photo to flicker with the tag “Facebook.”

“Right now we are focused on adding more channels and listening to what users want to use the service for,” said Tibbets.

He explained that he and co-founder Jesse Tane are working on integration with cloud file service dropbox, as well as on Google Chat integration.

Tibbets comes to ifttt after a few years situated right between the design and tech spaces.

After attending Santa Clara College on a basketball scholarship (he’s around 6′ 6″) and graduating with a computer engineering degree, he spent time working on games at Elecronic Arts before moving to Palo Alto, Calif.-based design darling IDEO.

Tibbets spent the last three years working on internal social-sharing projects at IDEO, before founding ifttt and launching the Web app of the same name in early November of 2010.

Ifttt is useful for sending yourself notifications, but Tibbets believes the real value is in creating connections between the Web services available in ifttt.

The zeitgeist for APIs use is to channel info out of one Web service and into another, as defined by a single site or app maker. Tibbets’s efforts put individuals more at the center of how their information flows around them.

This concept can get complicated in a hurry, and that’s where others have failed, at least according to Tibbets.

He explained: “It’s about usability, and being simple enough to understand and implement in your own life. Ifttt began more complex, but we cut a lot out of it, to make it simple enough to understand quickly.”

Indeed, lack of simplicity may be what keeps services like Yahoo’s Pipes, which can do many of the same things ifttt can, from becoming popular with a broader consumer group.

Ifttt is also developing native mobile apps that will focus on ultra-simple activation of an ifttt task.

He said that a major barrier to him doing certain things on a mobile device is that he feels it is just anti-social to have his phone out for more than 20 seconds.

To alleviate the anti-social dilemma, ifttt’s mobile apps will focus on quickly activating preprogrammed tasks.

Ifttt co-founder Tane is working full time on the apps, although there is no release date set.

Tibbets admits that ifttt is still little more of an idea and a high-resolution prototype than it is a full-fledged product. But his hopes hang on his philosophy about how to build value, which is either a little counter to, or ahead of, the current trend in Web apps.

“Our value won’t be built on adding your friends or sharing functionality to some other service,” he said. “Ours will be about creating something that would still be a valuable if there were only 20 people left on earth and none of them were your friends.”

We sat Tibbets down (literally, we had to make him sit or we wouldn’t have been able to reach to get good video) near ifttt’s San Francisco headquarters to get the quick rundown on ifttt’s present and future. Enjoy the video.

[ See post to watch video ]

(Early Adopter is a new column on early-stage start-ups and ideas written weekly by Drake Martinet.)

Former Apple and PopCap Engineer Launches App to Make iPhone Camera Useful

Liz Gannes — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:12:23 +0000

A new app called VisualList offers a simple but natural extension of the iPhone’s camera, allowing users to organize and remember things by taking a picture of them.

Many of us already pull out our smartphone to take a quick photo to document a shopping list, the diagrams on a whiteboard or the contents of a moving box. It’s just quicker and more informative than writing things down.

VisualList isn’t some massive feat of engineering; there’s no image recognition or anything like that. And it’s a lot simpler than other personal memory apps out there, like Evernote. What the iPhone app does is organize photos into checklists and let users tag items through the touchscreen, then formats the lists into emails and Facebook albums for sharing.

The app was created by Martin Gannholm, who worked at Apple on projects like the Newton for 10 years ending in 1995, then founded the hosted enterprise software company Allegis, and more recently worked on engineering projects at Microsoft and PopCap. The self-funded two-person company behind the app is called Way2Clever.

Gannholm is charging $2.99 for VisualList and anticipates selling future thematic versions–for instance, a wedding-themed app for users to take pictures of the dresses they try on or the centerpiece arrangements they want to re-create, or what have you.

Three bucks seems a bit much for something users can nearly do without an app, but perhaps not in the context of a big, expensive or ongoing project that’s helped by thinking visually–say, remodeling a home.

Having played around with the app, I’ll say it seems like the kind of thing Apple and other smartphone makers could think about making part of their own camera software.

Update: As of Feb. 10, VisualList’s price has been lowered to $0.99.

Microsoft Brings the First Piece of Office to the iPhone: OneNote

Ina Fried — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 17:49:16 +0000

While Microsoft still hopes to one day rival the iPhone, the company’s Office unit is the latest part of Redmond to acknowledge that, for now at least, the iPhone reigns supreme.

Microsoft is releasing on Tuesday a version of its OneNote note-taking application for the iPhone. The program will be free for a limited time, Microsoft said, adding that notes taken on the iPhone will automatically be synchronized and backed up to the Web using Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive.

“We know people care more about what they do than where they do it,” Microsoft Office unit Vice President Takeshi Numoto said in a blog post published on Tuesday. “Whether it’s on a PC or Mac, a mobile phone or online through the Web Apps on multiple browsers, we continue to bring Office to the devices, platforms, and operating systems our customers are using. It should be about the ideas and information, not the device, right?”

Of course, OneNote is just one piece of Office–and one of the newer and least used of the main components at that. It’s also an interesting choice, since OneNote isn’t available natively for the Mac. But Microsoft seems to be leaving the door open to bring other pieces of Office to the iPhone.

