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If you followed the progress of our Developer Competition, you might remember the company that took home the Grand Prize: Touchanote. A very cool integration that brings your notes into the real world by associating them with physical objects, Touchanote blew away the Evernote judges as well as the Trunk Conference audience. We sat down to chat with co-founder Hamid Zaidi to learn more about the app, the evolution of its development, NFC technology, and cool, everyday ways you can use Touchanote to remember stuff in your life.
I’ve been using Evernote for the last couple of years. I save everything related to my accounting and also use Evernote for recipes, travel checklists and to-dos. The idea of Touchanote came thanks to my own personal shortcomings — mainly my really bad memory. What if I could just associate my memories with the objects that they relate to? Before Touchanote, I would tape Post It notes all around my house and my office to remind me of things I needed to do. Now, all I need is my NFC-enabled phone and Evernote.
Touchanote lets you associate real life objects with your Evernote notes in a really intuitive fashion. Here’s an example: I have a note in my Evernote account with instructions for how to use my home theater system. I can associate the note with an NFC tag that’s attached to my remote control. If I touch my NFC-enabled phone to my remote control, the note in my Evernote account with instructions for how to use my home theater system will pop up.
Since your notes are available to you everywhere you have Evernote installed, anytime you make an update to a note say, on your Mac, it will automatically update to all of your other devices as well. So, if your home theater system has been updated, you can make changes to your instructions in Evernote and always have access to the most recent version when you place your phone near your remote control.
Above: Watch Touchanote’s presentation at the Trunk conference
Getting Started with Touchanote
If you have an NFC-enabled phone, you can download Touchanote from the Android market. Once you have Evernote and Touchanote installed on your NFC-enabled phone:
- Select your note in Evernote.
- Select ‘share,’ then select the ‘Touchanote’ option that appears.
- Touch the NFC tag with your phone, and you have written the note to the tag.
You can attach a tag to any real life object. Later, to access the information on the tag, simply touch the tag with your phone once again. There is no need to launch an app beforehand; that’s the beauty, notes launch instantaneously.
Who is behind Touchanote?
Touchanote was created by two partners (myself and Cyril). We have a team of eight people, half of which are technical and half of which are experienced in social media and the web. My partner and I blended our expertise areas (mobile and online marketing) to create Touchanote.
Touchanote is made for Evernote users with NFC-enabled phones. Even though our business plan is aimed at the enterprise, the Evernote Developer Competition really put NFC on the map and gave us a lot of insight into how even the average consumer would use it. Touchanote is making larger players realize that there is a market for people who already own NFC smarphones and could really benefit from this kind of service so we’re broadening our initial ideas about our target market to better meet individual consumer needs.
