Evernote and Yinxiang Biji are separate services that are developed in parallel and share much of the same code-base and features (you can read more about that here). Yinxiang Biji Business will offer the same great speed and quality of service that users have come to expect from Yinxiang Biji.

Evernote Business: Already 5,000 Strong, And Growing

Since we launched Evernote Business in December of last year, it has grown to nearly 5,000 businesses worldwide and is now available in 77 countries. We’re excited to see more individuals benefiting from Evernote in the workplace to discover knowledge, help their teams be more productive, and empower employees to work together.

If you live in China and want to sign up for Yinxiang Biji Business, then please go to http://www.yinxiang.com/business. Users outside of China can sign up for Evernote Business: http://evernote.com/business/

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and instructions.

In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that any of the content you store in Evernote was accessed, changed or lost. We also have no evidence that any payment information for Evernote Premium or Evernote Business customers was accessed.

The investigation has shown, however, that the individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords. Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption. (In technical terms, they are hashed and salted.)

While our password encryption measures are robust, we are taking additional steps to ensure that your personal data remains secure. This means that, in an abundance of caution, we are requiring all users to reset their Evernote account passwords. Please create a new password by signing into your account on evernote.com.

After signing in, you will be prompted to enter your new password. Once you have reset your password on evernote.com, you will need to enter this new password in other Evernote apps that you use. We are also releasing updates to several of our apps to make the password change process easier, so please check for updates over the next several hours.

As recent events with other large services have demonstrated, this type of activity is becoming more common. We take our responsibility to keep your data safe very seriously, and we’re constantly enhancing the security of our service infrastructure to protect Evernote and your content.

There are also several important steps that you can take to ensure that your data on any site, including Evernote, is secure:

• Avoid using simple passwords based on dictionary words
• Never use the same password on multiple sites or services
• Never click on ‘reset password’ requests in emails — instead go directly to the service

Thank you for taking the time to read this. We apologize for the annoyance of having to change your password, but, ultimately, we believe this simple step will result in a more secure Evernote experience. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Evernote Support.

The Evernote team

If you’re having trouble resetting your password, read this FAQ. If you still need help, please contact Evernote Support.

Take Flight with Evernote

Paul Gibbs, co-owner of PictureThis Ballooning, contacted us and offered to host a mini Evernote meetup in the basket of one of his balloons. How could we turn down a ride? Paul is a four-time national champion balloon racer who now spends his mornings piloting balloons over beautiful Melbourne. Running his business isn’t all flying though. Most of his days are spent managing the business. He needs to maintain agreements with landowners and sponsors, track daily flight logs, and plan out his future flights. Paul uses Evernote to organize it all. If you’re in Melbourne, book a trip with Paul and ask him to share Evernote power tips along the way.

Building a Winning Team

Australia has its own version of football, and boy do they love it. Ben Groom is the head of strategy for the Melbourne Football Club, which plays at the Australia Cricket Grounds to 100,000 fans. It takes a staff of 80, a team of 45 players and a large group of volunteers to field the team. Ben thinks about how to run the organization effectively, how to build the best team, and how to engage with the fans. Like most professionals, he has to do a lot of research, organize information, and synthesize everything into a strategy that the team can follow. Evernote is the perfect tool for him. Many of the coaches even use Evernote to monitor player performance and give them feedback.

Evernote Business is Here

Over the course of our several days in Australia, we heard story after story from business owners and executives about how Evernote was already an important part of running their workplace. And now, they can start using Evernote Business to connect the knowledge of the individuals within their teams to get more done.

Evernote Business was built to address the needs of people like Paul and Ben. Their challenges are the same challenges that we at Evernote face as our company grows: building knowledge, sharing ideas and keeping everything organized and on track. Evernote Business makes this possible by allowing individuals to use the same Evernote they love, but with additional features that help with sharing and discovery of what others in your company know. Business Notebooks and the Business Library encourage your teams to collect and share with each other. Related Notes magically show you what others know related to the work you’re doing. As an Evernote Business Admin, you also receive top-priority support from our Customer Success team to ensure your deployment runs smoothly.

Speaking of the Customer Success team, they have one of my favorite internal examples of using the Business Library. They publish questions and issues that they hear from customers into a Business Notebook that is available to the whole company. Product managers quickly respond to new feedback as it appears, so all members of our global Customer Success team have the best available information. This also gives our team great insight into what our customers want and the ways we can improve Evernote.

We’re really excited about all the ways that people around the world are using Evernote and Evernote Business to make their companies more productive.

