After Pledging A “Better Evernote”, Evernote Updates Data Sync, Now 4X Faster

Earlier this month, Evernote — the note-taking app with some 80 million users and over $250 million in funding — took a humble pill after former TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid slammed the company for letting its software development slip and the app fill with glitches. “I could quibble with the specifics,” wrote CEO Phil Libin, “but reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right. We’re going to fix this.”

Today comes part one of that repair job: Evernote is updating the synchronization that lets you keep exact copies of all of your data across different devices and in the cloud. It’s the first time syncing was first introduced in 2008 that the whole system, including the service side, has been upgraded. The new technology is going to more reliable, but also more zippy — some four times quicker in synching users’ information, Libin promises.

It’s part of a bigger push the company is making over the next couple of weeks that will include a refresh of its apps on mobile and desktop, as well as an API update, as the service adds on more devices and more users.

You could argue that Evernote of late has been too focused on growing and less on servicing the users it already has. (Case in point: last week’s new deal to expand its partnership with Deutsche Telekom.) That’s a particularly bad state of affairs for a company like Evernote, which has often touted the permanency of its product.

In that regard, it looks like the updates are coming not a moment too soon, especially if look at how some users have responded to sync lately:

Never using @evernote again… Losing notes all the time because of sync issues. DO YOUR JOB

— rae (@aortae) January 27, 2014

Libin notes that the new sync will work regardless of what version of Evernote you use — although the difference is likely to be a lot more noticeable to power users with large amounts of data in Evernote.

“Sync now often takes a couple of seconds to complete, and when you get a new phone or computer, downloading your notes will take much less time,” Libin notes.

In a blog post, Libin writes that part of the reason the older sync has become less effective is because of the growth of the different elements of how Evernote works: the number of notes you have, the size of files (which can be as heavy as audio or as light as little notes), the number of users on a server, the number of devices, and the number of people with whom you collaborate.

All of these have exploded in scale as Evernote has increased its own functionality beyond being a simple smartphone app, and into an all-in-one organiser for yourself, your business, your diet and so on, and built out its user base to match. “We would set ourselves up for fast and reliable service for years to come, factoring in the rapid increases in mobile usage, wearable devices, larger images, video and collaboration that we expect in Evernote,” he writes.

The original system had been designed for a much simpler concept of the app, for a much smaller number of users. “When we originally designed the architecture, we only had to support a few thousand, mostly single-device users, taking text notes for themselves,” writes Libin. “Now, we have tens of millions of users, most using multiple devices, storing and sharing notes, photos and documents.” It’s also gone from one service to more than 700 across “multiple data centers.” A more technical explanation is over here.

This is not an overnight change — and indeed, although Evernote only responded to criticism publicly in January, Libin says that the company was actually on the road to a larger upgrade for months already. In the case of sync, he says that the company redesigned how it worked a whole year ago on the server side. Like the company’s approach to implementing security (too slowly for some observers) it’s gone slowly on the sync update to make sure that there would be no service interruptions.

“First, our Service team completely re-engineered the way that Evernote synchronizes your notes. After that, we migrated every single note, resource and bit of metadata onto the new sync platform. We also upgraded the hardware on some of our older servers. Then we tested. And tested. And tested some more,” Libin notes.

It was only in the last few weeks that servers finally began to migrate over to the new infrastructure. As of now, all Evernote servers are running the new sync engine, Libin says.

The next step, he says, will be to upgrade apps and APIs, which should happen over the next couple of weeks.

After Pledging A “Better Evernote”, Evernote Updates Data Sync, Now 4X Faster

Science, Inc.-Backed HomeHero Launches To Help Families Find, Hire, And Manage In-Home Care For Seniors

Any family that has spent any time caring for aging parents, grandparents or those with special needs knows how stressful it can be, and how much energy is required, to manage in-home care. From keeping track of and organizing appointments, contacts and medications to finding and coordinating with the best caregivers, the process can feel like a full-time job — let alone having to worry about keeping all of that information private and secure.

That’s where HomeHero comes in. Backed by L.A.-based incubator and studio, Science, Inc., HomeHero is launching today on a mission to build a layer of trust in the senior care market and help families reduce the headache inherent to finding, hiring and managing in-home care for seniors. After struggling to find quality, affordable care for their elderly grandparents, Kyle Hill and Mike Townsend began building HomeHero last year to help alleviate some of the stress that many families experience when trying to find care for aging loved ones.

Part of the stress many families endure during this process comes from trying to find the best in-home care they can afford, while allowing aging relatives to stay in their homes — the issue around which the whole care process and discussion revolves once aging loved ones actually admit that care is needed. Over the years, it’s been the focal point for many-a-family discussion (or arguments) the world over.

