Leaving Evernote

I loved the idea of Evernote. A specialized, well-designed app for taking naps that persisted in the cloud and had great search-ability. I also liked that I own that content, a lot of my notes are drafts of creative writing or personal reflection, and so I don’t want to store that in my corporate’s OneNote for privacy and continuity reasons.

Lately though, Evernote hasn’t lived up to it’s hype. Meanwhile, Apples Notes has become just competent enough that it makes sense to switch.

My problems with Evernote

Performance
Evernote is abysmally slow on a Mac. Opening the application or creating a new note can take 15 seconds or more. If you’re trying to capture a thought or phrase just uttered, that’s just too damned slow.

Sharing
Evernote is blocked by my company’s firewall. This makes sharing notes a PITA. I guess many corporations would prefer for you to use the bundled OneNote.

Architecture

Evernote is monolithic: I prefer apps that build small; use-case specific apps mean greater simplicity, ease-of-use, less bloat, etc. I don’t need Work Chat, don’t need Tasks, etc.

Interoperability
Evernote friction with Microsoft & other vendors: e.g. Ordered lists moving between Micorsoft Word and Evernote often get trashed. Moving tabular data between Excel or JIRA is a real pain.

Buggy

Things just don’t work. Fields that don’t sort in the notes grid. Full-text search that misses terms. Giant memory leaks, etc. etc.

Privacy
Evernote made some big policy changes and they signal that privacy isn’t paramount for them, as it is with Apple. These changes were made opt-out rather than opt-in. Evernote also leaves encryption turned off by default.

Expense

At ~ $75/year for Evernote Personal, this was a pretty significant expense that only offered marginal value above the free alternatives I have like Microsoft To Do (formerly Wunderlist) and Apple Notes.

Missed things

• No bulk tagging

Throwable Potables (US 8,528,761)

The annual Strategic and Competitive Intelligence conference wrapped up today. I met with over 80 competitive intelligence professionals; product marketers, product managers, R&D folk. Really smart people, and I recommend it if you're in a similar role.

Many R&D and Competitive Intelligence professionals don't use patents as part their research. The predominant reason is that they think that patents are in the domain of counsel, when really, counsel is too busy with administrative tasks to provide primary research. We spent a lot of time educating attendees. 

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Figure 1: US 8,528,761

A booth visitor asked about trends in consumer packaged foods. I ad libbed a search string based on my knowledge about the space. The technology analytics showed us a mix of inventions from marginal improvements to paradigm shifting innovations. In the end, we uncovered a fascinating new area of development that delighted the attendee and demonstrated the insights our customers get from patent literature.

We also came across something of an oddball. US 8,528,761, Launchable beverage container concepts, contemplates a football shaped container, designed to be filled with a potable liquid. The football is fully intended and designed to be used for sport. We were very curious as to what sort of refreshment one might be put into a football. Alcoholic libration seemed a likely guess; we suspected the inventor had been under the influence when conceiving the idea.

While we wanted to dismiss it, but we kept talking about it. We decided to learn more.

Innography's Advanced Analysis shows the current assignee for US'761 is ThinkAtomic. Performing a web search, we found out that ThinkAtomic is an incubator, of sorts, and that they have invested in a startup called Rocket Bottling. Rocket Bottling doesn't have a website, but they do have several YouTube Videos.

On Youtube we found a product called Orange Zimbi being packaged into a remarkably similar shape, and tracking that name, searched and found the product pages for Zimbi drinks and the manufacturer doing business as Xymbiot in Orem, UT, with about 500K in annual revenues.

The visitor told me that this is the practice of "interactive packaging" filled with smart ideas for getting extra value out of the package materials are delivered in. Packaging can also serve dual purposes: traditional roles to protect and market and also secondary roles of place settings, freshness indicators, and entertainment.  Neither of us knew how prolific it was.

Figure 2: Market Map, Interactive Pac

We came back to Innography, and created a search around intelligent/interactive/active packaging. Not surprisingly, packaging manufacturers, Tetra Laval, Graphic Packaging, and Sealed had huge portfolios, and Consumer Packaged Goods companies came in second, more surprisingly were a number of pharmaceuticals manufacturers playing in this space.

In less than 15 minutes, we looked at new products, new trends, and new competitors. And as opposed to most of the CI tools out there, we're projecting years into the future. Moving CI from proactive to reactive. That's the power of patents.