Evernote‘s press conference was held in Tokyo on 23rd June, just one day before their second anniversary.
At the conference, Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin, who was visiting Tokyo, announced a lot of new things for their Japanese users.
1. Japan branch
They opened a 100% subsidiary, Evernote Japan. Evernote’s vice president Takeshi Nakajima, who worked in Sony Vaio team before, leads the local team. Japan branch is to hire 5 more employees this year and cooperate with US head office.
2. New feature – Japanese OCR now supported
Evernote now can extract Japanese texts from printed letters and handwriting images.
3. More and More Partnership with Japanese companies
In addition to the current partners like Canon(document scanner integration), Sony(Vaio pre-installed) and Eye-fi(bundled package),
Package ditribution
SourceNext sells a packaged version of Evernote “Starter Pack” on July 2nd.
Internet portal
NEC’s internet service provider Biglobe[J] offers Evernote to their customers on its portal.
Restaurant review web service
Gurunavi[J], one of the largest restaurant review site to add “save to Evernote” path.
Gadget integration
A big stationary maker Pentel[J] will make a new version of their handwrite-recording digital pen Airpen [J] which supports Evernote connection.
Evernote in Japan
Libin mentioned some interesting points on how Evernote is popular and getting attentions in Japan.
- Number of Japanese users is 350,000, which is 1/10 of all users.
- 18% of active users come from Japan, which is the second highest after USA(57%), more than the sum of following 10 countries(Spain, UK, Canada, …).
- Japan has the highest number of local collaborating partners
- Many Evernote books are published in Japanese, whilst no book in USA. – I confirmed at least 5 dedicated books on Amazon Japan. See below (translated book titles are not official but by me).
via Netafull [J]
See Also:
Event summary on official Japanese blog [J]
Pentel’s release [J]