In an interview, Microsoft senior director Jason Bunge said that the company had been working on OneNote for the iPhone for the past 18 months. Bunge wouldn’t say whether other Office components are also in the works, saying only that the company had no other apps to announce at this time.

“You can absolutely expect Office to expand its presence across other platforms,” Bunge said.

As for whether Microsoft plans to eventually charge for OneNote or other iPhone apps, Bunge said he didn’t know how long OneNote would remain free and had no other details on Microsoft’s pricing plans.

The goal in bringing OneNote to the iPhone, he said, is to allow those who do use the program on the PC to have it with them wherever they are. Rival programs, such as Evernote, have already been available on the iPhone.

Bunge did put in a bit of a plug for Windows and Windows Phone, saying, “We want Office on our Windows devices to be the best productivity experience that’s possible.”

OneNote is not Microsoft’s first app for the iPhone. Redmond already offers a Bing app, as well as Windows Live Messenger and the Microsoft Tag barcode reader, among other programs.

Update, 12:15 pm PT: Some people, including Mobilized, are getting an error message when they try to log in with their Windows Live ID. Since OneNote for the iPhone requires a Windows Live account, it effectively means those encountering the bug can’t use OneNote for the iPhone at all for now.

Microsoft says it is aware of the issue and is investigating.

1:45 pm PT: Microsoft has posted a blog noting the issues and says they are appearing intermittently as a result of high demand, with the recommended approach as “just keep trying.”

Saving Web Articles

Walt Mossberg — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:09:13 +0000

What program would you recommend for saving Web articles such as yours and which also provides for filing them by classifications such as technology, taxes, health, investments, etc.

There are a number of programs that will let you quickly and easily save links to Web pages you want to save or read later.

One is called Instapaper. Another, which I have recommended in the past, is Evernote. The latter allows you to categorize Web links or any other notes with tags, or to store them in different notebooks that you could label and organize for different topics. Using these tags and/or notebooks, you can quickly find all saved links to Web pages on different topics.

I always am wary of installing any Microsoft program on my Mac because of viruses. I have, however, been thinking of getting the new Office 2011 for Mac that you reviewed because I have not been happy with the iWork program from Apple. Should I have these virus concerns?

Microsoft’s Office for Mac is a purely native Mac program and doesn’t involve running the Windows operating system, which is the platform on which nearly all viruses operate. So, when it comes to the danger of viruses, Office for the Mac is like any other Mac program—highly unlikely to expose you to viruses.

The one exception is that, years ago, there was a rash of viruses that spread through the use of macros, or automated features, in certain Office files. These could theoretically still plague you, but Microsoft long ago took steps to snuff out most of these, and you can choose to disable macros in any documents you open.

Several times a year, a group of my friends rents a house in England or France. None of the houses has Wi-Fi. What is the cheapest and easiest way to access the Internet on our computers?

Assuming the houses also lack wired Internet connections, I’d investigate cellular data connections, either via cellular modems for each individual computer, or devices like the MiFi, which create a Wi-Fi network for multiple computers using the cellular data network. I cannot say whether this would be a “cheap” method, as it would likely vary depending on which carrier you used.

Evernote Raises $20 Million From Sequoia Capital

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:54:34 +0000

Evernote, the cloud-based platform for note-taking, has raised $20 million in a series C round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company’s success makes it the go-to example of the “freemium” business model–its premium product recently started paying for its current day-to-day operations, and there’s still $9 million left over from its B round. CEO Phil Libin aims to use the new infusion of cash to expand into more countries and into corporate and educational markets.

A Service That Says 'Yes, We Have Bananas on Sale'

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:14:05 +0000

If you’ve replaced pen and paper with digital data, you know how important it is to have a single, smart repository for holding and accessing this information

This week, I tested Springpad (SpringpadIt.com), a free service that saves and synchronizes Web content across all major browsers on Macs and PCs. It also works on the iPad, iPhone and Android using their apps. Services like this aren’t new: Evernote, for instance, does a fine job of saving Web content and synchronizing it across multiple devices. But Springpad is unique in that it automatically generates links and alerts you to online offers related to the content a user has already saved.

The free Springpad service works on Macs and PCs, as well as the iPad, iPhone and Verizon Android.

If I saved a recipe for banana bread, Springpad might send me a link from Coupons.com so I can save money on bananas. If I save the Web page for a new iPod I want to buy and its price drops on Amazon.com, I might see a Springpad alert about it. Or if I save a photo of a bottle of wine to my Springpad account, an alert may appear to tell me about an offer on free shipping from Wine.com.

Starting Sept. 22, these Springpad Alerts will work in mobile apps on the iPhone, Android devices and iPad. (Springpad currently works as a website and as a mobile app, but the alerts only appear on the website version.) Spring Partners, which owns Springpad, plans to also release a Google Chrome browser extension Sept. 22.

Springpad doesn’t work as a BlackBerry app and the company has no immediate plans to make such an app. A Springpad spokesman says the company is working on a version for Microsoft Windows tablets.