After his grandfather passed away, says co-founder Kyle Hill, his family watched as his grandmother’s health deteriorated at a rate they hadn’t anticipated, and they were forced to move quickly to find caregivers as a result. But finding an experienced, vetted caregiver ended up being a much bigger headache then they expected and, once they did find one, they found it extremely difficult to manage that care at a distance.

Over the last 30 years, Hill says, the average age of elderly people leaving their home for full-time, managed care has increased from 74 to 90, and the average distance between the elderly and the closest adult child has jumped from 32 miles to 56 miles. So, when the founders began building HomeHero, they set out to develop a product that would “consolidate in-home care services into a simple platform” and one that “families could begin using right away,” without any barriers to entry.

To do so, the Santa Monica-based startup is introducing two main products at launch, beginning with HomeHero Connect, which the founders describe as a simple tool designed to help families manage independent caregivers by giving them access to timesheet tracking, daily activity summaries (with audio recording), emergency phone alerts and automated payments.

The second is HomeHero Marketplace, through which families managing care for aging loved ones can access a marketplace of hundreds of experienced and vetted caregivers, which includes high-definition video profiles, background checks, social references and customer reviews. Families can also view caregivers by location, plotted on a map, and use HomeHero’s search tool to filter caregivers by gender, number of reviews, years of experience and language.

At launch, the marketplace will focus on caregivers in Southern California, with the geographical coverage expected to expand in the coming months, Hill says, but anyone (in any location) will be able to access HomeHero Connect and the startup’s in-home care management tools.

As to how caregivers are screened, the founders say that each is subject to a “rigorous certification process,” which includes an in-person interview, entrance exam and background check. The vetting process also takes into account references from past clients, Townsend says. The rates start at $15/hour and increase from there, but the idea, the founders say, is to allow families to avoid having to rely on third-party agencies, putting the ability to discover, hire and monitor that care back into their hands without the extra cost.

In terms of its target audience, the HomeHero co-founders say that caregivers listed in their marketplace run the gamut, but most will be able to accomplish everything from basic chores and housekeeping to the most sensitive personal needs. The idea, Hill and Townsend tell us, is to provide access to caregivers that can provide round-the-clock care and daily assistance to less regular, weekly drop-ins, for example.

Furthermore, as it can feel like a big risk for families to hire caregivers when they’re half-way across the country — because it is — to ensure the safety of its customers and their loved ones, HomeHero has a $1 million insurance policy to cover both bodily injury and property damage in the event of an accident. For those who are looking for extra assurance and peace of mind, once a family is up and running on the startup’s platform, caregivers have the ability to clock-in and clock-out from any phone, landline or cell, using HomeHero to provide daily summaries and voice recordings.

While it make seem like a niche tool to those not familiar with the process of managing in-home care for elderly loved ones, the fact of the matter is that care management still lives predominantly offline and happens through a mish-mash of online and offline networks and tools. Traditionally, in-home care can be an expensive proposition, and it’s not one that families enter into lightly, which means that those who can provide easier, more affordable alternatives — and access to caregivers that are actually experienced and trustworthy — could stand to benefit from an active and loyal customer base.

While the problem remains and the demand is increasing as people live longer and the elderly stay in their homes for longer and longer, HomeHero is far from being alone in tackling this market. CareZone, the NEA-backed startup founded by former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, is also building out a private, secure online service, which allows people and families to better take care of their loved ones — whether aging parents, children or those with special needs.

Other startups are tackling individual pieces of the in-home and care facility pipeline, including Silver Living, which is building a “consumer reports” for senior care communities, or those like TenderTree, which focus on the caregiver marketplace side of the market. Nonetheless, there’s still plenty of green-field ahead for these players, and, albeit after some serious customer education and awareness-raising, plenty of opportunity.

Science, Inc.-Backed HomeHero Launches To Help Families Find, Hire, And Manage In-Home Care For Seniors

Fashion GPS Updates Radar App To Streamline Search, Style Requests

The fashion industry, one of the oldest industries in the world, has historically been resistant to technological innovation. But Fashion GPS is on a mission to change that, most recently with the introduction of the newly updated Fashion GPS Radar app.

GPS Radar, one of many apps provided by Fashion GPS, lets fashion bloggers, editors, buyers, or anyone else in the industry organize their fashion week and keep track of their favorite looks.

With the update, Fashion GPS is bringing in some features from other apps to make GPS Radar a more full-featured experience.

Now, editors, bloggers, and buyers can not only keep track of their Fashion Week, but they can browse designer looks and request samples for those looks all from the same app.

