Name: Tuomas Rasila Company: Norfello Country: Finland App: DocScanner Platforms: iOS, Mac, Android, S60 Personal site: www.rasilagarage.com

Tuomas Rasila is the founder of Norfello, a 17 person software company in Finland. Norfello’s flagship product is DocScanner, a scanner app for iPhone, Android, Mac and S60 that automatically converts images of flat surfaces such as paper documents or whiteboards to clean PDF documents.

I met the Evernote crew for the first time in September of 2009. I had just arrived in Mountain View, California from Finland and randomly bumped into Alex Pachikov at an Irish pub. We started talking about tech and realized that we know each others’ products. Evernote was already popular in 2009, but I was surprised that people at Evernote had heard about DocScanner.

The Value of an Evernote integration

The value of an Evernote integration had been clear to us since the initial release of DocScanner. Our users were requesting it constantly, and it just made sense. The day after that chance meeting with Alex, we started working on an integration between Evernote and DocScanner iPhone. The first DocScanner release that worked with Evernote was released shortly thereafter.

Over the next few weeks our sales grew rapidly. In no time, we were selling DocScanner at a rate of $100,000 per month. Since then we’ve added Evernote integrations to our Android application and our Mac application. We’re also working on adding Evernote to our S60 app, as well as additional products that take advantage of the Evernote platform.

Working with Evernote

Working with Evernote has been a great experience for DocScanner. Evernote’s team have helped us whenever we’ve had any problems, their APIs are well documented and their service just works. Last year’s launch of the Evernote Trunk demonstrates Evernote’s dedication to making their millions of users aware of partner applications.

Most importantly, Evernote brings added functionality that makes our customers happier. DocScanner doesn’t have to duplicate Evernote’s functionality. We can focus on the image processing that we’re good at, and rely on Evernote to help our users transport, store and find the documents that they’ve scanned. Data stored in the cloud is far more valuable to our users than a file on their smart phone’s memory card.

Looking forward, we see a lot of potential for products that can automatically understand and organize unstructured data, such as a picture of a business card. Every one of Evernote’s millions of users is a potential customer of a service that helps add structure to their saved memories.

The Evernote ecosystem

There are many partners listed in the Evernote Trunk, and I expect to see even more of them in the future. The ecosystem that Evernote has created provides the best unstructured storage available for notes, audio and images. If your application can help on collecting data or automatically structuring it, then you should be looking into integrating with Evernote.