Zeptopad, a drawing and mind-mapping app for the Apple iPad. In addition, Libin announced that Evernote has been working with a small group of publishers to create “branded notebooks,” collections of content from sources like California Home and Design magazine, BlackBook magazine, and Make magazine that users can now read and annotate from within Evernote.
For Evernote fans—and readers of my coverage here, including my recent two-part interview with Libin, know I’m a big one—the Trunk is mainly a convenient new place to discover apps and services that can make Evernote more useful. I’ve already signed up for Voice2Note ($2.99 a month or $29.99 a year) and have found that it works exactly as advertised, depositing accurate transcriptions of my phoned-in voice memos into my Evernote account within minutes. The service is similar in some ways to Jott, Nuance’s voicemail-to-e-mail service, but Jott is more expensive (starting at $3.95 per month) and doesn’t work with Evernote. I anticipate using Voice2Note to capture reminders, to-do items, and other miscellany whenever I’m away from my computer or I can’t slow down enough to fire up Evernote on my iPhone or iPad. (At least one other Trunk app, Pliq.me, also converts dictated notes into text notes on Evernote.)
For Evernote, the company, the Trunk effort is an acknowledgement that one startup can’t build all the tools needed to deliver on the full offboard-brain vision. “We want people to be able to leverage their memories to do more stuff,” Libin says. “Your external brain is going to extend to any device you touch. We’re going to let you add or discover structure in your data through visualizations and semantic analysis and find connections you may never have known about but that make your life feel more augmented. That’s a lot of work, and we obviously couldn’t accomplish even 1 percent of this ourselves, so we have to rely on partners.”
For Evernote partners, adding Evernote functionality to their existing apps is a no-brainer, if it makes their own products more attractive to customers. For example, I love the way my favorite RSS reader for the iPad, NewsRack, allows me to send articles straight into Instapaper, a convenient e-reader program. But NewsRack would be all the more useful if it also gave me a one-click way to save articles to Evernote. In fact, I’ve written to the developer, Ole Zorn, to request this feature, and he says it’s coming in a future release.
According to Libin, more than 2,000 third-party organizations have downloaded the application programming interface keys needed to integrate their software with Evernote’s, so it’s a safe bet that today’s Trunk will only get fatter. And more profitable for partners: Libin says “in-Trunk commerce” is coming to Evernote this winter, and that the company is exploring ways to share its core subscription revenues with partners who add important functions. “Our goal is that for small companies, it should be a viable business model to make things that work with our external brain,” Libin says.
Ultimately, the creation of the Trunk is a step in Evernote’s development into what so many consumer-facing Silicon Valley Web companies hope to become—the center of an “ecosystem” of other services and applications, in the style of Twitter, Facebook, or the iPhone and iPad. The remarkable thing about Evernote is that it and its ecosystem are growing so quickly, with 9,000 new users registering for the service every day, even though it has none of the social ingredients or network effects that fuel Twitter or Facebook’s viral spread. (As Libin told me back in June, “It’s designed for you, not for your friends.”)
Evernote is thoroughly modern—it is, after all, a cloud-based service that buys so deeply into Web-2.0-era notions about sharing and interoperability. But at the same time, there’s something charmingly old-fashioned about it. It’s just a good service, with a simple business model, serving a real purpose: supplementing our poor, tired-out brains.
