Context brings information from third-party sources into the app so users can read news articles and other content alongside their own documents and notes. Nikkei is the first international news source that has been integrated into Evernote Context and the partnership is expected to become available to Evernote Premium and Evernote Business subscribers by early 2015.
Evernote Context looks at data in your files and feeds you news articles and other information that it thinks you will find relevant. As TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden noted last month, this builds into Evernote’s attempt to build its content discovery play, a similar strategy to the ones taken by Facebook and Twitter as they seek ways to encourage people to spend more time on their sites. Libin has said that Evernote is considering an IPO within the next few years.
Evernote had a great start, and a bumpy growing phase marred by instability and badly optimized software. Now it is at a stage where it starts talking about a not so distant IPO.
With Contexts, Evernote is shoving down the throat of their customers — even Evernote Business subscribers — data from an external source. The fact that you need to separately disable Contexts on each device says a lot about the plan. A note taking software should treasure the content that customers enter, not mix it with something taken from the Internet.
I’ve dabbled in Evernote for a few years, never collecting more than a few dozens notes because of the lack of a migration path out of its service. A serious note taking / document management service should in fact have clear, non proprietary and well documented import/exports processes.
Contexts is another good reason not to take Evernote seriously. The company is obviously not putting their customers’ interests first.