Phew. Well, we survived our very first conference. We weren’t sure what we were getting into when we announced ETC (the Evernote Trunk Conference) and we were thrilled with the results. People came — and lots of them (over 400, in fact). Evernote users, fans, developers, and partners filled Terra SF, a beautiful 3-story space in San Francisco for our all-day event.

Big announcements and informative sessions

We kicked things off with the announcement of our Skitch acquisition (you can now get it in the App Store for free, and download it to your Android device). Clearly, people love Skitch as much as we do; it was a trending topic on Twitter shortly after the announcement.

The day was filled with presentations from notable individuals, like Tim Ferriss and Gordon Bell, exciting users, including Michael Hyatt and Carley Knobloch, and the finalists from our Developer Competition. We talked about Evernote architecture with our CTO, discussed ways to create a killer app, and the decisions that help companies reach the next level of growth.

The Developer Competition

The event also marked the launch of our first developer competition. Nearly 1,000 developers participated, and from their submissions three winners were chosen: the Grand Prize, Student Prize and Wildcard Prize ($50,000, $10,000, $10,000, respectively). Each of the six Grand Prize finalists presented their apps to the ETC crowd and a global audience via UStream. Viewers’ votes were combined with community and judge votes to select the Grand Prize winner. You can read about each of the amazing finalists here. Congrats to all of them!

$50,000 Grand Prize Winner: Touchanote
Developer: Wiseleap Solutions, Montreal, Canada

Touchanote is an Android app that lets you associate real life objects with your Evernote notes. Assign your Evernote notes to NFC tags — the contactless technology that has made the mobile wallet possible. Open the note by simply touching the tag with an NFC-enabled mobile phone. Remind yourself of your to-do list at your desk, put tags on all your devices and associate with notes containing serial numbers and manuals, or attach an NFC sticker to your luggage tag associated with a checklist note in Evernote.

$10,000 Wildcard Winner: Read-along Bookvids
Developer: Arlo Faria, Berkeley, California

Read-along bookvids is an app that lets you automatically turn a static book into an animated video in which pages turn in-sync with narration. Just take photos of pages inside a book and record yourself reading along. That’s all. Place all of the notes into a notebook and enjoy a whole new way to ‘read’ a book. Using Evernote’s image recognition, combined with Read-along’s speech recognition technology, Read-along Bookvids is able to detect when to turn the page. When your voice reaches the end of the page, the app automatically flips to the next page.

$10,000 Student Prize Winner: Desk in the Clouds
Developer: Bernhard Caspar, University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany

Desk in the Clouds is a web and Mac app that lets you create a personalized, curated view of the notes you care about most. Drag notes from your Evernote account to a virtual desk, where you can change their position and order. It’s like creating a mood board of your Evernote content. Once notes are on your ‘desk,’ you can modify them and even create multiple desks by adding tags to notes (ie: ‘Business’ or ‘Cooking’). Any modifications you make will automatically be saved and restored when you visit the site. To start using Desk in the Clouds, simply log in with your Evernote account.

Time to Party!

We ended the night with a fun party and an exciting lineup of users who wowed the audience with their awesome presentations. Food was provided by some delicious food trucks and local vendors (including Delica, El Tonayense, RoliRoti, and Marge Bakery), and there were plenty of drinks to fuel the night. We think it’s fair to say we’re blown away by the experience.

Thanks again to all of our incredible speakers and attendees. And thank you to our community, for getting involved in many different ways throughout the event — you truly made it a special day…time to start planning ETC 2012!

Did you attend ETC? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.