Innovation in Evernote ramping up

Evernote continues its awesome story under new CEO Chris O'Neill.

I've been a user of Evernote since near the beginning, and blogged about it here 108 times, more than any other topic. I first blogged about Evernote seven years ago, in May 2009. I even wrote an e-book about Evernote (now withdrawn as it is much out-of-date).

I was shocked to see today that I hadn't written in over five months about Evernote. That may be a testament to to how much of my life it has become--I tend to take it for granted.

Interviews like this one from The Verge with the new CEO refreshes my enthusiasm.

Since O'Neill took the job, he has gotten Evernote out of the lifestyle business. They no longer sell Evernote branded socks, messenger bags or other goods.

And he closed down Evernote Food and other Evernote based apps that never seemed to get a large user base.

He is cognizant of the fact that the base product has gotten bloated and needs revamped.

And he recognizes that Google, Apple and Microsoft are all working hard to move Evernote users to their own products.

We are seeing some new innovation already. Their Android client now recognizes the kind of document you are taking a photo of when you scan a document into Evernote. It recognizes if it is a business card, post-it note or other. It can even do some correction to the angle of the image.

For example, when I took the photo of this image, the menu was at an angle.

Evernote automatically found the document, and when I had it fully in view, Evernote took the photo automatically. And it corrected the angle so that the image appears in Evernote straight on.

This latest release on Android also has some annotation abilities, like circling items and drawing circles around items. This is some of the functionality we lost when Evernote dropped their Stitch application.

I think we are about to see some more interesting innovation from Evernote.

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