Remember Evernote CEO Phil Libin’s fireside chat during Disrupt Beijing, when he talked about how important it was to Evernote that it have a presence in China? As one of the startups rumored to be in the ‘billion dollar club’ in Silicon Valley, it looks like the company is willing to put its money where its mouth is. This week, Troy Malone, the company’s Asia Pacific General Manager, has been in Taiwan and has revealed a little bit more about the company’s Asia plans.
Earlier today, Malone gave a one-hour keynote speech at the Social – Mobile – Integration discussion forum hosted by the Institute for Information Industry (III) and Business Next Magazine. During the speech, Malone elaborated on how Evernote was utilizing cloud services (at least 17 different ones) to power Evernote, which is itself a hybrid cloud service that has offline and online data storage.
He touched on Evernote’s Asia strategy, which features hardware partnerships with Asian manufacturers, such as HTC in Taiwan (whose Flyer was dubbed the magic Evernote tablet and is built on Evernote’s API) and Samsung in Korea. In an interview (attached below), Phil Libin told Sarah Lacy that pre-installs account for about 11% of Evernote signups.
Another interesting tidbit was the rate at which it was acquiring users abroad. In his speech, Malone revealed that 60% of Evernote users are outside of the US, where hockey stick growth is not uncommon. Take this graph of Evernote’s Taiwan users:
The chart is similar to its overall growth (see the slides here), but only steeper. The precipitating spark for the explosion in growth was the translation of Evernote into traditional Chinese. On this topic of app localization at a users’ meetup after his speech where he talked to a crowd of around 20 people about how he and others use Evernote for their own needs, Malone hinted that the Evernote was going to take a step past hardware partnerships in Taiwan:
“[Evernote] doesn’t have the text recognition ability in Chinese, but we are always looking to work with companies, Taiwanese companies, that might help us do that”
During the user meetup, Malone also demonstrated Clearly, the new text scanner that separates ads from actual webpage content. On this, Malone commented that on his next stop in Korea, this was a tool that he would be pitching to Korean portals such as Naver to be the featured article clipper on content pages.
It will be interesting to see what announcements, if any, will be made as a result of Malone’s trip to Asia. Regardless, it’s good to see that an elite startup such as Evernote is looking at Asia for cooperation on both the software as well as hardware levels. The question that remains is whether the company will succeed in Asia, and specifically China, where so many other American internet services have failed. If it can get it right, Evernote may be a model of localization to be followed. If it gets it wrong, and is overwhelmed by copycats and other local challenges, then it will be back to the drawing board once again for Silicon Valley.
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