Springpad uses a handsome interface to display saved content. Users can look at their saved content in list, detail or gallery view, where you see colorful images of products the service pulls from the specific page you saved. A Web clipper tool can be dragged from SpringpadIt.com to a browser’s bookmark toolbar, which creates a quick shortcut that saves a website in a Springpad account.

There’s also a My Tasks section, which let you jot down personal lists like checklists, packing lists, alarms, events and milestones.

I’ve been testing Springpad and its Alerts on a Mac and on a PC with various browsers, as well as on the iPhone, Verizon Droid and iPad. Spring Partners gave me a way to preview mobile alerts, which would be helpful to read if you’re out shopping for an item and a price-saving alert appears.

The mobile alerts will eventually have smarter capabilities such as using GPS to tell you about a discount at a nearby restaurant that you saved in your My Stuff or if a product you saved is on sale in the Best Buy where you’re shopping. Alerts don’t pop up as text messages or immediate emails; rather, you must open the SpringpadIt.com site or a section in the mobile app to look in Alerts for new offers (a weekly email Alerts summary is also sent).

While not everything saved in Springpad will generate an alert, I found myself more motivated to use this service. I liked the service’s way of saving images with almost every item in My Stuff. I also enjoyed searching through publicly shared things people saved in Springpad to see what others thought was worth saving.

But how exactly do the alerts work? For each saved piece of content, Springpad recognizes the content’s metadata (like the ingredients in a saved recipe) and sends an alert based on that metadata.

A spokesman claims Springpad doesn’t pass any personally identifiable information to retailers. So the fact that I saved a Prince tennis racket to my Springpad account isn’t shared with a retailer. Springpad may, however, pass along statistics to retailers, like 500 users saved Prince rackets to their accounts. If someone uses a link they received in Springpad Alerts to buy something, Spring Partners gets a commission from the company or service.

Springpad Alerts come from the partnerships that Spring Partners has with over 250 companies and services. Among the partners are Price Grabber, Best Buy, Wine.com, Groupon and Fandango, and the company continues to add partnerships.

These alerts are product-specific, so I didn’t have to worry about receiving alerts for a Panasonic HDTV if I saved a Sony HDTV in my Springpad account. There’s no way to opt out of alerts, which appear in special sections on the SpringpadIt.com site and in the mobile app.

If you’d like to display your saved content in Springpad with all other Springpad users, you can opt to make that content public. Someone who visits a new restaurant and wants to tell the world about it, or sees a movie that they think deserves high praise, Springpad will let them do that.

Springpad works like Twitter in that people using the service can follow one another. Unlike Twitter, no one can set an account to require permission to follow it, though marking all settings as private hides everything from others.

And accounts like Facebook and Gmail can be linked to the service creating contacts in Springpad and Flickr and Twitter to share images or saved data.

I don’t always say this about the products I review, but I think I’ll continue to use Springpad—especially for saving important shopping items and recipes that I find online. Its built-in Alerts add an element of relevancy to certain saved items, and I like that it gives me the option to share with Springpad friends or with friends in other social networks.

Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Turning a Web Page Into a Keeper

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:20:22 +0000

What do you do if you come across an interesting online article or Web page but don’t have time to read it? You could bookmark it for a visit to the page at another time, or email the URL to yourself in hopes of eventually getting around to reading it. But since the Web is ever changing, a link that works one week might be useless the next.

This week, I tested iCyte (icyte.com), a smarter way of compiling data from the Web. Rather than relying on live URLs, this tool saves a Web page’s content, just as it looked when you first saved it, even if that Web page later shuts down or is no longer retrievable. It also saves any highlighted markings you’ve made on a page. ICyte is a free Web browser add-on that, once downloaded, works with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Versions for Apple (AAPL) Safari and Google (GOOG) Chrome browsers are planned for May.

[ See post to watch video ]

There are several existing products that offer to organize digital data in one central place. Among them are Evernote and Springpad, which save a greater variety of content (documents, emails, reminder memos and voicemails as well as some Web-page data) in various places. ICyte focuses specifically on saving Web-page content.

Sharing Research

It encourages people to share Web research with others by inviting them to join a project (iCyte’s term for a collection of Web pages saved on its server), comment on the content and share notes with one another.

For the most part, I liked using iCyte. I created a free account and made several projects filled with “Cytes” (saved Web pages), naming projects according to what they contained, like Tech Stuff and To Read, where I saved a bunch of online articles I wanted to read but didn’t have time to finish. I also used it to create a project with a friend called Silly News, where we shared news articles and Web pages with videos on them in a common space and commented on each other’s pages. People who want to participate in sharing and commenting on iCyte must also create accounts for themselves. ICyte is currently limited to browsers—whether on computers or on smartphones—though the company is considering making an iPhone app.

Once the iCyte add-on is downloaded onto a Windows PC or Mac for use in Internet Explorer or Firefox, two tiny icons that look like an eye and a list appear unobtrusively to the side of the browser’s address bar. When the eye icon is selected, it saves the opened Web page into a new or existing project and lets you add details like notes and word tags.

