Evernote has been bought by Bending Spoons😲
So I was going to be writing about emailing notes into Evernote this week and how I convert notes into tasks but just as I was half-way though an email landed in my inbox informing me that Evernote has been sold to the Italian company Bending Spoons.
What! Totally unexpected.
I’ll do the notes to tasks thing another week. I thought I’d better write something about the buy out, can’t really ignore it, and also address some of the most talked about concerns I’ve seen on social media.
Who are Bending Spoons?
I’d never heard of them but I had heard of their apps.
Bending Spoons is a mobile app developer from Milan in Italy.
According to Wikipedia, they are one of the world’s largest app developers by number of downloads.
According to their website, they have 90 million monthly active users of their apps, so to be fair they know how to manage scale.
Probably the most important point to make is they are very big into artificial intelligence (Ai) and I think this is important for Evernote.
Stats from their website say their Ai tech:
Enhances 8 million photos a day
Makes 20 billion predictions per day
Processes 10 terabytes of data per day
These are not insignificant numbers.
They also seem to be a decent place to work:
2020: Top 10, Best Workplaces™ in Europe
2019, 2020: Winner, Best Workplaces™ (50–149 employees) in Italy
2022: 2nd place, Best Workplaces™ (150–499 employees) in Italy
2019: Winner, Best Workplaces™ for Women in Italy
2019, 2020, 2021: Winner, Best Workplaces™ for Millennials in Italy
2019: 2nd place, Best Workplaces™ for Innovation in Italy
All this is from their Wikipedia page.
How Ai tech could help Evernote?
Total speculation here…
…but imagine Evernote was using an image recognition Ai, you could search for a cup or a map or a map of London and the Ai could find it.
Maybe we could upload the audio of a meeting and have it automatically transcribed, into different languages or better still transcribed in real time.
How about a PDF being analysed and text and images from within the PDF brought to the surface during searches or even suggested as related notes.
Automatic enhancement when we upload images.
Working collaboratively with notes in different languages and have them translated in real time.
All this is speculation. A lot of things could happen if Ai tech was pumped into Evernote.
What would you like to see?
What about Privacy?
There’s been a lot of social media chatter about data privacy.
To be fair, Evernote stores a LOT of data so moving it would be a huge undertaking. Would this data need to be moved? I have no idea.
If your data gets moved to Italy or anywhere else in Europe then it would come under GDPR rules and GDPR is strict and fines are issued.
GDPR also covers areas like data ownership, retention of data and demands companies store data as securely as possible. You have to make an effort and have a plan to protect customer data.
I live and work in Europe, sort of(!) and GDPR is generally complied with.
What’s an app developer doing buying Evernote?
Lots of social media chat along the lines of “little app developer buying big Evernote”.
None of us know how big either are as they’re private companies.
Bending Spoons are not a small company by any stretch of the imagination.
Evernote is probably not as big as the hype lets us believe.
Evernote is an app no matter what device you use it on and an app developer is basically a software company. Just because they focus on mobile software doesn’t mean its any less advanced.
To quote the press release “…this decision is the next strategic step forward on our journey to be an extension of your brain” which probably translates to something like “We want to do things with the app but it would take too long and cost too much to do it ourselves”. So the buy out instantly gives both companies a huge amount of experienced staff and tried and tested technology.
It will be interesting to see what happens and I also hope the staff at Evernote are looked after well. The ones I’ve spoken to come across as lovely people.
Let me know what you think on Twitter, if its still going!
Have a good weekend.
All the best
Jon
The AI part about Bending Spoons has me concerned privacy mostly). A lot of apps are starting to integrate AI so it’s not unique to EN. They commonly use 3rd party AI services that just adds one more concern for security...