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VIDEOS: Evernote Hello & Vague Direction (plus a competition to win stuff!)

COMPETITION NOW CLOSED – congratulations to the winners – enjoy your year-long Evernote Premium accounts!

[dropcap]Bit[/dropcap] of a different post today. There’s a high chance that you have a small selection of go-to apps on your phone, ones that you use day in day out and don’t really think about. It’s rare to find an app that becomes totally engrained in your everyday life – it’s always open because it’s useful, provides value and is effortless – Evernote is one of those. It’s a second brain where you can safely store your ideas, notes and thoughts. It’s the only tool I use to keep track of everything that happens on the road.

I’ve been working in partnership with the Silicon Valley folks for a while now, and some of that work has presented itself over on The Evernote Blog (read all about it here) and in this commercial about Evernote Hello – which has played a crucial role in this project so far, and is super intuitive & useful when it comes to remembering the people you meet.

And below you can see a video about how Evernote in general comes in handy on the Vague Direction project. It’d be easy to reel off all the ways that the app helps with efficiency in the video, but it’d be quite long, so other highlights that were left out are included below the video.

  • Web Clipper – for any articles or text from the internet, use clipper to copy the articles, then read them offline.
  • Image recognition is built into search. It can read text from photos / receipts / travel tix / posters etc (this blew my mind).
  • Skitch – for annotating photos and maps. Good for marking directions.

If you don’t use Evernote, and want to be more productive, check it out – odds are you’ll never look back.

24 replies on “VIDEOS: Evernote Hello & Vague Direction (plus a competition to win stuff!)”

My most adventurous memory is when I was doing a test run for a bicycle tour around the coast of Florida to visit all 30 lighthouses. To do a shakedown ride before the official tour, I decided to ride down to Sanibel Island from my home in North Port. This was only 60 miles away, but due to extreme heat that particular day…plus getting lost multiple times in North Fort Myers…the ride took twelve hours. By the time I arrived, I was in full heat exhaustion and didn’t know it. I was camping on the island instead of staying at a motel, so I never really got out of the heat. All the next day, I just couldn’t drink enough and never really felt right.

When I left, I was feeling pretty strong. I found my way through where I had all the problems two days before and met up with a friend for part of the ride home. Again, a scorching day and we were drinking every fifteen minutes just to make sure we were hydrated. I had a flat that I had to stop and fix, which was not an issue. However, when we continued riding, I noticed that I had tunnel vision and had stopped sweating. When I informed my riding partner of that, she pulled into the next grocery store she could find and called my wife to come pick us up in our truck. I just could not understand why she ended the ride…I felt fine. Until later that day when I started to feel the full effects of being in heat exhaustion for three days. Almost had to go to the hospital, but I recovered.

The rest of the planned tour of Florida never happened that summer. The heat never let up and I knew that I would not be able to trust my own judgement if I started to slip. The only way to do this tour is during the Winter months in Florida (gee, such a simple concept.) But it was still a great adventure and always brings to mind the saying, “What does not kill you will only make you stronger.”

Kevin, North Port, FL

My most adventurous memory is climbing California’s White Mountain, at 14,000 plus feet in height. It was my first fourteener and I climbed just short of my 67th birthday on the 90th anniversary of my father’s birth. The day hike was 14 miles in length, all above the tree line. It was about 38 degrees just after dawn. I felt really accomplished.

My most adventurous memory is when I hiked Mt. Helvellyn with Andy. We started out on a brisk morning in the English Lake District at the base of the mountain in full sun walking through green vegetation and gravely rock. The path was wide, the incline was allowable. I thought to myself “This will be a beautiful little stroll in the English countryside! Why on earth would anyone stay at home and not want to join on this hike!?” I soon learned why. With each step, the path became narrower. The green vegetation dropped off to sheer-edged cliffs that ran into ice sheets and the gravely rock avalanched down into steep ravines that lined the now foot wide path that we were to keep following. As we kept walking, the sun disappeared. The sky turned white as did everything in view around us as the clear, sunny day turned into a snow field with little visibility. As we climbed and climbed I imagined the few hundred foot drop that I could see right next to me at lower elevations, now a white abyss in the blizzardy conditions. I concentrated on my footing. At an ice covered lake we took our lunch break. The lunch break that I imagined would be warm and peaceful with the sounds of chirping birds and the images of vivd green foliage, turned out to be a quick snack under a bright orange survival tent, huddled together to stay warm while the world around us blew white, cold, violent images of adventure. The peak of the mountain was unbelievable. A ridge so thin that I am sure the views down its sides would have sent me into a head spin, if I could have seen them through the snowy fog. We traversed Helvellyn’s top and headed down the backside, down jagged rock so fickle that we had to be tied into handmade harnesses by our deceiving guide to repel down the parts too steep to take by foot. Going through the motions I tried not to think about how different this hike had become from the “afternoon stroll” image I had perceived. But when we popped out of the snowy haze on the other side, and suddenly were back on that wide gravely path surrounded by the green English hills that I had become so accustomed to knowing, It was hard to believe what we had just been through. The base of the mountain looked nothing like its peak. It was something i was completely unprepared for and one of my proudest moments in accomplishing. I felt a true sense of adventure that I will never forget.

