Evernote team up with StarHub to boost presence in Asia

SINGAPORE — Evernote today (Aug 22) announced a tie up with Singapore’s second largest telco by revenue, StarHub to deliver its premium subscription model (worth S$58) to users for free for a year.

The complimentary subscription will be available to all re-contracting or new StarHub post-paid customers. Existing free Evernote users who are StarHub postpaid subscribers are also eligible for the upgrade for a limited time.

The move is the note-taking app’s effort to expand its footprint in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia, said its Chief Operating Officer Ken Gullicksen at the announcement this morning. Singapore has the highest penetration of Evernote users per capita in the world, shared Mr Gullicksen. Of its 66 million users worldwide, 400,000 reside in here - making Singapore the most successful markets in terms of market penetration.

And Evernote wants to use Singapore as showcase city for the region. By working with StarHub, it hopes to make the app relevant to its around 1 million postpaid customers. And help people relate to its uses.

StarHub’s Head of i3 (Innovation, Investment, Incubation) Stephen Lee said: “ We’re really seeing very strong competition in Singapore market today across all the telcos. As it is, the handset penetration has already reached close to 154 per cent. And it is really how customers today are utilising their high speed broadband as well as mobile network, or mobile broadband data plan to have access to many different applications so it’s not just about communications anymore.

“It is how we value-add to the lifestyle of our customers. So, with the partnership with Evernote, we found that it is imperative that we hear what the customers want and really they’re looking for more in terms of productivity apps.”

Before today’s announcement, there was speculation that Evernote was to collaborate with SingTel, which has a regional presence. Mr Gullicksen said: “We don’t focus on coverage, we’re not looking for distribution per se, we have distribution throughout stores (such as Apple’s Appstore) so we have a lot of users.

“What we’re looking for is territory-exclusive partnerships where the carriers are going to bring additional value to their customers. They’re going to communicate to them about it, talk with them about it. Doing so is going to enhance service offering as well as enhance their customer’s knowledge of Evernote so it’s a very deep, strategic partnership on a territorial-exclusive basis. So there are many places where we don’t have any carrier relationships whatsoever, and we do have them, for instance, in Germany, Latin America and in Taiwan and Japan.

“General rule of thumb, in successful carrier partnerships we’ve done - which is most of them - we’ve essentially doubled the level of engagement of subscribers that we’ve worked with through those partnerships. And that’s really the goal. Helping educate people so they become more engaged.”

Analysts, however, say it is too early to tell the impact of the collaboration. Senior Analyst of Forrester Research, Clement Teo said: “I’m not sure about impact as it’s still too early to tell. Having 400,000 existing Evernote users doesn’t add to Starhub’s own numbers as some of these users could be already be using other telcos. It’s like having Gmail doesn’t make one a SingTel subscriber any more than it makes one Starhub subscriber. Also, this doesn’t preclude Evernote from working with SingTel down the road.

“But it is good to see Starhub working with companies like Evernote to address a certain market segment that is more agnostic about devices and platforms,” added Mr Teo.

As part of the tie-up, StarHub users will enjoy a partner-exclusive feature, video notes. This lets users shoot and upload videos quickly and easily within the Evernote app. Premium features includes Evernote Food, Evernote Hello, Skitch and Penultimate.

The offer begins today and will end on Aug 21 next year. To activate your Evernote premium subscription, visit evernote.starhub.com.