Technology July 1, 2009, 8:16AM EST

Creating Order from Chaos with Evernote

The cutting-edge tool helps you keep track of your complicated life—not just with words, but with images, sound, and video

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When he parks his car, author Timothy Ferriss snaps a photo of the nearest cross streets with his camera phone. In business meetings, he'll often take pictures of sketches and notes made on a whiteboard. When he's out for dinner, he'll whip out the phone again to capture an image of the label on the wine he's drinking. He never knows when he'll want to recall the data later.

Ferriss, a productivity expert, blogger, and author of the best-selling book The 4-Hour Workweek, then ships those photos to what he calls his "augmented brain," which exists not in his head, but on the Web.

He is one of a growing number of people using a Web-based service and software application running on smartphones and PCs called Evernote that is quickly becoming a receptacle for much of the ephemera that otherwise gets cluttered and sometimes lost in a person's busy life.

At first, Ferriss resisted the suggestion from readers of his blog that he try the application. "I have this philosophical stance where I tend to avoid accumulating new gadgets and software because usually they create more work than they are meant to prevent," Ferriss says. But when a few reader suggestions turned into dozens, he decided to try it. "At first it wasn't clear what the appeal was. But the more I used it, it became really clear why they liked it."

Word Recognition in Photos

Founded by Stepan Pachikov, who co-founded handwriting recognition software company Parascript and is a former vice-president of Silicon Graphics, Evernote is designed for people struggling to become more organized. A February survey by the National Association of Professional Organizers, a trade group, found that 96% of some 400 adults said they could save time every day if they were better organized. "No one remembers everything as well as they would like to," says Evernote CEO Phil Libin. "We take the stress out of it."

Backed by $6.5 million in funding from Russian investment bank Troika Dialog, Evernote has signed up 1.2 million users since it was founded in 2004. It's growing at a healthy clip, adding about 100,000 new users a month, Libin says.

The service comes in free and paid flavors. For $5 a month or $45 a year, customers get 500 megabytes of storage a month, versus 40MB for the free version. Paid users also get an ad-free experience when logging into their account on the Web or via the desktop program. Notes are password-protected, and paid members receive an added benefit of having their notes transmitted over an encrypted Web connection.

One of Evernote's most popular features, users say, is its ability to recognize text in pictures. Send a picture of anything with text—say, the cover of the book How Rome Fell—to Evernote's server farm in San Francisco, and it will be turned into searchable data and then synchronized with your computer the next time you launch the Evernote application or sign into its Web site. Later, when you're struggling to remember the title, simply search for the word "Rome" on your phone and find that picture. Evernote runs on several types of phones, including Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, Research In Motion's (RIMM) Blackberry, Palm's (PALM) Pre, and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile, as well as PCs running Mac OS X and Windows.