Note-taking app Evernote is working to expand its capabilities for iOS users, announcing today that it has acquired iPad handwriting recognition app Penultimate.
The Next Web explains that Evernote has plans for developer Cocoa Box Designs’ app that stretches beyond just Apple’s iOS platform. Evernote has successfully spread its apps across multiple platforms, and it sounds as though the company intends to leverage Penultimate so that its technology can be used on those platforms as well.
The details of the acquisition haven’t been released, although Cocoa Box Designs founder Ben Zotto is joining the Evernote team going forward.
For those not in the know, Evernote is a popular note-taking app that’s designed to turn an iPhone, iPad or Android into a companion device for quickly jotting down everything from ideas to phone numbers. It supports audio and text notes, as well as speech-to-text, and has cloud-syncing capabilities to automatically save notes whenever users are connected to the Internet. It also has the ability to scan documents to save them into Evernote, and it includes a handwriting-recognition feature for those documents that can help the app determine what is written on them and make that information available for searching later.
Penultimate’s capabilities will undoubtedly bring new handwriting capabilities to the app, allowing users to write on their touchscreens with either a finger or a stylus and save that information into Evernote files. Penultimate basically turns your iPad into a writing tablet in its current form, and it even allows users to save their written notes and drawings to their Evernote cloud, should they have an account. Penultimate also had the distinction of being the fourth-most downloaded iPad app ever in March, according to The Next Web’s report.
For its part, Evernote is riding pretty high. It just came off a $70 million Series D funding round and has nearly 30 million users for Evernote’s various apps. It also plans to expand its Asian operations with the new investments it just acquired. And the app’s developers continue to make it more robust with each new update, adding and strengthening features like its speech-to-text capabilities. With Penultimate in the stable, Evernote should be able to offer quick and easy document annotation , and that should help it continue to gain more users. It’ll be interesting to see what else it does with the investments it just secured.
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