My most adventurous memory is trekking to Nanthimpokhri in the north Bengal, in the state of West Bengal in India. We were 7 of us, and we were about to visit a very well acclaimed Salamander project in that area. Salamander is found in very few areas in India, and this particular area in North Bengal is one of them. We planned to cover a huge distance by trekking, and that particular day we trekked uphill for nearly 25 kms, starting from 6am early in the morning. When it was around afternoon, we noticed clouds have already accumulated in the distance. It was end Summer and hence we had only 2 rain coats and 2 umbrellas in total. I had a detailed trek-planning in my Evernote, and not thinking about the diversity in form of impending rains was a huge mistake on our part. In the next half an hour, not only rains but the nearby hilly small streams started to be flash flooded. We all were drenched to the core in no time, Worse, we had quite a distance to cover before daylight goes off.
As per our planning, we were supposed to spend the night in the guard’s hut, adjacent to the Salamander project. After fighting with the nature Gods when we reached the place, it was already late evening. Due to the adverse weather, the guard decided to spend the night in his village, which was around 3 kms away from that place. Each of us was carrying heavy rucksacks, and in that situation, none had the presence of mind or energy or sense of direction to trek 3 kms more to visit the guard and make him open the hut for our night stay.
One senior in the team and me went o call him, keeping our rucksacks with others. After half an hour’s time, we had the hut to ourselves. It was still raining quite heavily outside. The temperature outside was down to 2-3 degrees and we had to light up woods to warm ourselves. My hands were so numb that I had to put it very close to the fire and rub it all the time to get the senses back. We stiil had to cook for the night. It was a long night indeed!

– Bastab from India

My most adventurous memory is…
the bike trip from D.C. to Pittsburgh with my brother. A drop in the bucket compared to your trip, but a big one for me.

As a young boy-scout, I was held up at gunpoint by a Swedish Count, when I and small group of scouts were using his land to do a canoe crossing. The count and a buddy of his pulled up in a big truck with screeching brakes in front of us and jumped out in a pretty exited state. I happened to be in the front of the group logging a canoe, and the count pulled out a gun, pointed it at me and screamed “Det er inte roligt!”, which translates to “This is not funny”. We had to go back and finally found a different crossing. I remember putting the canoes in the water, while the sun was setting. It was very quiet except for some dogs barking in the distance. We had to navigate our canoes down some rapids in the darkness of night before we found a place to go to shore and put up tents.

My weirdest memory was in Kirgizia. An official of the park came to see our permits at 4:30 AM. We didn’t have any, so the only solution was to drink wodka with him. I’ve nevre been drunk that early!
I’m Willemjan from the Netherlands.

My most adventurous memory is when I was a young boy and my family and I were due to go on holiday. There was such a commotion in getting ready that my parents and cousins all left for the airport without me. I was left at home by myself for the whole Christmas holidays. It was was strange being alone in our house and it was lonely at first but then when some lovable crooks tried to break into my house my mind became occupied with setting up a number of intricate booby traps. Good times!

Hi Nigel, wow. This sounds like something that should be made into a film. Has it happened again? Did you ever have any more epics – for example getting on the wrong airplane? Or throwing a note wrapped brick into a famous NYC toy store? Sounds like you have a nack for getting into trouble. But at least it sounds like you’re very creative when it comes to self defence and the protection of property.

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Really, I feel like I’m immersed in this adventure of life – that I could encounter something new and amazing in any and every moment.

How about a highlight?

My most adventurous memory took me into the Mayan jungle, where my entire world transformed, soul to skin. According to comments from some of the women there, even my voice changed. I guess that’s what happens when you willingly put on a blindfold, lie on a pallet, and put your body under a knife. Sure, the cuts weren’t deep, but that doesn’t make them in any less surprising when you can’t see them coming. And these “surgeries” weren’t about anything physical – they were direct operations on my soul.

I was probably crazy. But it changed everything.

I wrote more about it here: http://modernhedonist.com/born-how-carrying-my-mentor-through-the-mayan-jungle-transformed-everything/ . The whole story is way too long to post in a comment. :)

Hi! I’m Ephraim from Colorado.

This sounds like a very powerful and pivotal experience Ephraim! Thanks for sharing.

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Enjoyed reading all these comments! Thanks for taking the time to write them. Comp is now closed for entries. Handing this over to some amazing people who will choose their favourites, and then you might have won some swag.

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