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Evernote Celebrates Birthday by Joining the Billion Dollar Club (Really?)

Evernote has recently celebrated their third birthday. I also recently had my 21st birthday – it feels good to be able to legally grab a drink finallySmile.  (Hey, if Evernote can lie about their age, so can I…).   Joke apart, I have no idea why a company would pretend to be half as young as they really are – there are quite a few users, yours truly included who remember the early product, back from 2005-2006.

evernote scrollOK, so back then Evernote was really nothing more than a scrawny little note-taker, with a weird scrolling tape metaphor that was hard to get used to, but it already showed unusual flexibility of mixing typed and handwritten text with imaging. Still, the key benefit was price, compared to Microsoft Onenote.  It’s hard to compete with free.

I was truly surprised by the news of their first funding round. Here’s my offending post from 2006 (hm, before they even existed, if you believe the birthday news…):

EverNote – Love You and Hate You

EverNote is the last company I expected to raise venture funding: has a mature product, a mix of freeware and a $35 version, and I pretty much considered them a good candidate for safe, organic growth. GigaOM just reported it EverNote’s funding to the tune of $6M. Wow…

My Love & Hate relationship? The love part is easy to understand; it’s a handy, easy-to-use notetaker, which I prefer to the comparable Microsoft OneNote, and the $0 price is quite unbeatable. The hate part: it really does not fit into strategy of moving off the desktop into the Cloud.

In fact it’s the only application that breaks my sync efforts between two laptops using FolderShare:

Continue reading here.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve » Zoli Erdos)

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EverNote Free Giveaway Only Today

EverNote was my favorite notetaker for several years – now I have a love and hate relationship with it. Why?

The love part is easy to understand; it’s a handy, easy-to-use notetaker, which I preferred to the comparable Microsoft OneNote, and the $0 price is quite unbeatable. (I did not need handwriting, so I used the free “light” version).

The hate part: it really did not fit into strategy of moving off the desktop into the Cloud.

In fact it was the only application that broke my sync efforts between two laptops using FolderShare: if EverNote was loaded at bootup (which is the best way to use it), it “renewed” it’s data file even on the PC I was not actively using, and FolderShare would attempt to overwrite my good working copy with an older one (which however had a newer time stamp). Eventually I just got sick of it and stopped using EverNote.

Ideally I would need an online/offline note-taker, and I really don’t care if it’s a web-based product with offline capabilities or a client product with sync to the Web. Last year EverNote received $6M funding and was expected to release the web-enabled version in a few months. A year later than predicted, but here’s a new version, but from what I can see without the Web capabilities. That said, it is still a good – perhaps the best – offline notetaker, and if that’s what you want, then today is the day to download it: The $50 full version is available free, only today.

Installation is a bit confusing: first you unzip a file, click “setup” only to find it unpacks yet another set of files, then you can click the real install file. Before you get to install the program, you somehow find yourself connected to giveawayoftheday.com which will tell you your program is now activated. Whether that’s the case or not I don’t know; after installation there is no way to tell if my program is registered or not, there is, however a “purchase” link… not very promising, but let’s hope. You will know in 60 days, when some features either de-activate or not. Confusion aside, you should perform the installation today, as somewhere along the process I saw a warning that the install, not just the download has to complete within the promotional period (today).

As for the Foldershare / Sync problem, here’s a good workaround. Happy note-taking!