Evernote, the note-taking service, has acquired Cocoa Box’s Penultimate for an undisclosed amount. For the uninitiated, Penultimate is  a digital handwriting app designed for the iPad and available for just 99 cents in the Apple app store. The app looks like a notebook and users can jot down notes, draw an image with the help of a stylus or fingers, or even post pictures.

Ben Zotto, the founder of Penultimate, will be joining Evernote. Ben also notes in a blog post that Evernote will not only not shut down the app but will also make the app available on various platforms. At the time of writing this, Penultimate already offers basic Evernote integration where users can send notes directly to Evernote.

The acquisition makes sense for Evernote and Penultimate. Evernote is already good at handwriting recognition and its integration with Penultimate will bring Evernote to the iPad audience. In fact, according to Apple, it’s the #4 best-selling paid iPad app of all time. Whereas for Penultimate, Evernote will keep the app independent and bring it to a wider audience with its promise of bringing it on various other platforms. Ben Zotto will also lead the effort to put handwriting and digital ink functionality into other Evernote products and platforms.

Currently, the Evernote app is available on OSes such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Chrome OS, Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. We can’t wait to see how Evernote integrates Penultimate on its app on touch enabled operating systems.

Evernote recently raised $70 million in a Series-D round at a valuation of $1 Billion from Meritech Capital and CBC Capital. The company is said to be preparing for an IPO.

Buy Penultimate for iPad for 99 cents from iTunes App Store.

I have been a big fan of note-taking software which allow me to quickly jot down notes for later. In the past  I have covered several note-taking and sticky notes software and even extensions for Google Chrome. However, Evernote has always been one of the best software I have used for my desktop and mobile devices.

One of the things I usually miss while using Evernote is the lack of ability to post sticky notes on my desktop and a desktop widget which would allow me to quickly jot down notes without having to open up the app itself.

While searching for a Sticky notes application which would work with Evernote, I came across the "Sticky Notes" app in the Evernote Trunk, where external developers create apps based on the Evernote API.

Also Check Out Some Similar Software:

• Note Taking and Sticky Notes Apps for Chrome
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• wikidPad: Wikipedia Like Note Taking Application

Sticky Notes for Evernote has looks and feels like any sticky notes app for desktop out there. However, the advantage of using this app is that it automatically synchronizes your notes to Evernote making it available on multiple devices. Additionally, you can also setup the app on multiple desktops and it will automatically synchronize notes on them, provided you link it with your Evernote account.

One of my favorite apps is without a doubt one called “Evernote“.  There have been several articles about it on our site and for good reason. Evernote is like having your brain accessible on your smartphone, your tablet, or your computer. Now the makers of Evernote have produced a companion app called “Evernote Food“. It is designed to help you remember great dining experiences.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and had a wonderful meal and later wished you had looked more closely at the ingredients? Maybe you’re like me and you traveled somewhere on a trip and had the most wonderful restaurant experience and later could have kicked yourself for not writing the name of the restaurant down. Evernote Food is a great way recollect such experiences.

Evernote Food was released about four months ago and at this time has only been released as an iPhone app. Recently, they added new features at the request of some of their users. The features they highlighted on their blog were as follows:

• Meal Search – “so that you can quickly jump to that amazing brunch you had”
• Location Search – “We’ve added the ability to search for restaurants and points of interest by city and name. So, no matter where you are now, you can find the location you were back then.”
• Date Selection Screen – “set the date of a meal”
• My Places – “create your own favorite locations”

Evernote has been a great way to take or carry around your digital notes. Be it an audio or image or a clipped webpage, Evernote offers a nice way to collect them and keep the notebook in sync across all your devices. The Evernote client for Android just got better with the new speech to text feature that enables you to take notes just by recording anyone’s dictations.

Tap the icon to create a new note and in the toolbar below long-press the audio note tool (which you previously used for adding audio notes). You will notice a new icon (mic in a speech bubble) popping out. Select it and the audio tool icon will be replaced with it. Once you are ready to take a note, tap the new speech-to-text icon and start talking. The tool promises to detect the words and auto-fill the text description of your note or the title depending on where the typing pointer is set. This also appends the recorded audio to the note for further reference.

However, like any other app that uses the speech to text feature, Evernote (for Android) also has serious limitations regarding the pronunciations it can interpret. As you can see from the screenshot above, the words I exactly uttered for the title and description are “Hello this is awesome” and “You can now dictate to take notes with Evernote for Android“. I do not possess a perfect news-reading accent but I can speak words that are easily comprehensible for any average literate. Considering that fact, the note taking accuracy for the app is impressive.

