Evernote and 3M to announce partnership to help you digitize Post-it notes
The Post-it Note Goes Digital on Evernote — Rather than fight the digital revolution, the time-tested Post-it note is joining it. — 3M Co., which makes about 50 billion of the sticky paper notepads each year …
Context & Ripple Effects
Evernote has spent two years building capture on-ramps ahead of this deal: it bought the iPad handwriting app Penultimate in May 2012 to sharpen recognition of scribbled input, launched Clearly in late 2011 to pull web reading into the same store, and told TechCrunch in July 2012 its ambition was to be the automatic, trusted place to store your life. The 3M partnership extends that intake funnel from screens onto paper itself.
The story travelled widely on day one — pickups at The Verge and Android Community plus attention from the Wall Street Journal's Geoffrey Fowler — which fits why it matters: a maker shipping roughly 50 billion sticky pads a year is choosing to route its product through a note-taking app rather than compete with digital capture.
First-order effects
- Post-it users gain a sanctioned camera path into Evernote, so the handwritten notes people already stick everywhere flow into search alongside typed and Penultimate-captured ink.
- 3M turns a product exposed to digital substitution into an accessory for it — every digitized note still begins with buying a Post-it pad.
Second-order effects
- Rival note-taking platforms are pushed to strike their own stationery and hardware-brand partnerships, since branded physical capture becomes a differentiator no single app can claim exclusively for long.
- Office-supply retailers and 3M's reseller channel get a new sales argument — 'Post-its now work with your phone' — bundling consumable paper sales to software adoption.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legacy analog incumbents increasingly survive digitization by becoming distribution partners for capture software, with the camera-and-cloud pipeline — not the pad or the app alone — owning the customer relationship.
The trend: Consumer software platforms are signing up physical-world brands as capture on-ramps, making the smartphone camera the standard bridge between paper and searchable cloud storage.