Sign up your company for Evernote Business today »

Get started with Evernote Business »

Evernote Business, like Evernote itself, is a global product. More than 40% of our initial sign-ups for Evernote Business came from outside the United States. We’re incredibly grateful to our users who have brought Evernote into their workplace and for the enthusiasm that the global business community has shown towards Evernote Business. The support we’ve received from our users is not just inspiring us to build an even better product, but it has also fired up our Evernote Trunk partners, a number of whom are about to introduce great business-focused Evernote apps and services designed specifically to work with Evernote Business. A few of these integrations are already live in the Trunk, including UberConference, a service that allows you to create and share notes during conference calls and the Evernote-integrated line of ScanSnap scanners from Fujitsu.

In just over two months, Evernote Business has gone from a small closed beta to helping thousands of individuals get more done at work. We’ve received great feedback from our user community, which has inspired many new features and refinements, including easier user account management and improved knowledge discovery. In addition, we have been growing the size of our Global Customer Success teams to ensure that we are delivering the highest, most responsive level of customer support possible.

We’re just getting started.

Interested in getting Evernote Business at your company? Visit the Evernote Business site to learn more, or don’t hesitate to contact our team if you have any questions about Evernote Business. We’re here to help!

Join Evernote Business today »

The bike, built by Republic Bike, is just like the ones you’d spot around our office. Ours are available for employees for running errands, getting to the train station, or just getting some exercise. One lucky Evernote user will soon be riding around town in style on a brand new, special edition Evernote bicycle, just like ours.

How will you use Evernote in 2013?

There are two ways you can enter this giveaway: either leave a comment on this blog post, or submit a comment on our Evernote Insider Facebook page, sharing how you plan to use Evernote in the New Year. Blog comments must include the hashtag #EvernoteBicycle to make your entry official. We’ll randomly select one winner from among the blog and Facebook page entries.

If your name is selected, you’ll have an opportunity to choose between two types of bicycles. Due to shipping restrictions, the winner must reside within the continental United States only. Official rules here.

Happy New Year from the Evernote Team!

[Update: This giveaway is now closed.]

By Chris Traganos, Senior Web Developer at Evernote

We’ve held a number of successful hackathons around the world and recently hosted our biggest one ever in São Paulo, Brazil. Teaming up with Samsung and Wayra Incubator, we challenged developers and designers to build apps that would work on the Evernote platform over the course of just 48 hours.

Brazil is home to a solid startup community and a hotbed of talent. In fact, two of the winning teams in our Devcup competition at ETC (EV & Spotwish) are based out of Brazil. For our second hackathon in the country (the first was held in May), we wanted to drum up excitement by embarking on a roadshow that would introduce students at prominent Brazilian universities and technical prep schools to the Evernote platform and our event. Over 100 developers and designers accepted our challenge and we were thrilled to see what they came up with.

Hack time

This year, we’ve been focused on collaborating with technology partners that compliment and enhance our cloud service. Teaming up with Samsung Brazil, we gave developers the opportunity to create apps that would run on Samsung Android devices and leverage the Evernote API, our platform for storing and creating notes for users. This was our first platform-specific hackathon and introduced us to some amazing developers working to solve big challenges.

On the day of the Hackathon, participants arrived at the premier hub for tech innovation in South America: Wayra Brazil HQ, a Telefonica Digital initiative to promote entrepreneurship and accelerate disruptive startups in Europe and Latin America. The schedule for the weekend included:

• A developer meetup at a local restaurant where participants were provided with an overview of our platform and had the opportunity to meet and think about app project ideas for the weekend.
• Kickoff. Right away, developers naturally formed into groups of 2-4 and spent the next 24 hours planning, prototyping, designing, and coding their projects through completion.
• Wrap up. 20 teams presented their apps and demo to the audience and a lineup of Evernote, Samsung and Wayra judges.

Prizes, Pitches, and the Big Winners

Three levels of prizes were up for grabs:

• First place: A trip to Evernote HQ in Silicon Valley for mentoring, Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet, and a Galaxy Camera
• Second place: Week of mentoring in São Paulo with Evernote and a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet
• All participants received 3 months of Evernote Premium, Samsung devices for raffle, and additional giveaways

And the first place winner was…

Epicnote, an app that uses game mechanics to analyze and improve your use of Evernote. You can learn more about it here.

You can view all the submitted apps here.

The Evernote Ecosystem & Platform

Thousands of developers are using the Evernote platform to build some incredible apps that provide an even more powerful experience to our users. Our goal for this hackathon and others is to support these developers as they build apps that could be used on a daily basis by millions of people.
We look forward to hosting more hackathons and developer events in the new year. If you are a developer or designer who is interested in building apps and features that work with Evernote, make sure to review the API documentation on our Evernote developer website.

