The Brazilian team of EV says that 70% of the world’s six billion mobile phone users don’t have a smartphone, and are thus excluded from the benefits of using Evernote on the go. They created EV to address these users. It’s an SMS gateway to the Evernote cloud, and we think it’s pretty slick. EV won the Bronze medal in our Devcup competition this year. See their qualifying slideshow.

With EV, users can create notes by texting them to the EV service. They then appear in Evernote. Users can also search their archives, including searching for text in pictures and files, and get responses back via text. If the result is an image, EV will send an MMS message.

Finally, EV adds intelligence to notes. If you have a note that has the word, “Reminder,” in it, with a time and date, EV will send you a text reminder at the correct time.

But mostly we like EV because it provides on-the-go access to literally billions of people. Yes, the world is moving towards smartphones, but it’s a big world with a lot of people in it, and there’s a big opportunity for EV to help folks get organized with the Evernote platform and the phones they already have.

See also the Devcup Gold winner, EverClip; and the Silver winner, KustomNote.

It’s always great to see developers adding capabilities to Evernote, via the Trunk. One of the coolest extensions I’ve seen comes from KustomNote, which I was happy to see win the Silver prize in our Devcup competition this year.

KustomNote is a browser-based template system for Evernote notes. You can create fields, just like you would for a database, and then create notes that have these fields embedded in them, to keep your note-taking organized. See a full slideshow of all the KustomNote features.

So if you have a particular way of recording information about the wines in your cellar, or you want to record specific information each time you meet with a potential customer for your small business, or you want record the best routes for bicycling nearby, you can create templates that meet your needs exactly, with none of the entry fields you don’t want and all the ones you do.

For people who are a little obsessive about how they store information, it’s a great invention.

It seems there are a lot of these people out there, too. Since word got out about KustomNote — with no ads or marketing other than what we’ve been saying at Evernote — the service has seen more than 6,000 signups. KustomNote CEO Hussein M. Ahmed told me he’s upgraded the service’s Amazon Web Services instance three times to keep up with the growing user base.

You can create detailed templates for Evernote with KustomNote. Click image for slideshow.

Ahmed says his work is spurred on by Evernote users. “I’m still enhancing and fixing the Web app with the tremendous help of thousands of users. They are so passionate, helpful, experienced and knowledgeable. They sure know more than me when it comes to being organized.”

Users of KustomNote can also see the community at work themselves. Anyone who creates a note template can share it with other users. Maybe you want to keep track of wines but don’t want to build your own template to do so. There’s a chance that another user has created one that you can “clone” and use for your own cellar. I count about 200 public templates so far.

Coming next: Mobile versions of the service, for iOS and Android. Also, an offline note creation tool.

KustomNote is in the Evernote Trunk.

See also: The Devcup Gold winner, EverClip.

Have you tried KustomNote?

Everyone who’s seen and used the EverClip iOS app will understand why this product won the Gold medal in our Devcup competition (see the finalists) at the Evernote Trunk Conference. This little utility makes it easy to gather up all the things you see on your iPhone or iPad that you want to save into your Evernote account. All you have to do is copy items to the clipboard. The background app collects them for you, and makes it a one-button step to zap them over to Evernote. It’s like having an Evernote Web Clipper in iOS.

Based on a combination of votes from Evernote employees (who universally find EverClip impressive) and our global user community, EverClip won our competition for the best apps submitted this year. We were happy to award the $20,000 gold medal prize to the EverClip team at Ignition Soft, an app building company from Hong Kong.

EverClip wins the Devcup Gold. Left to right: Phil Libin, Francis Chong, Rafe Needleman, Seth Hitchings.

Shortly after handing Ignition co-founder Francis Chong his ginormous novelty check (good luck getting that in the overhead bin on your flight back home), I caught up with him to talk a bit about the project. Chong told me that EverClip was built because he, and his partners, “really needed it.” That, he says, is the key to building a good and popular app. But you do have to, “share it with your friends to see if it really works.”

EverClip can collect clippings from all your apps and send them to Evernote.

EverClip started as a project to help smartphone users clip and share content easily, Chong said. Evernote entered the picture since, “we wanted to save the time of building a full backend. Evernote was a good place to begin.”

I asked Chong what his biggest challenges were. Obviously there were technical issues, like, “converting the pasteboard content from different apps to Evernote’s XHTML dialect,” he said.

Design was even more important, though. “We had to design the simplest interface that worked, and also keep the app functional.” Here at Evernote, we’ve found the app, indeed, simple and fun to use. When you copy something to the clipboard with the app running, your phone buzzes briefly to let you know you’ve saved the item. Once you’ve copied all the items you want, from whatever apps you want, you can head over to the EverClip app to shoot the clips into Evernote. Since EverClip stores your items while you work, you don’t have the clipboard anxiety that you might have when items are only temporarily kept in your device’s clipboard buffer.