However, the introduction of the feature is quite relevant to the context of the app. The newly added feature is quite a help if you are someone who need to take notes now and then. No matter how handy your phone’s keyboard is or how big the screen is, someone taking dictations for you is always a relief.

Apart from the improvements made in the main app the Evernote homescreen widget for Android also got updated with new customize-able skins and widget elements. You can get them here. The updates were meant for the ICS (Android 4) phones although it worked fine for my Gingerbread device too.

The web is not as beautiful, as it was 10 years back.

It is certainly rich in information but no longer beautiful, thanks to all those widgets, advertisements, plugins and social media buttons plastered across each and every website you come across.

Organizing information is another big, big problem. Bookmarking is so 2007, it just doesn’t work anymore. Reading and accumulating information gets really troublesome, when you are running sort of time and hurrying through the finer details of a story.

Evernote’s Clearly changes all this.

Clearly (nice name) provides a simple way to read only the text version of a webpage, right inside Google Chrome. No advertisements, no banners, no buttons just the content, you and your browser. Following is an example of how clear a webpage becomes, once you hit the magical Clearlybutton:

Clearly comes with three preset themes to choose from, so if you are fond of reading articles on dark backgrounds and green text, you can always create your customized reading environment. The advantage of turning a webpage into its text only version is that you can read a lot faster, without getting distracted by nearby ads. Furthermore, it is super easy to copy excerpts, scroll, use the real meatand be done with it.

There are tons of other distraction free reading tools out there but Clearly has a unique offering. You can clip an article directly to one of your Evernote notebooks, or assign a unique tag to it. That way, the URL of the webpage is saved to your Evernote account, which can later be synched with the desktop client. The benefit here is that you can quickly bookmark important stories without getting lost among a pile of 2 dozen news items.

If you launch Clearly on a multi-page article, it will automatically turn it into a single page, so you can read the entire story at one place without having to click, click and click ….. all the way to the 10th page.

As of now, Clearly supports only Google Chrome while extensions for other browsers is a work in progress. Clearly wont let you save images or files but it is indeed a better alternative of Readability. Watch the following video to see Clearly in action:

Earlier, it was announced that Evernote acquired Skitch and was making it freely available to everyone. Today, the Evernote Blog announced some great new features for Skitch. In case you are unfamiliar with the two, Evernote, is one of the best cross-platform note taking applications available. Skitch is a simple to use annotation application that was originally just for the Mac, but since its acquisition by Evernote, is available for Android phones as well.

One of the cool features of Skitch, is the ability to take a photo on your Android phone, annotate it, and then publish it to a note in Evernote. It already had some great features but it lacked one real handy feature, the ability to crop. Today’s update changes all of that. Let’s say you have a picture on your phone that you would like to attach to a note, but you would only like part of that picture to show. You can open that picture in Skitch and tap the “Crop” button which surround the picture with a dotted rectangle. See the picture below. The red arrow points to the new “Crop” button. The center image in the picture shows you what it looks like when you click the “Crop” button. Once you have your picture cropped the way you like it, you can click the elephant symbol in the upper right corner and it will be sent to Evernote.

Courtesy of Evernote Blog

You’ve always had the ability to draw freehand on top of a picture using Skitch, however, today’s blog post announced some improvements. They have made improvements to how the app tracks your finger movements which in turn is supposed to return smoother lines. I thought that I would give this a try. Below you can see two images of hearts that I drew on my phone. The first image is in the older version of Skitch.

The second image is in the new version of Skitch.

As you can tell, neither is a Picasso, but that is my fault. You will notice, however, the lines on the second picture are smoother. I would say this is a definite improvement.

I look forward to seeing more come out of this partnership with Evernote and Skitch. This seems like a combination that can work very well. I envision a scenario where the boss has written a million things on a white board and you want to be able to remember it, so you pull out your phone, take a picture of it, and send it to Evernote. Then you open it in Skitch and annotate the picture with arrows and highlight the important stuff. Evernote makes it all searchable. Now you have a well documented meeting.

What about you? What cool ideas can you come up with for these two applications? Would you use it mostly for fun or would you use it for business? As always, your comments are welcome.

Dropbox and Evernote are two services, which I cannot live without. If you have not yet tried or started using these services regularly, I highly recommend you to do so.

Now, HTC has confirmed to the folks over at Pocket-Lint that all their Sense 3.5 based handsets, including the recently announced Rhyme, will come with free 5GB of Dropbox storage space. Hopefully, HTC will also tightly integrate the service with their Sense UI, and include some nifty features like automatically backing up your personal data including your clicked pictures.

Normally, Dropbox users get 2GB of free space when they sign-up for the service, but HTC users will get 5GB of free space with their new Sense 3.5 UI based phone. For additional space, Dropbox owners can use their referral system or directly get more space by paying for it.

