Evernote is one of my favorite cloud applications.  What is it?  Well, from their own web site (www.evernote.com) it's a way to "capture anything, access it anywhere and find it fast".  If a picture is worth a thousand words a video must be worth a million.

So, why do I like it?  

• It lets me keep all that "stuff" that I might need at some stage.  
• It's on my PC's, iphone and ipad so it's with me anytime I might need it. 
• I can search it, tag notes with key words and organise notes into related folders. 
• I can share notes and notebooks with others.
• It's quick and simple to add notes and to capture stuff off of web sites I might need.    

How do I use it?

Planning and notetaking - Any time I need to jot down plans for something or make a list of things I need do I use Evernote.  I can add checkboxes and tick them off when I'm done.  

Capturing - you can pretty much capture anything, from screenshots, to web pages, to photos, to voice notes and files.  Often I take photos of hand written notes I might need.  Evernote even indexes the handwriting in photos which makes them easy to find later.  

Here's a note to capture my wifes tyre information, she's been doing too many burnouts lately and I need to get her some new ones.  I took the photo on my phone and now when I'm ringing around I have the information on my computer or if I'm checking prices in the stores I have it on my phone.  

Storage - I keep electronic versions of product manuals and other pdf documents in Evernote.  They are indexed and searchable making it easy for me to find them when I need them.

It's free!!!!  Whaaaat? I hear you say.  There's a small amount of unobtrusive advertising in the bottom left corner of the interface.  There is a premium version for about $45 a year which gets rid of the advertising and gives you  a bit more storage and a few other advantages but the functionality of the free version is very rich.  I have the premium version which I got because I use it so much and wanted to support them more than to get the additional benefits.  

Hi

Welcome to our first blog entry.  We love the web and the cloud and I'm going to use this blog to let people know why.  We'll talk about what the cloud is, some of the cloud applications we use, what we are doing for some of our clients and perhaps some other stuff, we'll see.  

We are seeing a transformation in the way we do things.  An explosion of web sites, web applications and mobile apps.  Think back 5 years, 10 years, even 20 years and the way a lot of us are doing things has changed.  What did I do before my iphone?  

There's a fair bit of confusion about what "the cloud" is and what it can do for us.  Many of us already use it and it's important not to get too hung up on it being something weird and mysterious.  Typically "the cloud" is just stuff up on the Internet.  We might connect to it through our web browser, our smart phones or tablets.  It might include storage of data or some kind of web application, most likely it is a combination of the two.  What's the attraction?  Well firstly someone else deals with the details.....managing the infrastructure (servers, routers, espresso machines for the nerdy IT guys) and making sure it works.  Secondly.....it's scalable (can grow with the demand).  Thirdly.....it's flexible, it allows new ideas to cost effectively become reality.  Lastly....It's PAYG, we don't have to spend a fortune on costly infranstructure (see Firstly), we pay for what we use (use a little bit we pay a little).  

Here's a nice little picture from Wikipedia.  

In the past some of that stuff in the cloudy bit had to be managed in-house.  In business we had to have database administrators, developers, IT managers and all the associated infrastructure to do any of the stuff we are starting to take for granted.   

A good example most of us use is internet banking.  We connect to it from our internet browsers or some kind of smart phone app and do all the stuff we had to go to a branch to do.  Some of the other lesser know versions are online versions of things like word processing and spreadsheets  (Office Web Apps and Google Docs ).  

For all its good points it's good to be aware of some of the downsides.  We do loose a bit of control putting our "stuff" up in "the cloud".  We are putting our information and data in someone elses hands.  It's important to know how the data is stored (encrypted or un-encrypted), how it's being used (you think facebook is really free?) and what protections there are against disaster and failure.  In a lot of cases we are also relying on our internet connections, many cloud applications can store data locally so in many cases we're not completely toast if this happens and we can usually find alternative internet access elsewhere.  

Anyway that's a bit of an introduction to "the cloud", see it's not that scary ;-P.   If you have any questions please let us know and particularly if there's a topic you'd like covered in a future article. 

Bye for now.