Chong told me the work his team has put into the app has been worth it. “The first week we launched generated enough sales to pay us back for the 300 or so hours of work we put in to building the app. And since the Devcup success, we can arrange to put more time in to it, to bring out new features, and bring in more users.”

About those new features: Chong says a future update of the app will see smarter clipping. If you just clip the URL, you’ll get the page’s content, too, rendered using the Readability content extractor. Also look for an in-app browser to get layered in.

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.

We’re excited to announce our second annual worldwide developer competition: the Evernote Devcup! Devcup challenges software developers and designers to create awesome products that help over 25 million users do more with Evernote. We’ll be awarding over $100,000 in prizes and giving finalists the chance to present their work to the attendees of this year’s Evernote Trunk Conference in San Francisco.

Here’s what we’re giving away:

• Gold – $20,000 cash prize
• Silver – $15,000 cash prize
• Bronze – $5,000 cash prize
• 6 finalists – $10,000 cash prize, and airfare and lodging to attend ETC 2012

What are we hoping to see?

Great apps combine captivating functionality with beautiful, intuitive design. The entries that we select as Devcup finalists will be apps that we expect tens of thousands of people to use every day to capture and recall the important things in their lives. We can’t possibly enumerate every good idea that we’ve ever heard, but here are some general themes to help you get started thinking about what to build:

• Evernote Food and Evernote Hello are mobile applications that provide users with a dedicated experience for a specific Evernote use case. What other use cases could benefit from a customized application, and what type of rich, structured information would they contribute to a user’s Evernote account? What about a movie app that manages the list of movies that you want to see and your thoughts on those that you’ve seen, and combines that information with outside data from your Netflix queue and Rotten Tomatoes?
• Products like Nike+ and Fitbit have brought Quantified Self and lifelogging into the mainstream. These products generate an immense amount of data about us. How can Evernote fit in? What type of data could such products store in Evernote, and how could you incorporate all of the other information in a user’s Evernote account to enrich their life log?
• One of last year’s finalists noted that there are two types of notes that we create in Evernote. Some, such as shopping lists, start out being important but diminish in value over time. Others, such as records of great meals, aren’t that valuable in the short term, but become wonderful memories later. Dividing the world of Evernote notes into these two categories, what types of application could be built to focus on one area or the other?
• Evernote’s products are used by tens of millions of people around the world. Only a third of our users are in the United States, and about a third are in non-Western countries. We design products that we think have universal appeal and utility, but there are probably also opportunities for apps that serve the needs of a specific national or cultural group. What app would you build for users in your country that isn’t necessarily as obvious to an outsider?
• Evernote users love to learn about our products. Books, blogs and videos that help users get started with Evernote or get more out of it are extremely popular – there are currently 33 printed books about Evernote in Japan alone! What can you build to teach Evernote or guide great Evernote habits?

These themes barely scratch the surface of the opportunities that are available. Whether or not you plan to participate in Devcup, we want to hear what apps you’d like to see built for this year’s competition. Join the discussion at devcup.evernote.com or attend one of our worldwide meetups.

A look back

Last year, nearly 1,000 developers from around the world participated in the developer competition. Many were from the US, but almost a quarter were from Asia, another quarter were from Europe, and we had meaningful participation in South and Central America. All six of the finalist teams attended ETC and presented their submissions. You can watch their presentations at evernote.com/about/etc. Last year’s Grand Prize winner was Touchanote, an Android app that allows you to associate real life objects with your Evernote notes using NFC. Another one of the finalists, Notable Meals, formed the basis of Evernote Food. A third, Colorstache, allowed you to search your Evernote notes by color.

The details  

Any piece of software that integrates with an Evernote API is eligible for Devcup. You can build for desktop, mobile or the web. Here are the key dates:

• Now through July 2nd - Form a team, come up with an idea, build an app!
• July 2nd – Submission deadline (11pm PDT)
• July 23rd - 6 finalists announced
• Late summer - Finalists present their entries at the Evernote Trunk Conference; the Grand Prize winner and runners up are chosen

Devcup meetups around the world!

To help you get started, we’re holding a number of meetups around the world. These are a great place to brainstorm and discuss the feasibility of an idea with our developer relations staff, connect with others who are participating in Devcup, and learn more about Evernote. We’ll also be holding webinars if you’re unable to attend in person. For a list of events, and to find all of the information that you need about Devcup, join the conversation at devcup.evernote.com.