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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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

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.

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!

 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.