Touchanote Brings Evernote to Life With NFC Tags [VIDEO]
Mix an edgy consumer NFC idea with $55,000 in prize winnings and the support of Evernote’s fast-growing & well-financed platform, and you might have a soapbox stand tall enough to capture the world’s attention.
This is the position that startup Touchanote finds itself in after winning Evernote’s developer competition.
Founder Hamid Zaidi wowed attendees and judges at the Evernote Trunk Conference with an Android application that stores links to Evernote content on physical NFC tags (see above). Create a link to an Evernote note and slap an NFC tag on any object you’d like. Then, simply touch your device to the tag to open your note.
Touchanote, says Zaidi, who spoke with Mashable in an exclusive post-win interview, proffers a right-here, right-now consumer use case for NFC technology.
Much ado is being made about NFC-enabled payments, but the infrastructure and business adoption required to support payments is likely still two years out, he says. “Meanwhile, millions of lonely NFC phone users out there are excited to use the technology now,” says Zaidi. “We want to be the face for the consumer-driven NFC market.”
Touchanote is like a backup disk for your brain: Evernote serves as the memory bank and NFC markers make for physical placeholders that route you back to important information. Instructions or passwords stored on tags stuck on associated objects make for practical use cases. Tags on photo frames, however, could call up more memories in digital photo form.
The application connects the digital and physical realms in a way that brings Evernote CEO Phil Libin’s vision of a “trusted second brain for all your lifetime memories” to fruition.
Touchanote has received an encouraging post-victory reception. The application launched on the Android store last Thursday and users have already ordered 500 tags — tags are sold in 1, 10 and 25 batches for $3, $10 and $20 respectively.
The startups biggest challenge, says Zaidi, will be to meet demand with enough tags, which are supplied by a third-party manufacturer. He doesn’t seem to the think that the lack of NFC-enabled devices for sale will work against the company.
“This is a tangible market that people have disregarded,” he says, citing a forecast that more than 40 million NFC phones will ship this year. “I think that is a huge and blank canvas.”
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