Evernote's Smart Notebook digitizes your handwriting

Evernote also unveils Evernote Business for SMBs

Sometimes I’m a little embarrassed to be a tech writer while still clinging to some of my low-tech ways, like writing down directions on the back of an envelope when I have a perfectly good GPS app on my phone.  Most of my old school habits come down to doing things by hand.  I have a theory that a few million years from now, we’ll have evolved to have tiny T-Rex arms with one digit each. And of course we’ll have stooped backs with no muscle tone at all.  We’re going to be very unattractive creatures.

So to help us along the way, Evernote announced Friday that it has partnered with Moleskine to create “smart notebooks.”  It’s actually pretty brilliant.  Evernote and Moleskine are offering two notebooks—a large and a pocket-size—that will allow you to write something out by hand, snap a picture of it with your phone, and have your note automatically digitized.

The new Page Camera feature in Evernote’s mobile app will automatically correct perspective and improve the contrast between ink or graphite and the paper.  Actual transcription would be better, but this is the next best thing: high-definition pictures of your notes.

The notebooks come with “smart stickers” that are associated with a custom tag in Evernote, so that when you snap a picture of a page featuring one of those stickers, the Page Camera recognizes the sticker and automatically categorizes the page in your notebook.  The notebooks will cost $29.95 for the large notebooks and $24.95 for the smaller notebooks.  And purchasing an Evernote smart notebook (they’re adorable, by the way) comes with three months of Evernote Premium, a $15 value.

In addition to the Moleskine partnership, Evernote also announced the new Evernote Business, a solution designed specifically for SMBs.  The new offering, available in December, comes with all of the features in Evernote Premium and a bunch of features designed specifically for SMBs, like a directory of notebooks for sharing and collaborating among employees, a centralized console for administrators to manage access, the ability to own all data in employees’ designated Business Notebooks.  Evernote Business also comes with a dedicated support manager.

"We have always focused on building products we want to use," said Evernote CEO Phil Libin, in a statement. "As we grew from a small start-up into a global, 200-employee business, we realized we needed to develop a product that allowed us to more easily share information with groups, improve the on-boarding process and ensure that business data ownership was clearly defined.  Evernote Business is a powerful solution fit for small and medium organizations. We're excited to share the tools we use with companies like ours around the world."