MobileNoter in 2011

January 15, 2012

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.

 

 

5 Comments | AppStore, Competition, Metrics, OneNote on Android, OneNote on Blackberry, OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Microsoft Office is coming to iPad

November 30, 2011

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.

Leave a Comment » | AppStore, Competition, OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

MobileNoter turned two!

November 14, 2011

It’s been 2 years since the first commercial version of MobileNoter was released. Even though it’s still far from perfection, the recent release for Android Honeycomb received a lot of love from the Onenote admirers. Anyway, we haven’t reached our goal of 100,000 customers yet, so nothing to brag about. This goal is postponed to the next MobileNoter birthday party.

 

Leave a Comment » | OneNote on Android, OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Catch tries a different strategy

October 6, 2011

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.

 

 

Leave a Comment » | Competition, Marketing, OneNote on Android, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

New version of MobileNoter for iPhone released

July 27, 2011

We released a new version of MobileNoter for iPhone just two days ago. This version beats Microsoft’s OneNote for iPhone in almost any comparison, except for one or two. We still have room for improvements, so expect new updates soon. Our MobileNoter teams has over 10 people now, thus new update will REALLY come out soon. Meanwhile, here is a new tutorial video for MobileNoter for iPhone:

2 Comments | AppStore, OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Web Ready 2010 update

July 4, 2011

MobileNoter was a contestant in Web Ready 2010 finals, but didn’t make it to the winners. Let’s take a look at some of the participants who made a noticeable progress in the startup game since the finals:

  • Yam (2nd place in Web Ready 2010) received investment of $500k from Foresight Ventures. YaM (Yet Another Meeting) is a cloud-based solution for effective meeting management. It covers meeting scheduling, agenda management, note-taking, and follow-ups.
  • SaeX (one of the semi-finalists) received investment of $500k from Foresight Ventures too, and then (in a second round) $300k from unnamed Canadian investment company. SaeX is a service that lets people sell and buy other people’s contact information, for example emails and phone numbers of top managers and politicians.
  • copiny (one of the semi-finalists) received angel round from a private investor. Copiny aims at simplifying communications between a company and its customers.
  • No public information is available about 1st place winner Quadra and 3rd place winner Alloka, but given their plans to expand into new geo-markets in 2011, they must be either doing really well or silently getting some investments too.

Leave a Comment » | OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Update on note-taking app Catch

March 27, 2011

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

 

4 Comments | AppStore, Competition, OneNote on Android, OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

We did it again: another release for Android

March 12, 2011

MobileNoter SE for AndroidWe just released a new shiny MobileNoter SE into Android Market. How is this release different from the one we did a week ago? Well, the differences are significant.

First, the application was completely rewritten. SE stands for Standalone Edition. It highlights the fact that the shiny MobileNoter SE doesn’t require a Windows synchronization client and it doesn’t require Microsoft OneNote. Pretty soon the SE version will be able to grab OneNote files from DropBox, SkyDrive, and other file sync and share services. We believe this to be a huge advantage compared to Evernote and its clones. With Evernote, all your notes reside on Evernote servers. You don’t have any control over your data. You don’t own your data. You don’t even know who and when may decide to peek into your data. When you can store your notes on DropBox or similar services, you have much more control. Plus, most of these services give you a lot of space for free. Even better, you can set up your personal DropBox-like server and use it to sync all your data, including notes. While this may sound complex, this is the way the corporate users will go. No corporate would want to store their employees’ notes on someone else’s servers (be it Evernote or SkyDrive). They would want to host the server themselves for security purposes. Pretty soon we are going to give them this ability!

The second difference between MobileNoter and MobileNoter SE is that the latter is sold through the Android Market, while the former can be downloaded for free. Before this, we’ve used Plimus and PayPal to sell software. Well, Google Checkout is definitely the easiest to set up a merchant account with. However, the merchant interface is so basic at the moment. It’s not just basic, it is plain ugly to the point of being unusable. Come on people! Even downloaded CSV files with transactions are not formatted properly, like dates are wrong and amounts are mixed with currency symbols. I really hope Google will fix this soon.

2 Comments | OneNote on Android, OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

MobileNoter for Android shipped to stores

March 3, 2011

As promised, a full version of MobileNoter for Android was just released. So if you are a OneNote fan or heavy user, you can now access your OneNote notes on Android too.

There are going to be a few more updates during March, including MobileNoter for iPhone and iPad.

Even more exciting updates are coming one or two months later. The new MobileNoter will be able to sync with OneNote files stored on DropBox or SkyDrive. This will surely beat the hell out of Microsoft’s OneNote for iPhone. Stay tuned!

1 Comment | OneNote on Android, OneNote on iPad, OneNote on iPhone | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Microsoft ditches Windows Phone 7

January 20, 2011

Microsoft still hasn’t revealed sales numbers for their Windows Phone 7 and they probably have a reason not to. Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer said during CES that Microsoft “is going to continue to invest in WP7 aggressively in the future“.

 However, there are several indications that they already lost faith in Windows Phone 7 and are not willing to bid everything on it. One of them is the release of OneNote for iPhone.

Why did they release it at all? Microsoft will never move a finger for a market smaller than say $1b. Obviously, they don’t expect to make any significant money off OneNote for iPhone. But if they port their entire Office suite to iPhone and iPad, that’s a totally different matter. With the number of devices going into hundreds of millions that’s a $1b market.

Here is the problem: if Microsoft kept Office suite exclusively to Windows Phone 7 platform, it would have been a strong advantage of WP7, especially in the eyes of corporate users. Apparently, the Office division in Microsoft won over WP7 group and the exclusivity won’t hold. And WP7 is doomed without all the help it can get from Microsoft.

1 Comment | Marketing, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

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