Visit the Evernote Trunk, our collection of apps and products that help you do more with Evernote, to discover products and services that enhance your Evernote experience.

Obrigado!

As we’ve talked about in the past, there is no exit strategy at Evernote. Our goal is to build a permanently meaningful and enduring company; a hundred year startup. In order to accomplish this, we have to separate liquidity from exit. This latest round is another step on this journey. By giving early shareholders the opportunity to sell some of their holdings, we reduce the pressure to exit while at the same time forging relationships with important new long-term investors who can help shepherd the company to, through, and beyond an eventual IPO.

The additional funds brought in from the primary portion of this round will make sure that Evernote can continue to focus all of our energy on building the best possible products, without being distracted by external market conditions. It’s nice to have this extra peace of mind, even if we don’t strictly need it.

I’m humbled by, and grateful for, the support we’ve received from all of our users, employees, partners and investors. In particular, I’m happy to welcome AGC Equity Partners/m8 Capital and Valiant Capital Partners to the Evernote team. Thank you for your confidence.

It was a good time to cover this topic, since we’ve just released dramatically redesigned products for the Mac and for iOS, as well as a new Evernote client for Windows 8. They are the most designed products we’ve released so far. By that I mean they reflect our latest philosophy, which is to put the “experience first.” That means that we’re focusing on making the features and functions of Evernote’s applications fit users’ needs and likes more carefully. The upshot: Our apps look better, and work better in the real world.

The new apps appear to be simpler, but paradoxically they also will allow us to build more useful features into them as time goes on. But I’ll let the Evernote Talks speakers explain it in the videos of the event.

Here’s the rundown. In this video (part 1) I do an intro, and then at the 4:55 mark you can hear Jeff Zwerner, our VP of Branded Products and Experiences, explain the Evernote product philosophy. After him, at 18:45, Evernote’s chief Designer, Gabe Compodonico, talks about the design of the new Mac and iOS apps in some detail.

In video 2, Product Manager Naomi Pilosof talks about how we designed the “onboarding” experience for the new iOS client. All apps should welcome new users, we think. Naomi explains how we do it. Then, at 11:25, there’s an audience Q&A session with all the speakers.

We’re going to be doing more Evernote Talks events. If you have a topic you’d like to see us cover, drop me a note, rafe@evernote.com. These events are open to the public and free, and if you can’t make it or get tickets, we’ll again post the video online.

Rafe Needleman is Evernote’s Platform Advocate, and author of Evernote’s Opportunity Notes blog about startups.

In the meantime, if you prefer to use the version prior to Skitch 2.0 for Mac, you can download it here and use it until the new version fits into your workflow. Of course, you’ll be missing out on the new features in 2.0, but we’ll be working hard to make 2.0 the more appealing choice for you in the long-term.

As one of the founders of Skitch, I want to say that Skitch is something very personal to me. I realize that we’ve been so heads down for the last 16 months building that we’ve not taken the time to say hello and share our perspective on what’s happening in our world. And Skitch is all about sharing perspective.

So let me begin with a little history, and then share our roadmap for Skitch, below.

Skitch is Born

In 2004, Skitch started as an idea which grew into the barest of working prototypes — nothing more than a red rectangle on the screen. But we loved it. It was used by us and close friends for four years with features layered on over time. Skitch went ‘public beta’ in 2008. The public beta lasted for another 3 years, where it continued to accumulate features, polish, and a group of passionate users who loved its idiosyncratic UI. There’s probably a dusty award sitting unclaimed in some post office for ‘longest public beta ever.’ In fact, Skitch was only officially 1.0 for a short period before we started talking to Evernote.

Hello Evernote

Scholarly types might call it a ‘deictic gesture,’ but the rest of us just call it “pointing and talking”. I read somewhere once that this ability to direct attention to, and make some comment on *that* thing is a skill that upgrades a small group of humans from a saber-tooth’s smorgasbord to smart and effective hunters/gatherers/creators/builders. The penny dropped when Phil Libin and the brilliant people at Evernote framed Skitch in this way — as the ‘point and grunt’ tool for our modern, digital, life. They and we, realised that together we could help millions of people become smarter and more effective through a shared perspective. That’s why Skitch joined Evernote.

Acquisition

Skitch was acquired by Evernote in late 2011. At the point of acquisition we had one part-time developer. Fourteen months later, you can find me sitting alongside more than 25 of the smartest and most hard-working people I know, all working directly on Skitch.

