Lessons to be learned » Competition

MobileNoter in 2011

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:15:24 +0000

2011 was a monster year for MobileNoter. We didn’t get to our goal of 100,000 customers by the end of 2011, but still we are several tens of thousands users in. If you decide to compare these numbers to other services, like Evernote or Catch, remember that these are paying customers we are talking about, not people who download free stuff with the intention of never paying. The 100,000 customers milestone is postponed to the year of 2012 now.

Microsoft released Onenote for iPhone in January and then Onenote for iPad in December 2011. What’s good about these releases: first, they determined the price and trial terms. It will definitely influence our decisions in the future. Second, their release allowed us to differentiate our product from theirs pretty easily. Microsoft provides basic access to their Skydrive stored notes, which is totally free for everyone except power users. MobileNoter gives you full access to the notes stored on Skydrive, Dropbox, your computer, while preserving all graphics, drawings, and provides complete Onenote for Windows experience on the mobile devices. The release of Onenote for iOS from Microsoft has some positive and negative impact on us. Overall, it is a somewhat neutral event.

Android was our top platform in 2011. The sales of MobileNoter for Android went from zero to more than that of for iOS during the year. Two factors helped: exceptionally great releases of MobileNoter for Android and skyrocketing growth of the platform itself. Even MobileNoter sales in Amazon Appstore showed significant growth despite a slow start. The Kindle Fire is to thank for this.

We expect to have some great releases of MobileNoter of iOS in 2012, so this platform is not to be ignored. The dominance of iOS over Android is however evaporating and soon it will be gone forever, as more as more developers find their income from Android growing over that of from iOS.

Our plans for BlackBerry lost some priority as the year of 2011 clearly demonstrated that the platform is struggling to survive. If the enterprise mobile users move to Android/Windows 8 and leave RIM products, then those Blackberries may never see a native MobileNoter and thus receive access to their Onenote notes.

Finally, 2011 was the year when MobileNoter as a startup reached several important financial milestones. If you ever ran a startup, you know what I’m talking about. We never doubted that the day would come, but it’s nice to actually experience it.

Microsoft releases Onenote for iPad

Oleg Kokorin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:45:53 +0000

Microsoft finally released Onenote for iPad, almost a year after they released Onenote for iPhone. While it seems to be pretty nice looking, the users complain about the following problems:

- Does not work without a Skydrive account;

- No inking support, neither read or write;

- No text formatting (bold, underline, etc.);

- No ability to move or resize images;

- No ability to create new sections or notebooks;

- No ability to zoom in/out;

- Links/hyperlinks don’t work;

- No file attachments.

To be fair, MobileNoter doesn’t completely cover this list either, but at least we have most of it. The latest update of MobileNoter for Android just received inking “read only” support. The ability to draw on Android phones and tablets is coming out pretty soon too. But the biggest news is a totally new release of MobileNoter for iPad coming out beginning of 2012. Some competition is good for the users.

Microsoft Office is coming to iPad

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:46:13 +0000

According to various sources, including The Daily, Microsoft Office is coming to iPad in 2012. It seems as Microsoft finally admitted the importance of iPad platform. On the other hand, releasing MS Office for iPad is a bad strategic move for Windows 8 based tablets and therefore for Windows 8 that will also appear in 2012. If the Windows 8 tablets were the only to offer the super popular office suite, it would have been a serious advantage for them, especially in the enterprise field. Even more surprising is that Microsoft will start paying the “Apple tax” – the 30% Apple takes from all sales in their Appstore…

It is taken for granted that the iPad Office suite will have Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It is interesting to see if it includes Outlook and Onenote as well. The latter is somewhat important for us, because we are going to release huge updates to our MobileNoter for iOS pretty soon.

Catch tries a different strategy

Oleg Kokorin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:34:19 +0000

I used to say that Catch (a note-taking application) repeats everything after Evernote, but turns out that’s not true anymore. First, I noticed that Catch under Android is much better than Catch for iPhone. Despite a recent update of Catch for iOS, it is still pretty basic. Nothing has changed much since I reviewed it in March 2011. It’s a totally different story for Android. Not only Catch for Android is better looking and has a bit more features. It comes in several flavors too!

In addition to the main Catch Notes application, the guys released I Journal and AK Notepad. These are simply downgraded and differently skinned clones of Catch. While this approach is nothing new, it is mostly used in the game space. For example, most of the Alawar’s games are re-skinned time management and 3-in-a-row games. It is quite innovative to see this in the productivity application genre. I’m quite interested in seeing more Catch offsprings and whether or not this strategy leads to more paying customers in the future.

Evernote got rich text editing for Android

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:15:58 +0000

Congratulations to Evernote for adding rich text editing to their Android app. They say that iOS version will get this soon too.

MobileNoter has had rich text editing for how much time? Almost for two years by now!

