Evernote

Evernote is a privately owned company headquartered in Redwood City, California.[6] Its current CEO, Francesco Patarnello, has been in his position since January 2023 following the acquisition by Bending Spoons. Evernote has domestic offices in Austin, San Diego, and Bothell, Washington.[7][8] It has international offices in India, Switzerland, Chile, and Japan.[9][10] As of Feb 2023, the company employed nearly 400 people.[11]

After being founded in 2004 by Russian–American computer entrepreneur[12] Stepan Pachikov,[2] EverNote Corporation ('EverNote' stylized with a capital 'N' at the time) started marketing software for Windows desktop PCs, tablet PCs and handheld devices like the handwriting recognition software ritePen and the note-taking and web clipping application EverNote (also with a capital 'N'), a Windows application which stored notes on an 'infinite roll of paper'.[13] Under new CEO Phil Libin, the company shifted its focus to the Web, smartphones and also the Apple Mac, starting with Evernote (now with lower-case 'n') 3.0 in 2008. The Evernote Web service launched into open beta on June 24, 2008,[14] and reached 11 million users in July 2011.[15] In October 2010, the company raised a US$20 million funding round led by DoCoMo Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures and Sequoia Capital.[16] Since then, the company raised an additional $50 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures,[17] and another $70 million in funding led by Meritech Capital and CBC Capital.[18] On November 30, 2012, Evernote raised another $85 million in funding led by AGC Equity Partners/m8 Capital and Valiant Capital Partners.[19] On November 9, 2014, Evernote raised an additional $20 million in funding from Nikkei, Inc.[20]

On May 7, 2013, TechCrunch reported that Evernote launched Yinxiang Biji Business into the Chinese market at the Global Mobile Internet Conference.[21]

Linda Kozlowski was named chief operating officer of Evernote in June 2015, but left before the end of the year.[22][23]

Libin stepped down as CEO in July 2015 and was replaced by former Google Glass executive Chris O'Neill, but remained Executive Chairman.[24] In October 2015, Evernote announced it would lay off 18 percent of its workforce and close three out of 10 global offices.[25] In September 2016, Libin stepped down as executive chairman.[26] In February 2017, CEO O'Neill said in a blog post that the business was cash-flow positive.[2]

In August 2018, Chief Technical Officer Anirban Kundu, Chief Financial Officer Vincent Toolan, Chief Product Officer Erik Wrobel, and head of HR Michelle Wagner left the company.[27] Wrobel and Wagner both joined in 2016.[28] On September 18, 2018, 54 employees—about 15 percent of the workforce—were laid off.[29] In a blog post, O'Neill said, "After a successful 2017, I set incredibly aggressive goals for Evernote in 2018. Though we have steadily grown, we committed too many resources too quickly. We built up areas of our business in ways that have proven to be inefficient. Going forward, we are streamlining certain functions, like sales, so we can continue to speed up and scale others, like product development and engineering."[30]

On October 29, 2018, Evernote announced that Ian Small, former CEO of TokBox, would replace O'Neill as CEO of Evernote.[31][32]

In January 2023, Evernote was acquired by Bending Spoons, an Italian mobile app development company.[33][34] At the same time Francesco Patarnello took over as CEO from Ian Small.

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  Evernote Corporation's headquarters in Redwood City, California (2016)
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  Phil Libin, co-founder, former CEO, and former executive chairman of the Evernote Corporation

In 2010, the programming language used to write Evernote's software was changed from C# for version 3.5 to C++ in version 4.0 to improve performance.[35]

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.[36]

Where suitable hardware is available, Evernote can automatically add geolocation tags to notes.[37]

As of November 2018, Evernote Pro integrates directly with Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, and Evernote Pro adds an integration with Salesforce.[38] All versions of Evernote also support integrations through IFTTT[39] and Zapier.[40] In 2013, Evernote deprecated its direct integration with Twitter[41] in favor of these third-party services.[42]

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  Information model for Evernote
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  Information type model for notes in Evernote
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  Information type model for users in Evernote

On supported operating systems, Evernote allows users to store and edit notes on their local machine,[43] using a SQLite database in Windows.[44]

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 service also allows selected files to be shared for viewing and editing by other users.

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.

Scannable captures paper quickly, transforming it into high-quality scans ready to save or share.[54]

Skitch is a free screenshot editing and sharing utility for OS X, iOS, Windows, and Android. 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. Originally developed by Plasq, Skitch was acquired by Evernote on August 18, 2011.[55] On December 17, 2015, Evernote announced that it will be ending support for Skitch for Windows, Windows Touch, iOS, and Android on January 22, 2016.[56] Evernote said it will continue to offer Skitch for Mac.[45]

Evernote Web Clipper is a simple browser extension that lets a user capture full-page articles, images, selected text, important emails, and any web page.

The book-summarizing service Blinkist offers members to synchronize their highlighted text passages to Evernote. This happens in notes for each book with the title of the book as the note title.[57]

On March 25, 2013, Evernote announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom to provide German customers with free access to Evernote Premium for one year.[58] In January 2014 the partnership was expanded to additional European markets.[59]

Evernote Smart Notebook

In August 2012, Moleskine partnered with Evernote to produce a digital-friendly notebook with specially designed pages and stickers for smartphone syncing.[60]

All Samsung Galaxy Note 3 phablets included a free one-year subscription to Evernote Premium.[61][62][63]

On August 13, 2013, The New York Times reported that Telefónica Digital and Evernote entered into a global partnership agreement, giving Brazilian customers free access to Evernote Premium for one year.[64] Under this global deal Telefónica users in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, the UK and Spain were also offered the promotion.[65]

The service has experienced several cases of losing customer data.[66][67][68]

On June 11, 2014, Evernote suffered a crippling distributed denial-of-service attack that prevented customers from accessing their information; the attackers demanded a ransom, which Evernote refused to pay.[69] A denial-of-service attack on August 8, 2014, resulted in a brief period of downtime for evernote.com; service was quickly restored.[70]

On March 2, 2013, Evernote revealed that hackers gained access to their network and accessed user information, including usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. All users were asked to reset their passwords.[71][72] In the wake of this, Evernote accelerated plans to implement an optional two-factor authentication for all users.[73][74][75]

In December 2016, Evernote announced its privacy policy would be changing in January 2017,[76] leading to claims the policy allowed employees of the firm to access users' content in some situations.[77][78] In response to the concerns, Evernote apologized and announced the policy would not be implemented,[79][80] and that its employees would not have access to users' content unless users opted in.[81][82][83]

In late 2020, Evernote released Evernote v10, written from scratch in the Electron framework, to replace older versions on multiple platforms.[84][85] Some users noted the new app was much slower than the previous Windows and iOS versions,[86] had many features removed, and did not work with some default keyboard layouts, including Turkish, Latvian, and Polish, due to conflict of hardcoded key bindings.[87][88]