In those last 16 months we’ve designed, built and released:

• Skitch on iOS, including an iPhone and iPad-specific UI
• Skitch for Android, with a phone and tablet UI, including a 2.0 version
• Skitch for Windows 8
• Skitch for Windows Desktop
• A completely re-written Skitch 2.0 for Mac

I’m really proud of what we’ve built. We’ve made a tool that’s now in the hands of more than ten million users. People love being able to use Skitch not just at their computer, but wherever they are. But we’re not finished, because there are some things we didn’t get right, some things we screwed up, and some things we simply didn’t get to yet.

Skitch 2.0 for Mac is the most visible example of this. It’s a tool loved and used daily by many, of course including me. So why did we re-write, and rethink Skitch for Mac when going from 1.0 to 2.0?

Re-thinking Skitch for Mac

Firstly, if you looked under the hood of Skitch 1.0 you would see that it was being held together by five years of duct-tape and good intentions. The entire app needed to be re-written for us to ever move forward; for example it’s easy to forget that Skitch 1.0 for Mac had no way to resize shapes, no way to re-direct arrows or even transfer your Skitch Library to a new machine if you upgraded. We had to start from scratch to build a modern Mac app.

Secondly, I wanted us to re-think what made Skitch for Mac great. How could we make Skitch simpler, more friendly to the average Mac user? In the time since we started making Skitch, many great apps have grown to fill in functional niches better than Skitch ever could. So we didn’t think we needed to include those things. How could we build the Skitch app of the future if the UI was already overloaded? So we re-thought much of how Skitch for Mac looked and worked. We didn’t get it all right, and we’re certainly not done.

Future Skitch for Mac Roadmap

Since Skitch 2.0 for Mac came out, here are the 1.x features that users have been most vocal about bringing back:

Menubar Extra support
The original Skitch 2.0 shipped without a separate menubar icon. We’ve had to change a bunch of things around to make the menubar helper play well with Mountain Lion and sandboxing, but I’m happy to say that it’s already back in the Skitch 2.02 version available now.

Multiple file formats from the Drag Me tab
Already back in 2.02.

FTP/sFTP
Coming back to Skitch soon.

Auto creation of sharing URLs
Coming back in the next few weeks, as a user-selected preference (lots of people don’t want this to happen by default for privacy reasons).

Short URLs
While short URLs can be quite convenient, they come with a security risk. The chance of somebody stumbling across a random “private” file that’s been shared with a short URL are many orders of magnitude higher than with the long URLs we’re currently using. Many of our users understand this and still prefer the convenience of short URLs for not-super-sensitive Skitch documents. Short URLs are coming back soon — with appropriate notifications to alert users to that may be unaware of the risks.

Direct Hosting of Skitch Images (Deep Linking)
Image hosting is a very different business than Evernote’s. Most image hosting companies try to monetize their users through a combination of ads, behavior tracking, lead generation, data mining or other “indirect” methods. Evernote doesn’t do any of these things. We don’t make money from your data and assume that everything you put in is private and completely under your control. That’s why we got rid of direct image hosting on Skitch.com. We’ll be putting it back, with some constraints to make sure that it doesn’t get abused, in the next few weeks.

Storage, synchronization and sharing options
You can do three things with your documents in Skitch for Mac: (1) sync them to Evernote and make them accessible on every Evernote-enabled device, (2) save them locally to the filesystem so you can do anything you normally do with files, and (3) share them directly via email, Facebook, Twitter and other services. I think that covers the whole gamut. All three options are available now and will be getting easier to use in upcoming releases.

Multiple fonts and custom colors, streamlined cropping and resizing, automatic type tool selection
All coming back, with an interface that makes them far easier to figure out and use than in the 1.x versions.

The best Skitch is yet to come

Of course we’ll be doing a lot more than just putting improved 1.x features back into the new Skitch. We’re working on some really amazing stuff that should appeal to our most loyal users as well as bring in many millions of new fans. Imagine being able to Skitch on top of different document types, communicate complex ideas via email without typing a single line of text, and going on a manned mission to Mars. In the next few months, you’ll be able to do at least two of these things in Skitch!

All of this is possible only with the passion, energy and resources that Evernote has put behind Skitch. I am personally humbled to work alongside the Skitch team, whose members have worked late nights, cancelled vacations and poured their souls into something I’m fortunate to have been involved in. I’ve never known a collection of smarter, more caring creators of apps than those at Evernote. We’ve got lots of work to do, and I look forward to it.