To save a highlighted section of a page, just highlight it with your cursor before hitting the eye icon, and that text will appear highlighted in the saved Cyte. By selecting the icon that looks like a list, users can open or close a left-side panel displaying a list of all saved Cytes. At the top of this list, and from the iCyte.com home page, a search box lets users comb through all public Cytes or just their own for specific terms.

With a click on the iCyte icon, Web pages—with highlighted text—can be saved as they originally appeared.

Viewing Cytes

Though the ability to highlight and save Cytes only works with the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, users can log into their iCyte accounts and see their saved or shared content using any browser. I did this using Chrome and Safari browsers on Windows PCs and Macs, and I also accessed my iCyte account on an iPad with its Safari browser.

By default, Cytes are saved as private projects, visible only to their creators. But in one step this privacy setting can be changed so the Cyte is shared publicly for the iCyte community to view and comment on. I browsed several public Cytes and found a few that I chose to save to my own account for reading, like an art history Cyte one user saved from a Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web page.

Blue Bar Feature

Each Cyte has a blue bar across its top that shows who originally saved it and on what date. The blue bar also tells you whether you’re viewing the page with marked highlight on or off. A button lets you view the page in a live view, which may or may not be the same as what was saved depending if highlights were made, if the page has changed, or if more content has been added to it—like new reader comments on a blog post.

I found it easy to share Cytes with friends using a variety of methods, and a single Cyte can be shared from a private project without allowing someone access to the other Cytes saved in the project. I shared Cytes via Facebook and email, though links to Cytes can be shared in other ways like on Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and MySpace—or by using a shortcut to embed the link on a Web site or blog.

The Highlights

I didn’t use the highlighting feature much, but I could see it being a real boon for people doing research and saving Web pages for specific content. Also, by highlighting text before sharing Cytes with others, users can more specifically point out what they like or find useful in a particular article or Web page.

The version of iCyte that I used is free and a company representative said each user’s profile information is kept private and not shared with third parties. ICyte doesn’t currently include built-in advertisements; instead, the company plans to roll out subscription-based Enterprise and Pro versions. The Enterprise version costs $195 a year and the Pro version is still in the works.

If you use the Web as a research resource or simply like saving articles, videos and other online materials, iCyte could be a great tool for organizing and sharing all of that content.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Premium Buys Encryption for Evernote

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:06:06 +0000

Your review of the Evernote notes-storage service last week made it sound tempting. But do they encrypt my notes on their servers so a hacker can’t steal them? And what happens to my notes if they go out of business?

A: Evernote isn’t a purely cloud-based (Internet-based) system. It does store your notes on its servers, for Web access, but it also exists as a synchronized local application on Windows, Mac and every major smart phone. So your notes are stored locally on the hard disks of your various computers. Local storage is available on the iPhone app, and the company says it plans to add local storage to Android phones soon. Thus, even if the company went out of business, the notes on your Mac or PC or iPhone would be safe.

Evernote says it doesn’t encrypt data on its servers because it indexes all your notes for quick searching, and performs image recognition on photo notes, and it claims encryption would prevent that. Your user name and password, however, are always encrypted in transit, according to the company, and passwords aren’t stored on its servers—even if you have a free account. For premium users ($5 a month or $45 a year) all of the data, not just user names and passwords, are encrypted.

Also, the service allows users to encrypt all, or any part, of any note, and the company says it doesn’t receive the key to decrypt this material. The only part of a wholly encrypted note that the company would hold on its server would be its title and tags, if any.

I’m looking for a lightweight laptop, ideally under five pounds and with long-lasting battery life. I’m confused by all the models. Can you help me to narrow it down to a handful?

A: Unless you are looking for a tiny netbook, I suggest you consider a couple of options. One is a new category of Windows laptops variously called things like “ultrathin” and “thin and light.” All are well under five pounds in weight and many have good battery life. I reviewed three of these laptops—models from Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Lenovo—back in November, and you can read the column at http://bit.ly/m3JQn.

The second option worth considering is a Mac, which I believe has superior software and security, albeit at a higher price. Apple’s (AAPL) MacBook and 13″ MacBook Pro, while heavier than this new batch of Windows machines, weigh slightly under five pounds and have strong battery life. My review of the latest MacBook, from October, is available at http://bit.ly/7brVJk.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, for free at the All Things Digital site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Weekend Update 01.23.10–The Bated-Breath Edition

Drake Martinet — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:26:59 +0000

We’ve all seen it, that spiro-graphed, color-splotched invitation to Apple’s Jan. 27 event at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Weekend Update isn’t on the inside, but we hear rumors that Jobs will storm the stage dressed as Moses, carrying the new tablet, which will be made of stone, under his robes. Apparently, that’s where it’s been hiding all along. Either that, or Weekend Update is going a little nuts from “tablet fatigue.”

Before we got to rumors, plans and all important educated guesses, AllThingsD spent the week doing reporting about real companies with products you can actually buy.

