I commute to San Francisco using the Bay Area's Caltrain system, and every now and then I will board at the Mountain View, California station. On my way there, I will drive past this small, unassuming building with a large green sign that says, "Evernote". Between San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, tech companies are as abundant as the coffee shops, and it's hard to overlook just one. However, Evernote is a small company with big ideas.
The problem is simple: in today's world, we browse and digest much more information than we can possibly remember. It's even gotten to the point where we even have a term and acronym for this phenomenon : WWILF, or "What was I looking for?" We browse and read news, videos, pictures, and thing that catches our eye or our curiosity, and before you know it, you're looking at the latest wall shelves at Ikea, when what you originally began searching for was chicken recipes for tonight's dinner. Pretty soon, we have run past 50 different pages on 50 different topics, promising ourselves to re-visit maybe 5 of the interesting ones when we have the time. But we never do. Because the next time we open our browser, we're going to run past another hundred different pages, and not even think about the session before.
So how are we to keep track of the tons of places and things we see every day? We could bookmark these things, but bookmarks are clumsy, and they are meant more for places we frequent, not places we just intend to re-visit once or twice. We need a notepad, one that we can easily just scribble our browsing notes onto. And one that will follow us around, regardless of what computer we use.
This is Evernote's solution. It's a small program that saves pictures, links, webpages, videos, and random notes, all with a click of a button. You can organize it into folders, and use its powerful search tools. However, one of Evernote's greatest ideas is to tap into 'the cloud'. With automatic syncing, all of your notes are available from any computer, because Evernote's website has a web-based portal to obtain your entire history.
So, you could get all of those links about that do-it-yourself backyard project that you had copied on your home computer, all at work. Or, you can look up the engine modification research you started at work, on your laptop while you commute home. It's easy, it's seemless, and best of all it's free.
Now, you can even grab all of your information on your Android phone:
Evernote
Evernote turns your Android phone into an extension of your brain. This award-winning app lets you remember and recall anything that happens in your life. From notes to ideas to snapshots to recordings, put everything into Evernote and watch as it all instantly synchronizes from your phone to the Web to your PC.... Read More
Downloads >250,000
Developed by Evernote Corp.
