LangaList, November 18, 2004

EverNote

Long ago, when I was the Editor-In-Chief of Byte magazine, I had the opportunity to visit Russia--- it was still the USSR then--- at the dawn of perestroika. I went a couple times, and both trips were amazing not only to observe the birth of the local PC industry there, but more so to see an entire culture opening to the outside world. It was fascinating, exhilarating--- and at times a little scary. 8-) (Remember the Russian Parliament building that Boris Yeltsin shelled with tank fire? I stayed in a hotel about a five minute walk from there...)

I met some wonderful folks in Russia; people active in one way or another in the fledgling consumer PC world there. Soviet-era computer hardware was truly awful, but the software was something else: Often elegant, unusual, and unfettered by the material constraints of a hobbled and inefficient Soviet economy.

One of the friends I made in Moscow was Stepan Pachikov, whose energetic and wide-ranging intellect kept him involved with many products and projects, ranging from founding a computer club for Russian kids who otherwise might never see a PC; to selling advanced handwriting-recognition software to Microsoft and other Western high-tech companies.

We visited each other's homes several times; and Stepan eventually moved his family to San Jose. Over the years, we drifted out of touch--- until last week, when this arrived in my email from a PR person in Stepan's newest company:

Hello Fred, Back at Byte, you had covered Stepan Pachikov, CEO of ParaGraph and his team's pen computing product, Calligrapher.

It's been many moons since then, but with your interest in emerging technology products, I wanted to let you know that Stepan and his team are at it again with a new product, EverNote 1.0. EverNote lets you put all your notes and content (text, web clips, images, etc.) on an endless, electronic roll of paper and makes them instantly accessible anytime, any place.

You can download your own free beta copy of EverNote at http://www.evernote.com/en/downloads .

We plan to ship smartphone and PDA versions by the end of the year, complete with the ability to take a digital snapshot from your mobile device and have it appear automatically in EverNote. Linux, Symbian, Palm, Mac versions are in our to-do list....

EverNote takes some getting used to, but is an interesting idea:

EverNote is a new software product that gives you a single place for all of your notes. With EverNote, you can capture and easily find all kinds of notes: text, Web, email, handwriting, image clips and more. EverNote innovates by storing content on an endless, virtual, time-stamped roll of paper so you can quickly jump to any date and scroll chronologically through your notes, without having to open them individually.

The beta's free to try: Give it a look!