Walt’s column wasn’t exactly its normal, gadgety self this week. Maybe he’s saving his strength. Instead of the newest thing that won’t be leaving your pocket, he covered a service that claims to help you remember everything. Evernote, with its adorable little elephant logo, aims to be a sort of digital filing cabinet in the cloud, allowing you to save information, images, notes and just about anything else that can be digitized. Walt had good things to say all around, even if the available apps didn’t give every device the same functionality. Weekend Update liked the auto text-recognition feature that makes pictures of text searchable. We’ll never carry a business card home again. Neither rain nor snow nor tablet rumors can keep Walt from his appointed rounds at Mossberg’s Mailbox, and this week he grabbed a couple questions about e-readers, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 and the right laptop for the young and litigious. Walt cleared up the myth that e-books can’t highlight text (even if they don’t do it in color yet), and then moved on to a question about what IE8 refers to as “accelerators.” Before tying up the mailbag strings for anther week, he also gave counsel to a future counselor. He recommended a moderately priced Windows 7 laptop or a Macbook for the incoming law student, though he suggested it would be a good idea to check with the school and current students for specific needs. Weekend Update thinks that last bit is extra good advice. Katie was busy this week testing the latest Bluetooth earpiece from Aliph’s Jawbone line. The Jawbone Icon is the first earpiece to run with a software package that allows the addition of apps just for the earpiece. Overall Katie thought the Icon represented a step forward for Bluetooth earpieces but hopes for upgrades to the app suite will bring more robust features. Oh yeah, and she was glad that they finally got rid of those tricky hidden control buttons.

At MediaMemo, Peter gave us the continued saga of e-magazines and the world’s slowest moving electronic construction project. It looks like the Time Inc. e-mag prototypes won’t be part of Wednesday’s Apple (AAPL) event even though there was a lot of hullabaloo over the company’s Sports Illustrated prototype. Condé Nast, on the other hand, has declared its GQ mag-as-app tests a success. No word yet on who will be three-quarters naked on the first 10-inch screen edition. Completing the out-with-the-print, in-with-the-electronic trifecta was Peter’s post about the New York Times pay-wall announcement. The Times claims it will erect a metered wall in 2011, which seems like an awfully long time in the shifting sands of the Web. Outside partners may be playing a factor, and some speculate that the 2011 date is just a declaration that New York Times Company (NYT) will be waiting-and-seeing. Peter doesn’t see what that would accomplish and cites experts who assert that a year isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to build a complex pay wall with necessary features.

Digital Daily was on the ball this week with John’s signature hard-hitting hilarity. His early report proved correct when sources suggested that the EU’s approval of the pending Oracle (ORCL)-Sun (JAVA) acquisition was nigh. Not to leave the tablet news out in the cold, John asked some important questions about a future tablet’s data consumption habits, and thinks it might end up in a class of its own. A big, beautiful screen means big, beautiful images and video, which mean gloriously huge file sizes. Hooray for Wi-Fi. To round out the week, John covered a story about Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry and Sergey planning to sell about $5.5 billion in stock over five years. We’re not sure whether the proper term is “cashing out” or “cashing in,” but they are going to be doing a lot of one or the other. The stock sale will remove them as a two-man majority voting block, but their remaining 47 percent will assure that their velvety duet will continue to ring clearly at board meetings.

Boomtown led off with some viral video for the ages. Jimmy Fallon one-upped the “pants on the ground” video by performing the sarcastic ballad as Neil Young. We’re not sure the audience caught that it was Jimmy right way, in part, because Young was making the TV rounds about that time, and in part, because Fallon does a surprisingly good Neal impression. Kara asked her readers to vote on the new tablet’s name, making “iPad” her own prediction. Kara has an eerie way of getting this stuff right so Weekend Update is gonna go ahead and get that tattoo this weekend. Kara finished the week with a quick post about her trip to Sundance and all the geektastic happenings there. Kara’s Winnebago, which we call “Operation Rolling Thunder,” was crammed full of wife, kids, mom, dog, and maybe a few stowaway Bay Area indie filmmakers who tied themselves to the undercarriage. Read the post; there’s never a dull moment on a Swisher expedition.

AllTingsD is back on Monday with some great new stuff to feed that techie habit. And don’t forget to set your homepages here Tuesday (as if they weren’t already) to see live photos and blogging from Apple’s big unveiling. We’ll see you there, and will be sure to let you know if Jobs does, in fact, part the Bay in his walk from Marin to San Francisco that morning.

Digital File Cabinet You Can Bring With You Anywhere

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:03:23 +0000

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?

Well, such a service exists. And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud” online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the power and offline ability of local devices.

[ See post to watch video ]

The idea behind Evernote is to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “notebooks” containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly, without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy, synchronized place for your ideas.

You can sign up for Evernote free at evernote.com, and use it entirely as a Web-based application, through any of the major Web browsers. But Evernote also comes in customized versions for a staggering array of devices: Windows and Macintosh computers, and for all the major smart phones, including the iPhone; the BlackBerry; phones running Google’s Android operating system; the latest Palm (PALM) phones; and Windows Mobile phones.

This week, Evernote, which is made by a small Silicon Valley company of the same name, is introducing a totally revamped Windows version that brings the platform into parity with the company’s previously more advanced Macintosh version.

