Evernote as he is or what Igor Ashmanov thinks

    On April 2, the Evernote Corporation blog announced the launch of the Russian-language version of the Evernote service. It was launched in the USA in February 2008, exactly after an investment of $ 5 million * from the Troika Dialog venture fund (the investments, as RBC reported, were allocated to a “cross-platform solution for handwriting recognition”). To date, there are 900 thousand registered users of the English version.

    Apparently, recognition is quick? Not always.

    What is Evernote and why is it easy to find out on the blog and on the site, but the fact that the project belongs to Evernote Corp., which is headed by Stepan Pachikovfind out more difficult. Pachikov is the same Udin with whom Posner is friends (the latter did not fail to boast of acquaintance with a real IT-person in “One-Storied America”).

    Recognition



    Recognition is the core of Evernote, the main thing is that it has technologically important in it. Notes with Evernote are made without writing - the device accepts text as an image and recognizes characters, turning the image into a document.

    Staviskiy



    Localization of the service into Russian was the first, but not the only one. “This year we plan to translate the service into another major world language. Which language will be next has not been decided yet, ”says vice president of Evernote Corp. Dmitry Stavisky.

    The fact that Russian became the second language after Evernote is in Evernote Corp. explain that the company has Russian roots (the representative of the company did not say that the investor also has Russian roots). In addition, Evernote was afraid to repeat the fate of Facebook: when the social network came to Russia, its place was already taken by the clones.

    Ashmanov



    According to the director of the company "Ashmanov and partners" Igor Ashmanov, the service may well become popular in RuNet: "However, only if it fully meets the requirements of users and the recognition system does not make serious mistakes."

    So..



    The developers claim that Evernote is able to recognize any text, even Russian handwritten. But this is a rash statement. It does not fully correspond to reality.

    For example, the system was not able to recognize handwritten text and only partially the number of the car in the photograph taken by the telephone (of course, the photo quality left much to be desired, there was a lot of “noise” and the lighting blurred the numbers, but the number was clearly visible).

    So to the whole number entered _n192mu [199] _ Evernote did not react in any way. The same thing happened when entering the numbers _192_ and the combination _192mu_

    Upset, we decided to try other combinations - when entering the letters _н_ and the numbers _199_, the service quickly highlighted a too large chunk in the first case and guessed correctly in the second:









    Evernote also failed with the inscription “Microsoft”, Bill Gates with his Microsoft was not recognized, and the inscription painted on the old booth was completely: In the word “from”, Evernote recognized the word “taiga”: and refused to work with the text in the document that was flipped upside down. To the last, however, Evernote had, as it seems to us, every right - the recognition algorithm is not required to foresee a different arrangement of letters in the inscription. But as for the rest ... Although it cannot be denied that Evernote did a great job of searching when the picture was quite contrasting, the word is written clearly and from left to right. Under these conditions, the size of the text did not matter:





















    The developers took a promising path, connecting to the recognition process, in addition to the algorithm for determining characters, linguistics, correcting words with errors by comparing them using a certain algorithm with a thesaurus. Thanks to this, the hope that over time Evernote will become better at reading Russian remains.

    The business model of the service is designed to sell paid accounts. For $ 5 per month or $ 45 per year, the user will be able to get “priority” (ie improved) text recognition in pictures, upload ten times more information (compared to a free account - 500 MB versus 40) and not watch ads.

    Ashmanov again



    Igor Ashmanov is sure that now you can sell everything in RuNet, the main thing is that this “everything” should be “glamorous” enough. If so, then only two types of resources are truly glamorous in Runet - dating sites and entertainment (even in times of crisis, the average online game enthusiast leaves $ 9 per month on the Web).

    That's who Mr. Pachikov will have to compete with.

    ________________________________

    * According to one expert who wished to remain anonymous (but in the domestic IT party this person is no less authoritative as Mr. Pachikov), the budget of the Evernote project amounted to $ 6 million. Investments, as far as we know, will continue to continue.

    Author: Olga Fedina

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