This is a big change for Fashion GPS, which has always kept its applications separate based on use cases.

The update is also bringing with it the ability to search by designer, season or agency, as well as by fabric, color or clothing type.

“The biggest challenge we will face in 2014, especially with the roll-out of products like requesting on GPS Radar or via GPS Styles, is the adaptation of the industry,” said founder and CEO Eddie Mullen. “Based on previous experience we are confident that while adoption may be slow, once brands begin to use this tool to streamline the hundreds of sample/image requests they receive and editors learn how to access samples from hundreds of brands using their Radar app, it will certainly create yet another behavioral shift in the industry.”

In 2010, Fashion GPS had around 50 percent of brands using their products, and that has since grown to around 95 percent today.

Fashion GPS Updates Radar App To Streamline Search, Style Requests

Enterprise Messaging App Cotap Nabs $10M To Make ‘Every Worker A Knowledge Worker’

Cotap, a messaging startup co-founded by two ex-Yammer executives, came out of stealth last year with a very specific aim: using the boom in smartphone usage to break down communication barriers between “knowledge workers” chained to computers and employees who are front line, out in the wild, and directly interfacing with customers. Some three months after launching its first app, on iOS, Coptap is today announcing a new $10 million round of funding to build out that vision further, extending the app to Android and desktop, and hiring talent to build more features into the product, including its first tier of paid services.

As of today, Cotap has already signed up employees at 6,000 businesses to use its free app.

The Series B investment, which comes on top of a $5.5 million round last year, was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Charles River Ventures. Both VCs were early investors in Yammer.

Cotap’s debut and growth are part of a bigger consumerization trend among enterprise software developers: taking cues from the apps we use on our smartphones, tablets, and home computers, enterprises are moving away from dry and cumbersome legacy products. Workers want apps that are easier to use and more engaging, and on the IT side, the company wants services that are easier to implement and manage.

That’s given rise to a lot of startups that are trying to tap into this trend to make basic apps for already-connected employees easier to use. (Incidentally, one of the startups in that space, Tomfoolery, appears to be getting acquired by Yahoo.)

Cotap, however, takes this concept and extends it to another level: breaking down the digital divide in enterprises.

“There are 615 million knowledge workers in the world but 2.1 billion workers that are not ‘knowledge workers,’” says Jim Patterson, the co-founder and CEO. “It’s interesting that you have all these companies like IBM and even Google going after a relatively small piece of the pie. We’re looking at the other portion.”

Patterson believes that smartphones — becoming ever more ubiquitous — are a great democratizing force. Whereas a shop assistant or barista may not have been connected on a company network in the past, a handset — equipped with the Cotap app — could suddenly change that.

“For the first time, enterprise software will be something usable by all employees. If you work for a large grocery store or coffee chain in customer service, you’ve typically been excluded from company conversation,” Patterson says. “Your closest connection to company conversations happens in the break room, or on a message board.”

That goes two ways, too: those who work at cash registers typically come into the closest contact with customers, and yet there is no way for them to feed information back into an organization.

“In my experience at Yammer and in talking to Yammer’s customers, I know they would benefit greatly in connecting those line workers with knowledge workers. They are in contact with those customers every single day. They have something to add.”

The idea of equipping a huge workforce of line workers with smartphones, or pushing out an app that can be used on their own devicees, sounds a bit like a can of worms.

Patterson believes that this is surmountable, though. He notes that carriers like AT&T already offering enterprises charging plans where usage of specific apps can be charged to a company, as one way around the “bring your own device” trend.

He says that both service providers and enterprises are interested in these kinds of solutions, “the value of bringing people into the fold is so high. Yes, it can be complex to give access to front line workers, but even companies like Yammer and Box are exploring how to do this.”

And on the subject of the handset, when you consider that now companies often require employees to purchase uniforms, it’s not too outlandish to think of how that might potentially extend to mobile handsets, too.

As for paid features that might be coming online with Cotap, two areas that Patterson hones in on are security and push notifications. “Push notifications can be simple reminders, or they can be crisis communications, making sure people get word on something urgent quickly.” He says that Cotap will be offering customers the ability to segment by geolocation or department. “That’s a really powerful thing that companies don’t have the ability to do today.”

Patterson says that right now Cotap is working with around 10 different companies in beta on the new paid services, with the plans to introduce charging sometime before Q2.

