Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on August 2011

The platform-independent, cloud-based note-taking application Evernote has also been around for a few years, but rather than ingratiating itself only with tech-savvy, GTD anal-retentive types, it has now broken through to mainstream software users. That’s largely due to its go-anywhere mobile attitude: the Evernote service works on both Windows and Mac, the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android, Android Tablet, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and Palm devices. While the market is stuffed with audio- and video-recording note apps, Evernote adds optical character recognition to the list, meaning you can snap a photo of someone’s meishi, sync it, and retrieve the information from the card later from any other device by opening the app and searching for keywords. While you were away, the Evernote service noted all the words and names on the photo and made them searchable. Now that’s clever. Our writers have been known to use it for writing review notes in bars and restaurants and to take mind-jogging pics of the ambience. Needless to say it’s all geo-tagged so that drunken stumbles away from the bar can be retraced on the map. Notes are then copied straight from the desktop into Word and finished up. Talk about techno literacy. If you’re not keen on phone-cam photos, hook up the above Eye-Fi card to share your pro pics directly to Evernote and keep everything in one place. And the bottom line is it’s completely free—a great example of how apps can use ad-supported revenue to supply a great product. Though if you must, there is a no-ad, bigger-upload-size, MS Office document-capable, video-taking premium version for $45 per year.

Evernote. www.evernote.com