At this time last year, we announced six awesome apps that were selected as finalists in our first-ever developer competition. Today, we’re excited to announce this year’s Devcup finalists, six great apps that are guaranteed to help you get more out of Evernote.

The goal of Devcup is to find apps that our users will fall in love with, that push us to think about new ways of using Evernote, and that are beautifully designed and easy to use. Three weeks ago, the Devcup submission process was closed, and our team of judges began the challenging task of reviewing hundreds of apps with the goal of selecting five stellar finalists. Narrowing down the list to just five apps was an exceptionally difficult task, given the number of quality submissions. Numerous late nights, gallons of coffee and contentious arguments later, our group of Evernote judges agreed on the five apps that we think our community will love. Without further ado…

The Finalists

EV - Brazil - watch the video

Chances are you use Evernote on your smartphone, staying connected to your memories no matter where you are. However, over 4 billion mobile users around the world are still using feature phones. These users aren’t in the digital dark ages, though — they use their phones to access email, Twitter and Facebook through SMS. With EV, they can now access Evernote, too. EV is a deceptively simple SMS client for Evernote that lets you link your mobile phone to your Evernote account. From there, you can create new notes, search your existing notes and set reminders on your phone, and do it all via SMS.

EverClip - Hong Kong – watch the video

Web clips are one of the most popular type of notes in Evernote. Millions of people use our Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari clippers every day, saving articles and information that they find on the web. Most mobile users, however, haven’t been offered a way to clip — until now. EverClip is an iPhone app that watches your clipboard and allows you to send anything you copy in your browser straight to your Evernote account. You can clip anything that you can select on your iPhone, including images, regardless of what app you’re in.

KustomNote - USA - watch the video

Evernote’s unstructured nature is one of the things that makes it so powerful. We don’t tell you how you should use and organize Evernote; we let you do anything that you can think of. Sometimes, though, we wish that we could automate repetitive tasks or ensure that you can capture specific information when creating a note. KustomNote is a web-based app that does just that. With KustomNote, can you browse public note templates or create your own, then use simple fill-in forms to create beautifully-styled notes in Evernote.

LiveMinutes - USA - watch the video

Evernote is personal and private, but many of the things that we save in our Evernote accounts need to be shared with a small group of people, such as coworkers or family members. LiveMinutes is a powerful web-based collaboration tool that allows you to share your Evernote notes in an online meeting, collaboratively edit those notes in real-time, then save everything to Evernote.

PlaceMe - USA - watch the video

Start using PlaceMe with Evernote and you’ll never forget where you’ve been. PlaceMe is an iPhone app that quietly keeps track of everywhere that you go, then saves a daily summary of your travels to Evernote. The information is captured automatically and is entirely private — it’s designed to allow you to remember where you’ve been, not to share your location with others. Whether you want to find that restaurant that you ate at last time you visited San Francisco, the hotel that you stayed at on your vacation three years ago, or where your friend’s house is, PlaceMe lets you remember everywhere you’ve been.

The People’s Choice Award

Public voting on devcup.evernote.com chose our sixth finalist. The community was loud and clear — Spotwish Go! is the People’s Choice!

Spotwish Go! - Brazil - watch the video

Spotwish helps you organize fun activities with your friends, making it easy to get together for dinner or set up a pickup soccer game. Pictures and comments from your group can be added to the event. When your event is done, all of the collective memories that were captured over its course are saved in your Evernote account.

So many great ideas

Throughout the competition, we saw many recurring themes for great apps that work with Evernote. Below are some examples — not an exhaustive list — that will give you an idea of what’s coming. Note that some of these apps aren’t quite ready for widespread use, but all of them demonstrate great ideas for how to use Evernote.

• Study your notes using Retrospection and RevuNote.
• Plan and record trips using TripColor and LikeWhere.
• Keep track of your family using Family Journal and Art My Kid Made.
• Visualize your Evernote account using MohioNote and Bubble Browser.
• Have more efficient meetings using Taccto and ÜberConference.
• Quickly share notes using Snappi and Flynote.
• Geek out in a terminal using GeekNote.

You can view all of this year’s Devcup submissions in the submission gallery.

Next stop: the Evernote Trunk Conference

Each finalist team will be invited to attend the Evernote Trunk Conference on August 24th in San Francisco, where they’ll take the stage to pitch their app and compete to take home one of three top prizes: the $20,000 gold prize, the $15,000 silver prize and the $5,000 bronze prize. Audience voting at ETC will help determine the winners, so if you want to have a say in who goes home with the win, register for ETC today!

There’s more to come

The finalists and their presentations at ETC don’t mark the end of this year’s Devcup. The goal of Devcup is to put great apps in the hands of our users, so we’ll be reaching out to every developer who submitted an app, helping them polish their work and get it the Evernote Trunk. To encourage developers to keep working, we’ll be offering special promotional opportunities to the best of these apps. More details will be announced at ETC on August 24th.