Keith Lang, Chief Designer for Skitch

• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy

This post highlights the important changes to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, but we first want to emphasize something that hasn’t changed: Evernote’s Three Laws of Data Protection.

• Your data is Yours
• Your data is Protected
• Your data is Portable

These laws continue to be our core guiding principles for protecting our users’ data. In fact, we have made a number of changes that are designed to clarify these Laws and to provide additional information for our users to enable them to understand how to protect their data and how we collect and handle your data and personal information. These are the significant changes we want to highlight for you:

Easier to Read

The first thing individuals will notice when reviewing our new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy is that they are more conversational with less legal jargon. We hope that the updated description of how we operate the Evernote Service and the respective commitments between Evernote and our users are much easier to read and understand.

A Global Company

As part of our effort to better support the needs of our users around the world, we have established a company based in Zurich, Switzerland called Evernote GmbH. This wholly-owned subsidiary will be managing our business and the Evernote Service for our users who reside outside of the United States and Canada, and will be contracting with those users under Swiss law. The Evernote Service and all of its servers will continue to be operated by the California-based Evernote Corporation. For our users in the European Economic Area, this means that Evernote GmbH is the data controller for data protection purposes.

Preparing for Evernote Business

As we announced at the Evernote Trunk Conference in August, we will soon be launching Evernote Business. We have updated our Terms of Service to reflect how existing Evernote Service accounts will co-exist with Evernote Business. Existing Evernote users who are invited to join an Evernote Business account will find that their existing account gains a number of enhancements, most notably the ability to access and share notebooks with others in that business. Evernote Business accounts will be managed by an Administrator who has rights to allow or restrict an individual user’s access to the business’ notebooks, but the Administrator is not provided any information about any user’s personal Evernote account. (We will not even tell an Administrator if an individual user’s account exists.) Nor can the content in an Evernote personal account be accessed, viewed or otherwise affected by an Administrator.

Evernote in Schools

We’re thrilled with the number of educators and administrators around the world who have shown interest in using Evernote in their schools, so we have modified our contracts with respect to use by underage individuals who might not be old enough to enter into a contract on their own, including specific guidance for schools in the US where we want to ensure that the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act are satisfied.

Planning for the Future

We have established a policy not to disclose our users’ content to others, even next of kin, after a user’s death or incapacity. We have included this within our Terms of Service and encourage our users to decide whether their content should be available to others, and plan for this eventuality. We have also provided more guidance on the process by which user accounts are closed and how users can delete content from their accounts.

Resolution of Disputes

We have revamped our dispute resolution process by introducing arbitration provisions that will enable users throughout the world to resolve disputes they may have with Evernote more expeditiously and less expensively.

Using arbitration to resolve claims means that users will not be required to travel to California (or Switzerland, for Evernote GmbH users) to file a lawsuit and appear in court and, if the amount of the claim is less than US$10,000, the arbitration may even be done over the phone or internet, depending upon the circumstances. In an effort to resolve all disputes promptly, we are also including a provision that requires both parties to use good faith to initiate the arbitration proceeding within 30 days, with a mutually acceptable arbitrator managing the process.

Our changes will provide users outside the US an option to have their dispute resolved through arbitration, but under a special US law, we are requiring users in the US to use binding arbitration as the exclusive means for resolving disputes and to agree that such claims will be resolved only between them and Evernote (prohibiting participation in class actions or similar representative actions).

We feel strongly that requiring arbitration of disputes on an individual basis will enhance our ability to work with our users to resolve disputes, while ensuring that an individual user maintains control of the issue raised and resolution desired – and that this will happen much more quickly than the long months or years that class action matters typically require. Because we are requiring arbitration for US users (and others subject to the US Federal Arbitration Act), we will pay the arbitration-related fees for all claims up to US$10,000 and even in cases involving more than that amount if those fees would be prohibitive compared to litigation costs, unless, in either case, the claim asserted is determined by the arbitrator to be frivolous. We appreciate that this is a significant change, so we will permit existing Evernote users who do not agree with this change to “opt-out” of the arbitration agreement by notifying us via the methods described in our Terms within 30 days of December 4, 2012 (the effective date of our new Terms).

Please Read Everything

We strongly encourage everyone to read our new contract terms carefully, in their entirety. The content placed into Evernote is important, and all of our users should feel completely comfortable entrusting it to the Service. This post does not describe all of the changes to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and is not, after all, our contract with our users. The provisions in our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and the other documents are the binding contract terms. We hope our users agree that these terms are an improvement and, as always, we welcome input and feedback. Thank you for your support.