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

MobileNoter is available in Amazon Appstore

April 26, 2011

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.

1 Comment | AppStore, Competition, Marketing, OneNote on Android | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Catch – an unlikely competitor to Evernote

October 24, 2010

Update: I wrote a new post about Catch recently. For some Google-knows-why reason a lot of people stumble upon this old post, instead of the new one.

Meet Catch – “the easiest way to capture what matters to you” as they boast on their web-site. Even though they don’t say so, some tech review sites name them as a competitor to Evernote. Have they got what it takes to be an Evernote competitor? OK, they got a great name – Catch. This is much better than “3banana” as they used to be called (I’m NOT kidding on this one). What else? A client for iPhone/iPad, a client for Android. Calling themselves a platform. You know, it’s not cool to be an app these days. You have to be a global platform for human memory or at least simply a platform, so that some VCs will give you money.

However, what they are missing the most is a business model and customers. You read that right. Catch doesn’t have any paying users at the time of this writing. With this trait, I am not even sure they can be considered as a competitor to anyone. Any startup that offers a free product or service has to pull the trigger one day and start charging money. When they do it, the users start hating them and the product/service doesn’t even look so cute anymore. Because Evernote is making some buck, Catch will definitely be under pressure to start charging money soon too.

How is MobileNoter doing? Steadily growing. We plan to get more than 100,000 customers by the end of 2011. Microsoft OneNote will be incarnated on everything that is not Windows.

5 Comments | Competition, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

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