I tested Evernote on two Macs and two Windows PCs, as well as an iPhone, a Palm Pre phone and the new Nexus One phone from Google (GOOG). I also tried free plug-ins the company offers that make it easy to insert all or part of a Web page or email into an Evernote note. These are available for the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome Web browsers, and for the Outlook email program. There are also system-wide Evernote buttons, which make capturing notes quicker, for Windows and the Mac.

I found Evernote works well for gathering ideas for business or personal projects, hobbies, or events you’re planning. When you see something or think of something you want to add, you can do it from whatever computer or phone is handy, and it will shortly appear on all of them.

Here are a few examples of how I used Evernote. I typed notes to myself on my desktops and laptops. I dictated a reminder to myself using the Evernote app on my iPhone. I used the Nexus One’s camera to take a picture of a person’s business card. I also copied text from Web pages, emails, and Word documents, and pasted them as notes. I even attached whole files to notes.

Within a few minutes, all of these notes were available on my personal Evernote Web site and from within all the Evernote apps on my computers and phones. I could search through them, email them, print them, group them with related items, or edit and annotate them.

Every Evernote user also gets a unique Evernote email address, and anything you email to that address goes into your repository as a new note. You also can use Twitter to get a note into Evernote.

The program has a few extra-cool features. If you create a note from a photo that includes printing, Evernote’s servers will try to figure out the words and make them searchable. This worked well in my tests with photos of business cards. And some smart-phone apps can save items directly into Evernote notes. One example I tested successfully was the Associated Press news app on the iPhone.

There are a few minor downsides to Evernote. While there’s no overall limit to the amount of data you can store, you can only upload 40 megabytes a month with the free version, attach certain types of files to notes, and you are forced to view ads. A premium version, which costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, increases the quota to 500 megabytes monthly, removes the ads, allows attaching any file type, and adds more features.

Also, I found the Evernote programs and apps, while similar, differ slightly depending on the capabilities of the platform they run on. Among the phone versions, for instance, the iPhone app is by far the most full-featured, and is currently the only one that can store whole notebooks offline, though the Android version is due to get that feature soon. Finally, the Evernote plug-in crashed Outlook on one of my Windows computers.

But, all in all, I found Evernote to be a valuable, easy-to-use tool that simplified my work and made good use of both the Internet and all my devices.

Find Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Apple iPhone Apps: Fast-Growing but Not Quite Fast Enough for the ADD Set

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:47:55 +0000

Someone get a dose of Ritalin stat to the noisy but deeply misguided critics who took news of the huge number of downloads of apps for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and immediately concluded it was just not good enough.

Thus, as reported today in The Wall Street Journal, 60 million downloads in 30 days–mostly for free apps, but with about $30 million in revenue, and a runway of three million more new iPhones out there too–is a chance to talk about how it all is just so unexciting and how the apps market is officially saturated?

Am I missing something here? One would assume that were these pundits pioneers, they would get to Ohio and declare that the going farther west held very little promise, thank you very much!

Wrote TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld:

The question is how many apps can one person really manage before becoming overwhelmed. While the initial impulse is to download as many apps as possible to try them out, there is a limit to how many apps you can juggle on your iPhone. It is not much different than a PC. You have tons of apps, but how many do you actually use on a regular basis? For most people, that number is probably no more than ten apps, and on a daily basis, maybe three or four, tops.”

Yes, that personal computer thing has been such a disappointment for us all and a real failure in spurring the creation of a plethora of multi-billion-dollar software makers, hasn’t it?

In actuality, while there is obviously going to be an initial period of frantic trying-out of apps and a fall-off of regular usage, the entire point is that a useful and important platform is being developed here.

Stlll, GigaOm’s Om Malik talked to new iPhone analytics company Pinch Media and managed to find lemons in the lemonade:

Using the caveat that only a few app makers were using the Pinch Analytics library, [Pinch's Founder Greg Yardley] pointed out that as per their data, the ratio of free downloads to paid downloads is at least 10 to 1. He also said that the pace of downloads is slowing, which is expected because the early rush is behind us. According to data collected by Pinch Media, on average, less than 20 percent of an application’s overall unique users return to an application each day. Yardley also pointed out that people are using the apps for just under five minutes at a time, on average. The majority only use the applications once per day; the average number of uses per day is around 1.2.

Looks like I am not the only one who is getting bored with some of the more blah apps. Phew!”

Of course, Malik and others will not like each and every app, but that is not exactly a surprise; nor should it be the focus.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs correctly noted to The Journal:

“Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that. We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software.”

Exactly. This is less about the iPhone, than it is about all mobile phones, going forward.

But, because of the iPhone’s trailblazing, they will be easier to use, because of apps and multi-touch and a much richer multimedia experience.

That market will thus require a lot of apps, some of which will work and some of which will flop.

As I wrote about the popularity of the third-party apps and Apple’s iTunes App Store:

That’s because Apple has built a platform for adults.

Like many, I have downloaded dozens of iPhone third-party apps over the last several days.