Microsoft buys users on whopping scale

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 11 May 2011 16:48:38 +0000

Microsoft top management has a good reason for their recent agonizing buying spree. Everyone and his dog know that Windows and Office cash cows will be dead one day, and the day is coming fast. Microsoft is really trying to make a move into online, cloud, and mobile – the most promising categories dominated by Google, Facebook, and Apple.

Apple… was a marginal company only a few years ago. Apple passed Microsoft in market cap in 2010, passed Microsoft in revenues in October 2010, passed Microsoft in profits just recently.

Meanwhile Microsoft pays a fortune to buy users from Yahoo, then from Nokia, and now from Skype. That’s right – Microsoft is paying billions just to get the users, not valuable technologies or products (not entirely with Skype, but mostly so).

Every business school teaches that this strategy is not going to work. If you purchase users with low ARPU from someone, the users will continue to bring low ARPU to you. If you try to charge them more, they will flee to your competitor. Those business schools will soon have an excellent case study to support the claim that the strategy is bad. The chart below shows how Microsoft Online Services Division has been doing for recent years. If you have trouble summing those columns up, here is the summary: the Online Division is losing $2.5b per year. Surely you have no trouble picking the trend.

MobileNoter is available in Amazon Appstore

Oleg Kokorin — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:12:52 +0000

Amazon approved MobileNoter SE into its Appstore a few days ago, and the first sales are rolling in. Amazon Appstore is weird in many ways. For example, they have the right to change the price of your app. Unlike Android Market, they take time to approve apps and they don’t reveal identity of the buyers to the vendors. On the bright side, they got transaction export into Excel right, which is still a great problem for Google.

So far, customers’ activity is about 10 times less than that of Android Market. On the other hand, all our competitors like Evernote, Catch Notes, Springpad are on the Amazon, so we couldn’t sit on the sidelines.

I find the most helpful customer review of Evernote to be very remarkable: Great app for organizing and keeping track of things as they happen, however the terms clearly states they can use, modify and distribute anything you upload for purposes of the site and sell to partners. 18 of 22 people found this helpful.

That’s exactly the biggest difference between MobileNoter and its competitors: we don’t and won’t own your notes and data. Use Dropbox, SkyDrive, or your personal server to store your notes and don’t ever worry about who can access your data.

You never know how far your competitor is

Oleg Kokorin — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:27:28 +0000

It turns out that a Blackberry version of our competitor Evernote has been developed by Axmor – a company whose offices reside in a building next to ours. The guys are literally just half a mile away from us. How is that for globalization? OK, when get serious about porting MobileNoter to Blackberry (and this is coming soon!), we know whom we should contact.

Update on note-taking app Catch

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:34:46 +0000

It looks like Catch has been updated since the last time I wrote about it. First and foremost they got a premium plan called “Catch Pro”, which is $5 per month or $45 per year. If you think this is just like Evernote, you are correct. Catch is similarly creative in how they limit free accounts: you can upload a limited number of pictures and hi-res images per month among other limitations.

Catch also got some platform additions: browser plug-ins for Chrome, MSIE and FireFox, plus they got an API for third-party developers.

I tried the iPhone app and it worked pretty well. It’s very simple, but get the job done. Still, I fail to see how Catch is different from Evernote. It seems that they are going to repeat just every Evernote’s step. As of now, Catch has few features, but this is also how Evernote started. I bet Catch will be beefing up with all kind of features in the near future.

Now some MobileNoter news: DropBox and SkyDrive support for MobileNoter SE is coming out any day now. Then we’ll have a major update to our iPhone app in April with some long awaited capabilities

Lesson learned: native wins, HTML loses

Oleg Kokorin — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:22:14 +0000

We are now witnessing the coming of a new era.

The internet without the web.

Read it again.

The holy grail of the internet developers, the only multi-platform technology than can reliably run everywhere, including them shiny iOS devices – HTML (and HTML5 in particular) is losing battle against a bunch of proprietary SDKs like Objective C, Java ME, and Silverlight. You can’t even call these a programming language!

The mobile development is all the rage now, and apparently for many years to come. The number of mobile devices is going through the roof and all of a sudden, a tablet is going to be enough of a computer for 95% of the users. And if you develop for mobile, you don’t want HTML5 for many reasons:

- if you need access to camera, notifications, or run in the background;

- if you need the app to look good and have decent performance;

- if you need to make money from the app, like charge for it;

- if you need the users to somehow find you app.

Right now, almost any HTML mobile app is a joke comparing to its native counterpart. And because the mobile apps are not scarce (they stopped counting the AppStore when it reached 400,000) the users will choose only the best apps with the best user experience. If you read it as “the users will choose only the native apps” you read it right.

Funny enough, Google, which is supposed to push HTML5 the most is not doing the job very well. Their Chrome OS, built around HTML5 and web apps is virtually non-existent. While Android is very alive and is flourishing with native apps at accelerating pace.

So, when people stop buying computers and stop going to the web sites from their mobile devices, the web will again become a hacker thing. Remember Gopher? Look it up here, if you haven’t ever seen it.