While, there are other cloud based storage services from other giants like Microsoft’s SkyDrive,   and Apple’s iCloud, none of these services comes close to Dropbox. SkyDrive offers 25GB of free space, but does not have a dedicated Android app.

A few days back I interviewed Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote. We talked about Evernote’s roadmap and vision forward. Phil shared his thoughts on the competition and the progression of the app to a platform with additional, related services.

• Funding: Evernote received $20 million in October 2010 in first round of funding and another $50 million in July this year.
• Profitability:   Evernote achieved gross-margin profitability very early on, about two years ago. Six months back, the company got even on cash flow. However, Phil shared that they will probably go in red again in cash as they hire more people and look forward to buy few companies. The latter made sense soon after the interview with the Skitch acquisition.
• Users: Evernote announced that they’ve crossed   the 10 million users mark in June 2011. During the conversation, Phil specified that they are past 12.5 million now and are growing by about a million users each month!
• Competition: Phil mentioned that Evernote does not look at the competition in users of  similar products like Microsoft OneNote, but the pen-and-paper users. While 10 million users use Evernote, there are another 7 billion who aren’t using the same. Since Evernote follows a freemium model, other products cannot beat Evernote on price, but only on quality and features.

Source: I Love Windows Phone

Evernote is arguably the best note-taking application available for all the platforms on desktop and on phone as well as on the Web. It allows individuals to capture, find, and interact with their memories. Evernote has announced a few new features and capabilities as part of an Android update (3.2). Apart from some useful UX changes, there are some great new feature additions too.

Skitch Integration

Evernote recently acquired the popular annotaion app: Skitch. This update is the first version of Evernote to showcase the  technology as part of Evernote. When you create a note or edit an existing one, you’ll see Skitch’s heart logo in the toolbar. If you have Skitch installed, you’ll be taken into Skitch and in Skitch, you can draw and doodle, then send your sketch into Evernote by tapping the elephant icon in the top right.

Offline Search

You can now search within your Evernote account when you don’t have a network connection. In the past, you were able to access certain notes offline, but searching for notes wasn’t possible. While Premium users can take entire notebooks offline and search within them, free users can only search within notes that they viewed or created on their Android device. The Premium users will also have the ability to search within their PDFs while offline.

Slideshow View for images

The latest update features a dedicated image viewing mode: Slideshow View. Within a note, tap on an image, photo or something you marked up in Skitch to view it full-screen on a black background. Swipe left and right to view all the other images in that note. If your note contains an image and nothing else, then it will automatically open in Slideshow View.

Anyone who makes a full time living by writing for the web knows the importance and value of a cross platform note taking application. I have been following the Write it downphilosophy for years and Evernote has been my best friend ever since.

Whether I am scrolling through my RSS reader or writing something, I always use Evernote to quickly jot down ideas, notes, deadlines and reminders. The best thing with Evernote is that I can attach videos, images and links to my notes from any computer or from my Android, so this helps me stay focused on the work I am currently doing and refer to an earlier note later.

The good news for Evernote users is that now you can now upload and attach almost any file type to your Evernote notebooks. Previously, Evernote only allowed PDF, images, text and audio attachments in your notebooks but the company has lifted this restriction recently. Now you can upload almost any file type to your Evernote account, which may include ZIP files, PSD templates, FLV videos and so on.

There are two advantages of this new enhancement. First, all your files remain accessible from a single and visually searchable location. No longer you have to find an old email attachment from your ever expanding inbox or pull out your external hard drive, just to find a very old document. Whenever you receive something that you think you may need later, it’s a good idea to quickly open your Evernote desktop client, write down a small note and upload the file as an attachment. 2 years later, you can find the same file from your online Evernote account, so it doesn’t matter whether you have shifted to a new office or your computer has been replaced during that time.

And since you have the ability to attach a custom text note to the file attachment, you would probably have more information and data to start with. This is far better than file sync services like Dropbox, which will sync only the file but not any custom note you may want to attach to the file.

Smartphone and mobile users can use this same feature to upload podcasts, audio recordings and videos to their Evernote notebooks, directly from their phones. This is very useful when you are attending a meeting and want a central location to archive text notes and upload files or attachments to the same note you wrote just a few minutes back. And since every notebook in Evernote can be shared with anyone, you can share a complete project with your colleagues without having to separately send the files as email attachments. Nice!

Please note that Evernote has only lifted the restriction for file types and the older restrictions for file size still hold good. Free users can make a single note of up to 25MB in size and can upload up to 60MBs of new stuff every month, while Premium users can make a single note of up to 50MB and can upload up to 1GB of new stuff every month.