And, unlike what one can discover on the other hot apps platform–namely Facebook–they are uniformly superb, lovely, useful and fun in a really nonjuvenile way. …

I think you would not say so after looking over a lot of what is available at the App Store on iTunes.

Lots and lots of the apps there are games, of course, which are the most popular.

But what amazingly clever games, like MotionX Poker with the delightful rolling dice, or the humming swish of PhoneSaber (totally silly, but in a profound manner that Vampire-biting on Facebook will never achieve).

And the list of useful stuff–Pandora Radio, Starmap, WeatherBug, Evernote and WHERE–is long and growing longer, and these seem to enjoy as much prominence and popularity as the sillier stuff.

In addition, the ability to truly use other Web services in a mobile setting–from Photobucket to Yelp to AIM to the New York Times–makes the iPhone an even more useful device to me.

And for each of the apps I can also imagine various monetization schemes that now make a lot more sense since the iPhone platform enhances them with mobility and simplicity.”

Or, as the cliché goes: “The Plains are covered with the bodies of pioneers.”

But some of them, of course, made it to California.

The rest, as they also say, is history.

Speaking of which, here is a video of AllThingsD.com‘s Co-Executive Editor Walt Mossberg discussing the iPhone’s significance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July, in a short snippet from his talk there:

All Grown Up: Apple Apps Are for Adults (There, We Said It)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:26:22 +0000

When Apple releases its third-quarter earnings after the close today, Wall Street will be looking hard for a solid performance from the company to help buoy a tech sector smacked silly by weak reports from industry leaders Microsoft and Google last week.

It’s a lot of weight to put on the slim shoulders of Apple (AAPL), even though the company has shifted in recent years–largely due to the iPod and now iPhone phenomena–from a maker of devices for the elite to a mass consumer icon and a major influencer of key technology trends.

And, as has been much written about, Apple’s iPhone has brought the vision of a touchscreen minicomputer-on-the-go to the kind of reality that seemed impossible only a few years ago.

But more important to me is what is happening with the plethora of third-party apps now available from the iTunes App Store–both free and paid (picture below)–for use on the iPhone platform.

That’s because Apple has built a platform for adults.

Like many, I have downloaded dozens of iPhone third-party apps over the last several days.

And–unlike what one can discover on the other hot apps platform–namely Facebook–they are uniformly superb, lovely, useful and fun in a really nonjuvenile way.

The iPhone Facebook app is, by the way, stellar.

It’s more than a little ironic, then, that about a year ago it was the social-networking site that reinvigorated the idea of the importance of having a platform that a multitude of developers could thrive on.

It’s not exactly a new idea–Microsoft has nourished an ecosystem of developers for its powerful Windows software platform for, like, forever.

But Facebook surely made the idea bigger, looser, wilder and more exciting. Except that a lot of what has been created for Facebook has been profoundly stupid.

Last year, Boomtown set off a mini-tornado of debate when I suggested that I was less than impressed by the quality and endurance of most of the new Facebook apps–also called widgets–that began to take off.

In a post called: “The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It),” I wrote:

I get it, I get it. Millions upon millions of people are downloading and using these apps, part of a very clever ecosystem [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg unleashed in late May.

Under the scheme, widget-makers got to go wild on Facebook, and Facebook got to offload a chunk of its feature development onto others.

‘Until now, social networks have been closed platforms,’ said Zuckerberg at the [f8] event, calling on outside developers to integrate their applications into the service. ‘Today, we’re going to end that.’

But so far, as popular as those apps have become, what Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time-wasting, and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.

I never thought I would call the often frivolous AOL back in the day–very simply, a Neanderthal version of Facebook–a mature offering in comparison.

While I will admit when I am not chewing nails that a lot of these apps are somewhat fun, I can’t help but ask myself that lyric from the old Peggy Lee classic: ‘Is that all there is?’

And if that is all there is, can Facebook really build a viable and long-lasting business on what is essentially a bunch of games that will ultimately become wearying for users? Doesn’t it need more robust apps that actually are useful and relevant and make Facebook the service that Zuckerberg has often told me was a ‘utility’?

While Facebook–with a cleaner and more strict look and a better navigation–is surely less goofy than rival MySpace for anyone over 12 years old, and its video, photo and email features are nice, the vast majority of its apps are still mostly as dumb as a box of hammers.”

Too harsh?

I think you would not say so after looking over a lot of what is available at the App Store on iTunes.

Lots and lots of the apps there are games, of course, which are the most popular.

But what amazingly clever games, like MotionX Poker with the delightful rolling dice, or the humming swish of PhoneSaber (totally silly, but in a profound manner that Vampire-biting on Facebook will never achieve).

And the list of useful stuff–Pandora Radio, Starmap, WeatherBug, Evernote and WHERE (pictured here)–is long and growing longer, and these seem to enjoy as much prominence and popularity as the sillier stuff.

In addition, the ability to truly use other Web services in a mobile setting–from Photobucket to Yelp to AIM to the New York Times–makes the iPhone an even more useful device to me.

