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Live from the floor [literally!], Stacey Harmon and Kristi Willis recap the major announcements and their key takeaways from day one of the 2014 Evernote Conference in San Francisco, CA where each of them presented sessions [view Stacey's session]. Get the full scoop by watching the video replay.

Video Highlights

The event marked the first time we learned about Scannable and Evernote work chat, had the chance to opt-in to the redesigned Evernote web client, and heard Evernote's CEO Phil Libin explain that "meetings suck" followed by an explanation of how Evernote's presentation mode is designed to eradicate PowerPoint. 

Original Air Date: October 2014

Transcript

[Stacey] Welcome from San Francisco! Kristi and I are here at Fort Mason at the Evernote 2014 Conference. We’re trying to bring you live, all of the cool things we’ve seen from day 1 at the conference. We just want to tell you how inspired we’ve been over the last 24 hours and talk about the things you can start playing with right now! Starting with Phil’s keynote yesterday. The themes have been set!

[Kristi] I was really blown away yesterday with this idea of Evernote as a workspace. I used to describe Evernote to people as a note taking app. But it's really become more than that to me and clearly to other people. That redefinition of Evernote as a workspace and really concentrating on the four key things that Evernote is great at… which is writing, collecting, finding and presenting. All the efforts are being poured into those four things. We saw yesterday that they're going to have a new app called Scannable that makes it even easier to collect; there is going to be- on the find part of it- more context clues as you're looking for things and not just in Evernote, but the integration with the Wall Street Journal! When you’re searching for things, they’re pulling in WSJ articles that might apply. As a writer, that is huge! Evernote is going to help me do my research! 

From the distraction free writing and then changes to presentation mode where you can actually have breaks in your presentation, which I think will be really great. I actually had this feeling when they were talking about Evernote as as a workspace and about changing how we work and giving people that home base, I had this feeling that it was very much like the change we all had when the email came into our workplace. I knew it was going to change how we did our work and I really feel like using Evernote as our workspace is going to change how we work and make us so much more productive and just make it easier to do everything that we do every day.

[Stacey] Definitely breaking old productivity metaphors in our work environment. This is a massive change for a lot of people out there. Deconstructing how we’re used to organizing things and really re-breaking that down into those four basic elements that Kristi mentioned. Everything that Evernote is focusing on is kind of shifting towards that and allowing you to accomplish your “life's work.” There are also lots of things coming down the pipeline. They promised like 20-30 massive changes before the end of the year. You’re going to see a lot of changes to the platform. A couple of highlights: they’ve redesigned the web client for Evernote. The focus is really on distraction free productivity. They’ve stripped away all of the things you don’t need, while keeping the functionality.

The other things is the focus on “your life’s work.” It’s how you can use Evernote to “workflow” your life. It’s definitely something we focus on in the book, as well. How can Evernote be organized to be a productivity tool for your life? Kristi I know you're over on the demo pavilion. Give us a preview of Scannable!

[Kristi] What you can see is that from your phone you will be able to scan documents and determine where they go to. And if you have a ScanSnap, you can walk up to it and get the scans on your phone. It becomes a great tool for teams. This will really make a difference in how we get things into Evernote.

[Stacey] We saw a demo of it yesterday, and the functionality of the photography from your iPhone was so impressive. You can take an image and not even touch a button. It will auto-sense that it is there. It’s similar to the business card feature.

[Kristi] Of course my favorite thing about yesterday was Stacey's presentation where she talked about and seamless workflows for teams. She talked a lot about some of the things we talked about in the book. 

[Stacey] Kristi has her session coming up to today about how she blends paper and digital. There have been some great announcements with how Evernote is going to integrate even more with the paper/digital world.

[Kristi] Now Moleskin will have a daily agenda! The coolest part is that when you take a picture of that day’s notes, it will recognize that it’s based on date. No matter when I digitize it, it will be about one certain day.

[Stacey] There are two new product names you’ll want to know: Context and WorkChat. WorkChat is going to supercharge the collaboration features in Evernote. You’ll be able to see avatars of people that you share notebooks with and be able to tell what notes they’re looking at in real time. That will transform your remote team environment for sure.

[Kristi] I'm really excited about the business summary dashboard. You’ll get a summary of what notes are getting the most traction, the new people in the company, what trends are, etc. That is so great because I never pay too much attention to the activity feed.

[Stacey] They’ve always been great about contextualizing things. Phil said yesterday, “You want to find things, you don’t want to search for things.” Evernote will really help you with that. A major theme yesterday as well was that “meetings suck!” Everybody understood what he meant by that. Evernote is really taking it upon themselves to transform productivity, efficiency, and the “enjoyment” factor of meetings. He’s combatting PowerPoint. He called PowerPoints “pitches.” Meeting don’t need to be pitches.

Presentation mode will be transformed. Evernote is allowing you to show your slides in a great way.

[Kristi] I’ve enjoyed using presentation mode with clients when we were creating content for them as we go. I could make changes in Evernote and show them immediately. And then I could share that notebook right there without emailing a huge PowerPoint. Now we’re making meetings a conversation instead of a “push.”

[Stacey] There’s also going to be a new line of desk items for Mac. The design of what Evernote does has so much pride. You can see it in every choice that they’ve made. They’ve also been doing a lot of discussion about how EBCC’s can help deploy effective Evernote workflows in your businesses. Also, Evernote and LinkedIn are very important. Your LinkedIn profile is going to become very critical. My two tips are: make sure you like your headshot! Also, make sure that your e-mail associated with your Evernote account is also associated with your LinkedIn account.

[Kristi] It looks like when someone is searching for keywords, it might pull up your profile if you have those keywords. Make sure your profile has those keywords so that when people are searching for related topics, you will show up in someone’s search!