EverNote is Pretty Impressive

I was introduced to EverNote by my friend Colin. He asked if anyone was interested in a beta invite…mmmmmm, beta invite. I quickly said yes – of course this was via Twitter. Upon first inspection of EverNote, I thought, “great, another scrapbooking application to take notes and place images.” I was ready to pass, but then I noticed its unique element, text recognition.

To put it simply, you can take a picture of anything, and it will make the text in that image searchable. Why do this? Here’s my use case:

My daughter dropped my five year old camera and it broke. Of course, I started the research process on a new one at CNet. I cut and pasted some reviews, prices and notes into EverNote. Then I went to Costco, Best Buy and Target. While there, I took pictures of their price tags – the ones that say the model number, the features, and the price with my iPhone. I emailed the photo to my private EverNote email address. I then was able to open EverNote and search on all the text. I could compare models and prices and which store had which cameras.

I have since taken pictures of articles in magazines, mail that I needed to track, and direct mail that I was interested in. The desktop client for Mac is easy to use and it integrates well with Skitch.

If you want a beta invite, please feel free to comment. I have 9 available.