And for each of the apps I can also imagine various monetization schemes that now make a lot more sense since the iPhone platform enhances them with mobility and simplicity (Carling’s branded iPint is very smart, for example).

I also get the feeling that, knowing they would otherwise not be granted entrance into the elegant kingdom of Steve Jobs, developers tried to design their apps just a little more perfectly.

I cannot say the same about adding widgets to Facebook, which only seem to put more burden on my experience there.

Some are great and some are truly awful, but you never know exactly what you are getting until you go through the typically onerous addition process.

That will soon change with the new Facebook redesign.

I do have great hopes for it, as it gets rolled out this week for users, because it looks like it will make the service much easier to manage and enjoy.

I hope so, because right now, Facebook feels too much like a garden in constant need of weeding.

Perhaps this is because these apps or widgets are more useful in a mobile setting, when you are truly looking for a wide range of discrete pieces of information, rather than on a large screen–which gets larger all the time–at home when the browsing experience lets you handle more information coming at you from all over.

I don’t know, but I do know that I have gotten more use out of my iPhone apps than any Facebook app so far, making me more productive and happy in the process.

Yes, the BubbleWrap app is pointless, but it did give me a few minutes to decompress and read the newspaper as my six-year-old son digitally popped away in glee this weekend.

You know what I mean–it’s called adult time.

EverNote Organizes Your Endless Stuff Onto an Endless Tape

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:01:00 +0000

Computer users are drowning in information. Between Web sites and email, and the pictures and documents you download from them, a flood of material pours into our personal computers each day. Organizing it all is a major challenge.

Many people make do with the crude tools the PC provides. They stuff all those documents and messages into folders in the computer’s file system or inside their email programs — until they get lazy. They overload the bookmark features of their Web browsers and cram saved Web pages into their imperfect folder system.

Others just give up and save everything in the Windows “My Documents” folder, where finding the data later can be a scavenger hunt.

Macintosh users with the new Tiger operating system have a leg up in solving the mess. The system’s Spotlight feature finds almost any document or email in seconds, and you can create “Smart folders” that automatically accumulate files based on search criteria you specify. Similar capabilities are promised for the next version of Windows, called Vista, in the fall of 2006.

There is another way to tackle the information overload. For years, some folks have turned to an obscure type of software called information organizers. These are programs designed to collect and organize your notes, as well as snippets of information copied from elsewhere. Users of these are addicted to them.

Among these products are Info Select for Windows, $250 from Micro Logic; and StickyBrain for the Mac, $40 from Chronos. Microsoft entered the field a couple of years ago with a Windows organizer called OneNote, which is $50 after rebate.

A new contender has now entered this field, and it boasts an unusual design. It’s called EverNote, and is for Windows computers only. EverNote is being offered as a free download from its maker, EverNote Corp., at www.evernote.com. A paid version, the $35 EverNote Plus, adds handwriting and shape recognition for people who use tablet computers.

I have been testing EverNote and it works well. It is fast and logical and a good way to round up random thoughts and resources.

Like many other information organizers, EverNote is designed as a bottomless storage locker for your notes and clippings. So, it dispenses with the regular Windows system of creating a new file each time you want to do something and then saving it. Instead, EverNote lets you quickly create notes in one central place and saves the material automatically.

It doesn’t use the interface of a word processor or a virtual notebook. EverNote appears on the screen as an endless tape, with notes falling one after the other down the length of the tape. Unlike tape in the real world, this virtual tape isn’t narrow. It can be whatever width you like, up to the full width of your screen. But it is long.

You see only a portion of the tape at any one time — the portion containing the note you are creating or reading.

EverNote allows you to create notes in several ways. You can just type them in; a new, empty note frame is always ready at the bottom of the tape. Or, you can select and drag text or graphics into an empty note from a document, email or Web page. Or, you can use the standard Windows copy-and-paste system to get content from elsewhere. Finally, you can install a special EverNote icon into your Web browser that will automatically create a note from selected text on a Web page, or even the whole Web page.

In most cases, when you create notes from copied content, EverNote adds a reference line to the note saying where it came from. If you double-click on this reference line while holding down the Control key, EverNote will send you back to the source: a Web page, a document or an email on your computer.

You can assign one or more category labels to each note. Some are automatically assigned based on the form of the note, such as “Web clips” or “Word clips.” Others can be created and assigned by the user, such as “Clips about David Ortiz.”

There are three main ways to navigate the virtual tape and to find notes quickly. On the right side of the tape, EverNote presents a “Time Band,” a single-column calendar with dates and hours, so you can get a note whose creation date you recall by clicking on that date.

On the left is a list of the categories. When you click on a category, the tape shows only the notes that fit that category. Finally, there is a search system that rapidly locates any word or phrase you type and highlights it in yellow in every note in which it appears.

EverNote has too may other features to list here. It saves a history of each version of notes you revise. It has templates for common kinds of notes, like shopping lists and phone messages. It automatically backs up, and can restore, your notes. The company also is working on such things as a version for cellphones and a way to synchronize with multiple devices.

So, if you are lost in a sea of files and data, give EverNote a try. It may be just what you need.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com