Evernote focusses its attention on the core product: Ken Inoue, General Manager, APAC and Japan

Evernote has been a popular choice when it comes to synching information across devices. Back in the time, when smartphones were beginning to make their way into our workflows. I had the opportunity to speak with Ken Inoue, General Manager, APAC and Japan on how things are looking at Evernote. Here are excerpts from the conversation. In recent times there has been a renewed interest in cloud services. Doesn’t that come as a reason for concern to Evernote? There has always been an ever increasing amount of interest for “cloud services” with the popularity of smartphones across the world. What about services like Google Drive, Keep, or other cloud services? What about other services adding sync features and posing a threat to Evernote? There are several distinct groups of services that use the cloud to sync between devices, and allows for access from anywhere. There are straightforward cloud storage services, chat/collaboration services, task management tools, and office suites, which are all somewhat related, in a very large market for productivity services. We’ve found through our studies that people use a combination of different cloud services to make them more productive and don’t rely on any one service to do everything. We, at Evernote too use various cloud services and they work very well with each other. We also provide great integration with services such as Google Apps (now G Suite), Microsoft Outlook, and Salesforce, among others. Also, there are services such as IFTTT and Zapier that offer easy ways for services to complement each other. Evernote’s truly platform agnostic product and background makes it a perfect tool in such an environment. Evernote has always been a pioneer and leader in the note-taking and organisation space, and we continue to provide the best service to customers through a combination of our own functionalities, and through integrations with partners. The market for such services is huge, and we’re very excited at the prospect of serving unmet productivity needs, and collaborating with others. What is the key feature offered by Evernote, that you see stands the test of time? Search: our in-house OCR and handwriting recognition, tagging, and intuitive UI together makes finding things so much easier Capture: our clean and easy web clipper add-ons, annotation features, and ability to save any type of file makes capturing infinitely efficient Sync: our totally platform-agnostic service lets users sync everything automatically across any computer, phone or tablet, which they can access anywhere, anytime Has the world come a full circle for Evernote, since after exploring other features, now it is focusing on the core product? Evernote has a culture of always innovating and experimenting new technologies, and that will continue to be the case in the future, for example with AI and Machine Learning. We’ve gained valuable insights from our past trials, and utilities that are useful to users have been incorporated as new/additional features to our core Evernote service. It’s true that we’re focusing more on the core, but everything we’ve done in the past has definitely made us what we are today. Could you tell us more about the handwriting recognition and other technologies that Evernote has mastered over the years? Is that enough to sustain Evernote? Aren’t device manufacturers and platforms such as Google also focussing on handwriting as an input to give better user experience? Evernote’s roots are a team of Russian engineers who developed a handwriting recognition engine which they licensed to Apple for their Newton product in the mid-nineties. They became the core team that later became Evernote – and built the original service around that technology. Handwriting as an “input” method is another different area where both software and hardware advancements have been made. Evernote should certainly benefit from such trends, since what is inputted naturally needs to be recognised to make it searchable. Evernote also holds a large portfolio of patents which we have built over the years – but we believe that what ultimately matters is the user experience that is built using these technologies, and we strive to combine design and technology to build ever user-friendly services. No service company can be successful just on technology alone – and we need to continue to excel in our product, marketing, support, among others. In a country like India, is Evernote planning to work on more languages? Evernote currently indexes and recognises 30 typewritten languages and 11 handwritten languages, with improvements and additions on a regular basis. Some languages are easier than others, but we generally try to prioritise languages that are used by a larger number of Evernote users. Languages, written or even spoken, are areas where great advancements can be expected with the use of AI and machine learning, among others. These are some of the areas we wish to aggressively pursue in a partnership with the Google Cloud Platform, which we just announced in September this year. Is the future digital only, or a hybrid between pen-and-paper and digital? Would we see more devices like the Livescribe Pen? Or is the future looking like digital only? We have learned over the years that people use pen & paper for various tasks, and they will continue to do so. However, the issue is not analog or digital, all or nothing – people can and will benefit from using a combination of analog and digital, and we provide several easy ways for people to benefit from using both. An example is our Scannable app, which is an iOS app that lets users easily scan (in many cases handwritten notes and whiteboards), digitalise, and then save into Evernote. And of course, with Evernote’s OCR technology, such scans are all searchable. Another example is our long-lasting collaboration with Moleskine, an Italian notebook brand, where we recognise the beauty and usefulness of physical notebooks. We have also collaborated with scanner manufacturers to provide an intelligent destination for all digitalised scans. Pen and paper will not go away, but we will certainly be providing means for users to be more resourceful, efficient, and intelligent in the way they use these traditional writing tools.