With a blog post published this morning, Evernote has announced the acquisition of Penultimate, a digital handwriting app for iPad developed by independent studio Cocoa Box. Penultimate, which we have covered on several occasions on MacStories in the past, is one of the richest – and best selling – handwriting apps for iPad, featuring smooth virtual ink to create notes users can send to a variety of services including Dropbox and Evernote. The latter was only added in January, and clearly caught Evernote’s attention as the company, after raising another funding round last week, is now focused on expanding its ecosystem of connected apps and services to new areas and platforms.

The acquisition will let Penultimate live on as a separate app, but more connected to Evernote, similarly to how Skitch – also part of the Evernote family – works now. It appears Penultimate will soon come to more devices, and gain deep Evernote search capabilities as well as a new synchronization option.

From Penultimate’s blog post:

Importantly, Penultimate is not going away: it remains an independent application, and will continue to espouse the virtues of ease of use, elegance, and “that special something” that have kept you coming back. But I also think you’ll be thrilled, and even surprised, by how much more the app will be able to do for you as we work together to improve it and connect more profoundly with Evernote’s capabilities.

Evernote, on the other hand, writes:

Penultimate is hugely popular. In fact, according to Apple, it’s the #4 best-selling paid iPad app of all time. When you have such a great product, the last thing you want to do is mess with it. That’s why Penultimate creator, Ben Zotto, is joining Evernote to head up future app development. Penultimate will stay a separate, elegant application and will get many much-requested Evernote-y improvements including full search and synchronization. Ben will also lead the effort to put handwriting and digital ink functionality into other Evernote products and platforms, so you’ll see handwriting cross-pollination popping up everywhere.

Penultimate isn’t the only handwriting and note-taking app for iPad to feature Evernote integration – others like Noteshelf and Notability also have basic support for Evernote – yet due to its elegant interface and simple approach to handwriting, Penultimate has always managed to maintain its top position in the App Store’s charts.

In its goal to build a “company for the next 100 years”, Evernote has been spending the past year revamping its ecosystem of services and apps that connect to Evernote accounts to bring together text, audio, images, and documents to help people “remember things”. The company acquired Skitch and iOS text editor Essay, launched two new iOS apps (Hello and Food), a browser extension (Clearly), and recently announced it is working on a task-management application following the acquisition of another iOS app, Egretlist. With the acquisition of Penultimate, it’ll be interesting to see whether Evernote will also make changes to its own iPad app to include deeper integration with the standalone handwriting software, and if the main Evernote interface will gain new filtering tools to better organize text notes and handwritten ones (which already support optical character recognition for search when saved to Evernote).

Check out a video featuring Evernote’s Phil Libin and Penultimate’s Ben Zotto after the break.
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During the past year, note taking/memory management service Evernote set out to build a platform around its services, which span the web, iOS devices, OS X and Windows through a set of cross-platform tools and native applications. The company launched Trunk, a unified showcase of third-party applications that integrate with the Evernote API, and updated its iOS and Mac offerings with richer user interfaces and new functionalities. Furthermore, Evernote acquired image annotating service Skitch and released an iPad version of it; they also launched four standalone Evernote-based apps: Food and Hello, for remembering meals and people, respectively; Clearly, to read web articles in an elegant format; Peek, to help students learn more through Evernote’s visual presentation.

Whilst it sounds fairly obvious for Evernote to be considering new platforms and opportunities to expand upon the concept of preserving human memory – a subject that offers itself to a broad range of implementations – Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch shares some juicy details behind Evernote’s various acquisitions that led to the dedicated Evernote apps we see today.

As it turns out, Evernote CEO Phil Libin has confirmed the company purchased four startups in the past year alone: among those, Readable became Evernote Clearly, Notable Meals became Evernote Food and an another one, called Minds Momentum, was acquired in order to get the assets for an upcoming Evernote todo list application. TechCrunch doesn’t share any more details, however a quick Google search confirms that Minds Momentum was the company behind Egretlist, an iPhone app to manage todos based off Evernote that we reviewed here.

We wrote:

This isn’t an application meant to replace Evernote with a prettier interface, but rather complement it. Egretlist is strictly focused on managing to-do lists with your various notebooks. On the surface, that might pretty tame. But when you combine to-do lists with Evernote, suddenly the functionality becomes stellar. As you read in the real-estate example, being able to just sync not only with yourself, but others using Evernote’s service, makes for an always online, always updateable task-list not dissimilar to Basecamp to-dos and milestones.

Basically, Egretlist provided an effortless way to create todos and format them in a native interface that would, however, sync back to Evernote’s main client to make those todos readable, and possibly editable as well, from your desktop computers. Interestingly, Minds Momentum also developed another paid Evernote-based app, Egretlinks, which ran universally on the iPhone and iPad and allowed users to manage web clippings from their Evernote notebooks. Both Egretlist and Egretlinks haven’t been updated in months, the developers’ Twitter account is silent, and the website is still showing iPhone 3GS screenshots for the apps.

Evernote isn’t new to this kind of acquisitions. iOS text editor Essay, for instance, was bought by Evernote to power their iOS rich text editor and few people knew about it until the developer published a blog post.

From my perspective, it only makes sense for Evernote to look forward to revamping the todo management aspect of the service. Note taking and memory management often overlap with todo creation and completion these days, and Evernote’s built-in checklist/todo support is stripped down to minimal functionality without really offering a compelling way to add tasks and reminders. I’m first to admit I’ve used Evernote to remember things to do more than a couple of times in the past.

Minds Momentum’s acquisition, I believe, also plays well with Evernote’s plan in the long term. Rather than supercharging the main client with hundreds of features, Evernote has taken the ecosystem approach in choosing to offer a centralized service with a main general purpose client and several different standalone apps for more specific purposes. The Evernote app itself isn’t the proverbial Swiss army knife: the whole service is. Honestly, I don’t want the Evernote app to incorporate a text editor and a task management tool and food diaries, and it appears that the company seems to be thinking the same thing – nurturing an ecosystem can be much more profitable and rewarding (both for the company and its users) than feature creep.

I look forward to Evernote’s “upcoming” todo list application, just as I can’t wait to get my hands on a public version of the latest Mac beta (which adds some sweet improvements in the text editing UI) and refreshed iOS clients. Expect more Evernote news soon.