Evernote, a service that offers users an elephant-never-forgets virtual brain, has announced a Trunk extension.
The Evernote Trunk is part app store, part showcase for the service’s integration with other applications and media, from imported magazine content to partner apps that scan in business cards and receipts to its memory.
Evernote has grown to 3.7m users, myself included, on 12 different platforms and 16 different languages since its public launch two years ago.
I use it in browsers by clicking on a plug-in elephant icon to clip a web page. The page can also be tagged and it appears in a searchable “notebook” database at evernote.com, which syncs the information with Windows and Mac desktop software and mobile applications.
Evernote can also receive emailed information, text and audio notes, photos, pdf files and other file attachments. Taking a photo of a business card on an iPhone or other smartphone and sharing it with Evernote triggers optical character recognition that turns cards into searchable contacts.
At the launch of Evernote Trunk in San Francisco, Phil Libin, chief executive, revealed 38 per cent of users’ virtual memories were made up of web clips, 30 per cent were text notes, 21 per cent were images and 10 per cent PDFs and other files.
Phase Two of Evernote’s development is aimed at allowing users “to leverage their [virtual] memories to do more stuff”, he said.
This included analysis tools giving meaning to what they had saved and providing “structured functionality” that would aid tasks such as shopping and travel planning.
For Evernote to achieve this and become a platform for how people organise their lives and store information, it has opened up its programming interface to more than 2,000 partners developing applications that integrate with it.
Only around 100 applications from 67 companies are featured in the Trunk at launch, but many more are on the way. Some can be paid for as iPhone apps downloaded through iTunes, others are free.
Examples shown included Voice2Note, which converts Evernote audio notes into text, and Make magazine, which offers importable notebooks of its DIY projects.
Evernote also plans to become more sociable, allowing users to share their memories with social networks and enabling groups to collaborate on ideas.
Games such as brain training, educational applications and more productivity tools are promised for the future.
There will also be “in-trunk commerce”, where Evernote will handle app transactions rather than handing off to iTunes or the Android Market, for example. In addition, Mr Libin said he hoped to share with the best developers some of the revenue Evernote earns from its 80,000 Premium subscribers, who pay $5 a month for extra functionality.
Evernote’s plans are ambitious – it also wants to be on every kind of device that can be touched, from computers and phones to TVs, cars and refrigerators.
But opening itself up more as a platform gives it a chance of putting users in touch literally with memories they can never normally put their fingers on.
