For those of you unfamiliar with Springpad, one of its niftiest features is the ability to “spring” culinary ideas from websites and store them as structured recipe data in your account. The advantage of that approach is that Springpad winds up with gobs of parsable data on ingredients, cooking techniques and instructions that companies like Snooth can act on. Every time a customer clips a recipe, Springpad relays a copy to Snooth’s servers, which then spit out detailed lists of wine recommendations that Springpad embeds at the bottom of the saved recipe.

There are countless recipes on the web — Springpad customers alone have clipped 1.3 million of them — so rather than hire an army of sommeliers to suggest pairings for each of them, Snooth has taken a Pandora-style approach to categorizing them, said Rich Tomko, the CEO of Snooth Media. It has developed a proprietary algorithm that assigns recipes to one of 2,000 flavor profiles based on their ingredients and techniques used to cook them. It then assigns each flavor profile to three of its 1,400 different wine profiles, creating nearly a million different possible pairings, Tomko said.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Tomko said. “Barbequed or grilled chicken will have a completely different taste than [sautéed] chicken, and they would match with completely different types of wines.”

If you’ve been to Epicurious, MyRecipes or Fine Cooking, you may already be familiar with Snooth’s wine recommendations. It has indexed the recipes from half a dozen partner sites in order to offer up recommendations to their users. But with Springpad, Snooth is venturing out into the larger web to parse recipes on the fly. As long as Springpad can recognize and clip the recipe — the service has trouble with food blogs and other nontraditional formats — Snooth will be able to push wine pairings, Tomko said.

NYC-based Snooth launched in 2007 with the aim of becoming the primary wine resource on the web for the growing masses of wine consumers. Snooth isn’t after the wine elite. It’s targeting the 22 million or so core wine consumers who drink wine two to three times a week. Today the site has 1.1 million registered users and 300,000 newsletter subscribers. It has raised a total of $2.6 million, all from angel investors. It has an advertising-based business model, and according to Tomko, it expects to turn a profit this year.

Snooth isn’t the only company to apply big data techniques to recipes. Yummly, which recently raised a $6 million Series A round, has been parsing the recipes of the web to extract nutritional and flavor data, which it then uses to power its semantic search engine for food. Like Snooth, Yummly is trying to predict how a dish will taste. But rather than apply that data toward wine recommendations, Yummly wants to create a service that allows cooks to find recipes by conceptual notions of sweet and savory, bitterness and saltiness, not just by ingredient lists.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr user Davide Restivo

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“Facebook ‘likes’ can be valuable for people seeking recommendations from friends who share similar interests, but today they’re not discoverable,” CEO and co-founder Jeff Chow said in a statement. “The persistent and enhanced nature of Springpad’s notebooks and powerful filtering capabilities cut through the social clutter to make it easier for you to make better decisions filtered by interest and those you trust.”

Once placed into the appropriate notebook, Springpad embeds information about the artist, movie or restaurant drawn from its content partners. It embeds review data from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant hours and reservation links through Open Table, and consumer goods pricing and availability alerts through online retailers. Springpad users can access these shared notebooks, and notebooks can be made public for the Web to see. Or the notebook’s creator can post them back on Facebook as a single “movies I like” timeline entry. The Springpad app is available through Facebook’s App Center.

As I wrote in April, Springpad is evolving from a note-taking, online-information-capture service into a quasi-social network – sort of a Pinterest with a lot more organization tools. The interesting thing about these new Facebook features is that Springpad seems to be acknowledging it will never replace a Facebook or other mammoth social network, but it can work within those networks to layer on context and organization features to the stuff consumers are already sharing on their social graphs.

We’re starting to see other examples of companies utilizing social media content rather than trying to replicate it, for instance Silicon Valley food startup Say Mmm. Instead of requiring customers to save their recipes within its portal, Say Mmm is organizing the recipes you store in Evernote and like on Facebook into an easy-to-use interface, where it provides meal planning and cooking tools Evernote and Facebook simple weren’t designed to supply.

The big benefit for Springpad is referral revenue it gets from all of this cross-platform sharing. If a friend finds a restaurant you liked on Facebook in a Springpad notebook and then books a reservation through the convenient Open Table link, then Springpad collects a commission. The more traffic it can generate between social networks and its notebooks the better off it will be.

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Evernote started out as a note-taking application but over time, it’s built up a portfolio of products through acquisitions and internal development. Now, it’s increasingly looking at how to educate people on the many uses of Evernote and its family of products. That’s one of the big themes of Evernote’s second annual Trunk Conference, scheduled for August 24.

While the inaugural conference was dedicated to developers, this year’s agenda is split between developers and users, who can attend a “Life Series” track. The lifestyle track will be led by Evernote’s ambassadors, a group of leading users across a number of areas who were first announced last October.

The idea is to further educate users about the way they can apply Evernote in their real lives. And it helps expand Evernote’s audience to more mainstream users, who now have more tools to use to organize their lives. Evernote in December released mobile apps Evernote Hello and Evernote Food to help people remember contacts and past meals respectively. Evernote also bought services like image-sharing app Skitch last August and handwriting iPad app Penultimate last month. Here’s what CEO and founder Phil Libin had to say:

People feel they’re not using Evernote to its full potential. There is an appetite for people who want to get the most out of it. And there’s definitely more opportunity because Evernote is much bigger now. The goal has always been to make you smarter and more productive but the ways to do that has definitely increased. We want people to learn all the ways you can use Evernote.