Enterprise Messaging App Cotap Nabs $10M To Make ‘Every Worker A Knowledge Worker’

YC Alum GoCardless Raises Another $7M, Aims To Be The Stripe Of Direct Debit Payments

GoCardless, a Y-Combinator alum that has created a simple way for online businesses to set up and accept direct debit payments (that is, money that comes straight out of your bank account), is today announcing a $7 million Series B round that co-founder and CEO Hiroki Takeuchi says will be used to add more talent and to take on banks by targeting bigger enterprises. The funding comes as GoCardless is seeing rapid growth: launching in 2012, in 2013 it processed $200m of transactions and grew by 700%.

The Series B round was led by new investor Balderton, with existing investors Accel Partners and Passion Capital also participating, and it takes the total raised by GoGardless to just under $12 million.

GoCardless stands out among other YC startups for a couple of reasons. For one, it is one of the very few that is based outside of Silicon Valley — in its case, in London. (Among the others, the biggest is probably Songkick, also based in London, while other YC-incubated startups that may be based over here now are strategising about how to move back to California, and Lanyard recently got acquired by Eventbrite and moved back to Silicon Valley, Takeuchi notes.)

But Takeuchi says the reason for being here goes beyond the fact that the four co-founders hail from the UK (they are all Oxford grads).

“London has strength in the fin-tech space,” he notes, pointing to the city’s position as one of the world’s biggest financial centers makes it ripe not only for forging partnerships and finding investors, but also for picking up talent among the ranks of disaffected City workers. “It was a combination of that and banking regulations that made sense for our business.”

The other reason the UK makes sense is also the other main way that GoCardless stands apart from other YC startups.

In a world where much payment processing is run over credit card-based networks, GoCardless has created a simple, API-based solution that bypasses that for all businesses that center around recurring payments. And it is building that out in Europe, one of the strongest markets for direct debit transactions. In contrast, the market for this is far less developed in the U.S.

“In the U.S. people may look at you funny if you ask to pay for something by direct debit. People are wedded to their cards,” he says, “while in Europe it’s a widely-used mechanism to pay for utilities like gas and mobile phone bills.” Other types of companies include any service that you pay for by subscription.

Think of GoCardless as a kind of Stripe for direct debit, using a few lines of code to let anyone take a recurring payments. “What we are doing is similar to others disrupting the financial sector,” says Takeuchi. “Startups are taking on the banks in particular verticals: Wonga in loans, or TransferWise in FX, and us in direct debit.”

There are other ways of setting up direct debit payments today — namely, via your business’s bank. But Takeuchi says that the reason why GoCardless is better is because of its modern approach to enabling them. “We have built an easy to use tech layer on what is otherwise a horrible system,” he says.

As with the online payments API from the likes of Stripe or Braintree, or Square with its mobile-based payment option, GoCardless’s solution opens up the direct debit model to a vastly larger number of potential users.

“If you are not of a certain scale you would not get access to using direct debit in first place,” he says, “but even if you did you would get a piece of clunky software with barely an API. You are talking weeks or months of development time and a manual process to oversee on a regular basis.” The old way of doing things can take up to five or 10 people to manage the process, he says. “Banks are notoriously bad at this.”

While this pitch certainly helps smaller businesses incorporate direct debit, what GoCardless has been finding (much as Square and others have found in their verticals) is that the ease of using this ends up attracting much bigger businesses, too. Takeuchi tells me that its largest customer today is 15 times bigger than that of a year ago.

Tim Bunting, a General Partner at Balderton Capital, who is joining GoCardless’s board as part of the investment, says that customer response played a big factor in attracting investment. “GoCardless is an exceptional team with the potential to radically improve the way payments are done for businesses. For us, the most distinguishing feature was the feedback from their existing customers, who stressed that the technology they have developed, and the technical team they have built, is world class,” he said in a statement. “We believe this technological advantage, the scalability of the GoCardless model and size of the market it operates in will allow GoCardless to play an important role in the future of online payments.”

It’s a boost, too, that GoCardless is competitive on the fees front. Its pricing model starts at 1% of transactions and capped at £2, based on volumes.

For now, GoCardless is mainly focusing on online transactions rather than mobile, and plans to really establish itself in Europe before looking further afield. The fact that it’s doing so well, attracting both customers and investors, sets up GoCardless as one to watch in the ongoing debate of whether its possible to start, build and scale a company away from the Valley.

YC Alum GoCardless Raises Another $7M, Aims To Be The Stripe Of Direct Debit Payments

Yahoo Is Buying Tomfoolery, An Enterprise App Studio Led By Ex-Yahoos And AOLers

Yahoo’s acquisition spree continues apace, with the next deal likely to cover a few different bases for the company: mobile, enterprise and bringing ex-Yahoo talent back into the fold. We have heard that Yahoo is in advanced talks to acquire Tomfoolery, an enterprise app studio co-founded by two ex-Yahoos and two ex-AOLers. One person close to the situation says the deal could be done as soon as this week. The WSJ is also reporting a possible acquisition and puts the price at $16 million.

