Evernote Discusses Vision, Security, Privacy — San Jose Mercury News
Q You do image recognition, handwriting recognition and you are working on audio recognition. How has technology advanced to make this possible not only in a browser but in a hand-held device?
A A bunch of things have happened. Recognition technologies have advanced a long way. A lot was done by Stepan and his team. He started a company called ParaGraph that focused on handwriting recognition and 3-D graphics. It was sold to Silicon Graphics. Then he started a few other companies, including ParaScript, which currently handles the reading of mail and checks in the United States and other countries.
Q What about networking and computing infrastructure?
A This whole service couldnt have worked five years ago. It would have been immensely hard to build something that automatically syncs to every single computer — either Mac or Windows, as well as to the Web and to different kinds of phones in real time — that had data stored on a data center in the cloud and locally on your computer or device and was reliable without you having to think about it.
Q Being someones brain is pretty personal. What kind of thinking has the company done about privacy?
A Quite a lot, and about security as well. It is really up to users to decide if they want the world to see all their thoughts, or if they want to keep things private, or if they want a mix. You can publish everything and you can synchronize everything, or you can use Evernote without synchronizing it and choose to encrypt everything and keep it encrypted somewhere on your hard drive. We support all that kind of stuff. Of course, you are compromising some kind of functionality if you only use Evernote on your computer. You cant effortlessly access your notes from anywhere and of course you cant share them with your friends.
Q What about the data itself?
A The first thing is, your memories are yours. Thats really important to us. We are not going to sell any of your information to advertisers or any third parties. And we are not going to charge you to get access to information. Any memory you have for the rest of your life, its yours. We have full import-export capabilities.
via Sunnyvale software startup offers extra memory in an external brain – San Jose Mercury News.