Messing with EverNote and SpinVox

I listened to an interview with EverNote CEO Phil Libin on IT Conversations today. The title ‘Personal Outboard Memory’ was a bit over the top, and there are a few too many capital letters, but it was a good listen and I was intrigued enough to have a play around with it.

I can see the appeal of having an online scrapbook that can handle and organise a variety of media.That said, things didn’t start well. There’s no Linux client and it doesn’t support Firefox 3. After an ominous message, it does let you through though, strictly at your own peril. I was able to add notes via email, which has appeal, especially from work, plus the Evernote Web clipper browser, which allows to quickly grab areas of a page, worked nicely.

One of the things I like the sound of, is the ability to add photos taken from your camera phone. Lacking a device to test this with, I thought I’d have a go at replicating this trick from lifehacker, which the EverNote guys liked too. Living, in the UK however, I had to substite SpinVox for the North America only Jott.

“So will SpinVox be able to translate this and consign it to my heaven, earth volt forever. I’m not sure.”

That should have been ‘my EverNote vault’ but otherwise it’s verbatim. It took about 9 minutes from the time of call for the note to appear. Cute the way SpinVox recognise their own capital ‘V’ huh?

It was pretty easy to set up. Just get accounts at both sites and set SpinVox to ‘blog to’ your EverNote ‘Email your notes to’ address. You’ll get a number to call and a pin from SpinVox. Dial the number and leave your message and you’re done.

I think I’ll keep an eye on EverNote, the API should be released soon and should usher in some interesting developments. It also promises text recognition which I will test next time I get a moment. As for SpinVox, I’m not a huge fan of talking on the phone but I can see myself dialing that number again, even if it’s just to deliberately confuse the voice recognition.