Tomfoolery — which opened for business last year with seed funding of $1.7 million from a group of big-name investors (it included Andreessen Horowitz, David Tisch, and a number of Yahoo and AOL veterans including Jerry Yang, Brad Garlinghouse, Ash Patel and Sam Pullara) – has been built around the concept of developing apps for enterprise users built on consumer principles.

The idea is that, in a world full of dry and often tedious enterprise software, adding consumer elements makes the apps more engaging and easier to use, and employees more productive. Tomfoolery’s slogan is ‘Work Awesome’.

The company’s first product was an app called Anchor, a real-time conversation platform. Users of the app can create groups for different threads, for example what to eat for lunch but also progress on a particular project. With a camera button alongside the main text input window, the idea is to be able to upload pictures as easily as you would in a consumer product to help make your points. Anchor also integrated with other popular apps such as Box, Dropbox and Evernote to help make it part of other workflows.

But Anchor was intended, really, to be just that: an anchor. Tomfoolery’s bigger business plan was to produce a number of apps that would work together (think Facebook with separate Messenger, Poke, Camera, Pages Manager and Instagram apps). From what we understand, that’s what it had been doing before Yahoo came knocking. One area I’d heard was in progress was a messaging app.

It’s not clear whether Yahoo would want Tomfoolery to continue along this particular enterprise/consumer trajectory, whether it has another mobile project in mind, whether this would be a talent acquisition that could see the team redeployed in a number of areas, or something else entirely.

All scenarios make some sense.

Last year, Yahoo made a couple of acquisitions that are now part of its Small Business group — Lexity (founded by ex-Yahoo Amit Kumar, who now runs the the Small Business group) and Rondee, a conference calling startup. Adding a team of people that has built a startup around apps for small workgroups would be a logical move to expand that business.

At the same time, Yahoo has its eye on making engaging mobile apps for more than just business users. Of the two dozen or so acquisitions that Yahoo has made since Mayer took over, a large portion have been in the area of mobile. But although Yahoo has been making some decent inroads in updating its mobile apps after years of near-neglect, the company has yet to really hone in on a perennial, breakthrough app — ending 2013, for example, without a single app in Apple’s Top 100.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Tomfoolery co-founder and product head Sol Lipman, who once sold a startup to AOL, would have been scooped up to boost a mobile team. In other words, Tomfoolery’s talent and ideas could just as easily be redeployed into that group.

It’s unclear how much traction Tomfoolery has had with Anchor, or whether it was in the process of raising another round of funding. Indeed, what is more obvious is that the group has a lot of talent in it that extends beyond mobile.

Co-founder/CEO Kakul Srivastava is the former GM of Flickr, who led it during its biggest phase of growth, from 37,000 users to over 50 million by the time she departed. She also played a big role in products like Yahoo Mail in her time at the company. (Like many others, she left and worked with Stewart Butterfield at Tiny Speck before moving on to co-founding Tomfoolery.)

Other co-founders like Simon Batistoni, VP of platform, had a big role to play in how Flickr build out its monetization platform and community aspects of the service (before he also left for Tiny Speck). And the final co-founder, Ethan Nagel, is described as an “architect hacker” who has worked both in enterprise but also mobile.

We are reaching out to both companies for comment and will update as we learn more.

Yahoo Is Buying Tomfoolery, An Enterprise App Studio Led By Ex-Yahoos And AOLers

Emsisoft Congratulates Peter Rodionov

During the holiday season, Russian security software community Comss.ru held a “Why Emsisoft is Awesome” drawing contest.  1st place went to Peter Rodionov for his depiction of an Emsisoft warrior scanning the front for malware.  Peter also illustrated an army of Emsisoft soldiers, with grey-bearded General Emsisoft leading the charge!

For his impressive creativity, Peter received 3 free months on a 3 year license of Emsisoft Anti-Malware for up to 3 PCs.  In all, 280 artists participated in COMSS’s competition.  2nd prize went to Nikita Erko for her depiction of another Emsisoft warrior smiting the evils of malware,  and 3rd went to Sergey Yaroslavov for his very comical nod to WWE.  All of the contestants’ submissions can be viewed here.

Emsisoft would like to thank everyone for participating and showing the world why you think Emsisoft is Awesome.  We think you are too, and that’s why we create Anti-Malware!

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Emsisoft Congratulates Peter Rodionov