Evernote Takes On Web Reading With Clearly
Evernote, an application that has gained momentum by providing an easy way for people to quickly capture things they want to remember, is determined to branch out past its humble note-taking origins. — First, the company bought Skitch …
Context & Ripple Effects
Evernote built its momentum on quick capture — saving things people want to remember — and the Clearly launch is the second move in a deliberate stretch beyond note-taking, following its completed acquisition of the annotation tool Skitch earlier in 2011. The pattern is acquire-a-single-purpose-utility, then fold it into the core product: Skitch extended capture into images, Clearly extends it into the reading experience itself.
First-order effects
- Evernote's capture funnel moves upstream: instead of waiting for users to save a page after reading, Clearly inserts the product at the moment of consumption, cleaning the page before it ever becomes a note.
Second-order effects
- Single-purpose capture and reading-utility developers now face a consolidator with both an acquisition budget and a bundled distribution channel — Evernote can absorb their use case rather than compete feature-by-feature.
Third-order effects
- If the Skitch-then-Clearly cadence holds, Evernote's defensible position shifts from storing notes to owning every format of personal capture — text, images, and now web pages — making the platform the default ingestion layer for what users read and keep.
The trend: Consumer capture apps are expanding from single-purpose tools into multi-format memory platforms, buying adjacent utilities and folding them into one store-everything product.