Evernote raises $6 million to save all kinds of notes

EverNote, a Sunnyvale start-up that wants to let you save all aspects of your online and offline life, has raised $6 million from individuals, the company told us yesterday.

There’s increasing competition in this sector. So it wants to differ from the others by offering the kitchen sink, letting you save everything that goes on around you and to have it everywhere you go. By letting you save photo-shots, but also web pages, it wants to co-opt other players like ScanR, which lets you capture (via camera) and share images, and the ilk of Kaboodle, Google Notebook and Microsoft’s OneNote and others which have services to let you save Web pages and other computer documents.

Evernote has developed imaging technology that recognizes handwriting in a “jpeg” file, for example, so that you can take a photo of scribbles on napkin, and save it for review later — and thus be able to search it for certain words. And you’ll be able to tag the file, so that you can search for those tags later too.

We weren’t able to really kick the tires. ScanR lets you take photos of your offline activities, from business cards to scribble on whiteboards, and then allows you to email them to your storage place of choice, and is doing much of the same “search” stuff that Evernote talks of. So we asked Evernote chief executive Tom Garland about this. He said the market is big enough for both companies. Evernote, though, provides a storage place so that you can save ScanR files and carry them with you. Evernote will also let you save everything on the Web directly from your browser.

Garland said technology pundit Esther Dyson and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin have joined the company’s board.

This Fall, the company will release a mobile and a Web-based version of its software, which currently is a downloadable software for your computer. It is currently free. Garland wouldn’t say what sort of traction the company has had, but confirmed the downloads so far have been in the “thousands,” helped by a review by the WSJ’s Walt Mossberg last year.