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.

We love Skitch so much that we decided to buy the company. Skitch is an amazing Mac application that’s changed the way people capture, annotate and share images. Chief Skitchers, Cris Pearson and Keith Lang are moving from Australia and joining Evernote to lead a significantly expanded Skitch team focused on supercharging the product.

The Evernote Story

Our journey at Evernote has been an exciting one. In 2007, two teams came together to develop a new type of product, a service that would help the world remember everything. In 2008, that vision turned into the Evernote you know today. Now, 14 platforms and 12 million users later, we’re taking the first steps in the next phase of our company: new applications.

Why Skitch?

We were drawn to Skitch (har har) for one simple reason: we love and use their product with Evernote. For years, one of our most requested feature areas has been related to improved handling of images and annotation capabilities. Our users take and share millions of photos and screenshots already, but the experience isn’t as good as it could be. We debated about whether to add the improved functionality into Evernote or build a separate app to handle it. Finally, we decided to do both. Thanks to Skitch, we will.

Skitch will make Evernote better (and vice versa)

As Skitch users will attest, this is one of the most innovative, easy-to-use applications available on Mac. We’re going to keep it that way. We are committed, not only to making the Skitch Mac app more awesome, but also to bringing Skitch to every desktop and mobile platform under the sun. In addition, in the coming months, you’ll see tighter integration between Evernote and Skitch to let you easily draw, ink, grab screenshots, annotate and share your favorite memories.

We gain more than just an app; you don’t build one of the top Mac applications without having some great ideas, which is why we’re also looking forward to the Skitch team’s input on Evernote. You’ll be seeing their influence in many aspects of all our products.

What’s changing?

Everything you currently love about Skitch will stay the same and we’ll be quickly introducing a lot of new, exciting stuff.

The full version of Skitch, which used to be $19.95 in the Mac App Store, is now completely FREE! There are no more trial versions, because you don’t need them. No more ads and no more restrictions, either.

New users can sign into Skitch with their Evernote credentials. Existing Skitch users can continue to use their Skitch.com accounts.

Using Skitch with Evernote today

Using Evernote and Skitch together today is easy. Drag images from Evernote into Skitch for Mac, annotate and edit them, then use the “Drag Me” feature in Skitch to bring it back into Evernote. Or, simply take screenshots in Skitch and drag them into Evernote. Our goal is to make this experience much more streamlined.

Much More to Come

Our goal is to make Skitch a household name with everyone that wants to draw, sketch, annotate, doodle, sign or highlight something. That happens to be everyone. Our engineers are working on tying the two services together. We’re combining our years of experience with inking, handwriting recognition and pen input with the fantastic capabilities of Skitch.

This is a pretty great way to make sure that the elegant screen-capture app we fell in love with all those years ago finally gets the resources it deserves.

Please join us in welcoming team Skitch into the Evernote family!

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