It looks like Evernote is starting to branch out a little from their usual cut-and-dry cloud storage service. Today they’ve launched two new iOS apps, called Evernote Hello and Evernote Food tailored to saving information specifically about certain foodstuffs and certain people. Hello goes a little bit beyond just recording contact data in a few interesting ways. After punching in their contact data, people are e-mail the contact info of the phone owner, so the swap can come around full loop, even if both parties don’t have the app. Hello takes three quick pictures of the person, which are stitched together for a little animation, which is viewed in the mosaic overview. I’m not quite sure why Evernote Hello doesn’t let you add these people and their new information to the native iPhone address book, but it will detect when you’re having a new meeting with someone based on calendar items, and create a new “encounter” in the app based on it. This way you can always keep tabs on how and where you’re meeting new people. That said, it seems to me this could be a great tool for sales folks.
Evernote Food strikes me as very similar to Foodspotting, if a little less social and a little more archival. Of course, you can share notes out to Facebook and Twitter. You can take pictures, add notes and labels, and information about the places you’re eating.
It’s interesting to see Evernote starting to splinter its functionality a little bit to create tailored experiences that all make use of the same cloud, but I’m not sure if they’ll be able to compete with overlapping apps that have been in the space longer. For example, if Evernote Hello had NFC or Bump built in, Google contacts sync, and maybe a businesscard scanner built in, then I could see myself using it regularly, but just because it’s Evernote doesn’t automatically engender me to using it; those of you who are more hardcore about Evernote may be in a different boat.
Anyway, you can download both apps for free at the links below.