The deal is being hailed as just the sort of thing the telco doctor has been ordering for years.
DT's customer base (approaching 60 million) will be eligible to get a year's worth of Evernote Premium (usual price €40 per year), after which they'll pay to get the service through DT. Evernote currently has over 45 million users, a proportion of which use the premium service. Obviously it would like to win more, especially as Google is entering its market.
Evernote has therefore become a bit of a poster child for the OTT/telco partnership model. By lining up with OTT providers instead of just fighting them, it's thought telcos should be able to leverage their assets and squeeze some revenue out of them in the longer run, over what is currently a very short app and OTT value chain.
Perhaps. In the shorter run, however, this deal is mostly about market positioning and visibility.
Evernote has been pushing the corporate (paid-for) side of the service for a while, enlisting the support of telcos such as Orange, Korea's KT and Japan's NTT Docomo. DT, in common with all the other mobile telcos, wants at the very least to have greater value-added visibility to the user. If, in the future, the relationship can be broadened into something involving meaningful revenue streams, all the better.
The Evernote Premium offer will be available to all DT subscribers including those on fixed lines and broadband as well as mobile subscribers.
This cross-platform aspect is important (which is why Google is so keen to get into the area) as the whole thrust from both Google and Evernote is to convince users that they may hoard without limit - both in sheer volume and over a long, long time-span.
Customers tap out notes, post photos, clip web pages (metaphorically) and articles, generate to-do lists and so on. As they develop it's possible to see Keep and Evernote partially replacing things like bookmark storers, list-making apps, photo albums and so on.
This might be an interesting tussle.
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