Libin said the first show sold out immediately last year with more than 400 people attending and expectations are for this year’s show to attract double that number. Despite its developer focus last year, the conference attracted a number of regular users interested in finding out more about the service. He said by creating dual tracks, he believes the two groups can help spur each other on.

The developer track will also teach people how to use Evernote’s APIs, will showcase top apps on the Evernote platform and will give attendees a sense of where Evernote is headed in the future. Developers can also compete in a $100,000 Devcup competition. There are already 2,000 submissions for this year’s competition, double that of last year.

Evernote continues to steam along toward Libin’s goal of creating a 100-year company. The start-up raised $70 million last month, increasing its total funding to more $160 million to date. Libin said the company is still preparing to be “IPO ready” by the end of 2013, but will likely hold off on going public as it continues to innovate and take risks.

For GigaOM readers interested in attending the Trunk Conference, there’s a 50 percent discount code for the first 25 people who sign-up. The code is: ETCGIGAOM

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Springpad essentially uses bookmarklets, browser extensions and its mobile and tablet apps to grab information off the Web for later viewing, but unlike other note-taking apps, Springpad tries to structure that information and add context. For instance, if you “spring” a review of a restaurant or a movie, the service will recognize the information for what is, adding to your notes information about opening hours and local box office show times as well as links to dinner reservation or ticket purchasing services. Users then store all of those items in individual notepads, which they can make public to the whole Web or keep as private files.

The new update allows users to share their notebooks with one another, publicly or privately, similar to collaboration features on Evernote. For instance, a family could share grocery or to-do lists among its members. A book club can keep a running list of reading ideas and cooks can trade recipe ideas. Users can share notebooks privately among friends, or they can make notebooks public, allowing any Springpad member to follow another’s particular interest. The feature is particular useful, since I might be fascinated by one member’s recipe collection, but have no desire to read his collections of religious or political essays. The tools allow me to selectively follow what I find interesting and filter out the rest. Here’s a video Springpad produced to highlight the new features:

Like Pinterest, Springpad relies heavily on images to represent the items and notebooks, leading to a stunning visually layout within the application. But according to co-founder and business development VP Jeff Janer, Springpad is adding many more layers of contextual information to make the service into a sophisticated social collaboration tool.

“We want to form active micro-communities that revolve around particular interests,” Janer said. “Pinterest is focused on inspiration that may lead to a transaction, but there’s not really any collaboration there.” While Janer isn’t dismissing inspiration – which has made Pinterest an overnight success – he said Springpad sees a lot more potential in inspiration-oriented networking than in simply driving customers to retailer Websites, though such transactions are a key part of Springpad’s business model as well.

A mixed bag of revenue

Like Pinterest, Springpad takes a little off the top from any transaction originating from its notebooks, whether it’s a CD from Amazon or a movie ticket from Fandango. But Janer said Springpad’s primary business model will be based on advertising and offers. With detailed information about each user’s interests, Springpad’s advertisers can tailor specific coupons, based on the exact items they have stored in their notebooks. If you have saved a specific Sony HD TV in a gadgets notebook, Sony could ship you a discount offer specifically for that TV, Janer said.

Springpad has added a few other features with the new update as well. It’s introduced natural language understanding features to its search and item creation bar. So typing “Call Jeff tomorrow” into the add item bar will automatically generate a reminder task, which is then automatically synced with Google Calendar. It’s also generating alerts, based on items in stored in notebooks. If you a add a movie trailer, it will send you a notice when the film is available in your area and later generate another note when its is released on DVD and Blu-ray.

Springpad is still a relatively small operation. It launched in 2008 with funding of $7 million, and has since grown to 3 million registered users and a staff of 17. Much of that growth has been fairly recent driven by its mobile apps.

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Evernote CEO Phil Libin

The tech industry as a whole has had a pretty strong year. Mobile devices are everywhere, the apps that run on them are flourishing, and the experience of using the web is becoming more personalized to individual tastes than ever before. And as it turns out, all of these trends have been especially beneficial to Evernote, the company that makes note-taking and personal archiving software.

In terms of user growth alone, 2011 has been a red-letter year for Evernote. The company started the year with 6 million users, and ended it with 20 million users, CEO Phil Libin told me in an interview last week. That’s impressive in itself, but Libin says such growth has only whetted the company’s appetite for more:

“On one hand, I’m really proud of that, and I’m really proud of our team. But on the other hand, 20 million users is a tiny fraction of what our overall goal is. There are still about 7 billion people out there on the planet who aren’t using Evernote. We want to improve everyone’s life, and we won’t be satisfied until we’ve gotten there.”

It seems that Evernote’s success is tied to the fact that its management is concerned with longevity above all else, rather than a near-term sale or IPO. Libin often says that he is building Evernote to be a 100-year company, and according to him this mentality affects everything:

“It really impacts how we approach our pricing, our business model, who we want on our board, who we hire as employees. For a lot of us at Evernote, this is our second or third or fourth company we’ve built in our careers. Those first few companies, maybe, we were in the mindset of doing something for a few years to flip it — sell the business and move on. That mentality is not that interesting to us anymore.”

Evernote is not the only web company that is thinking longer term. According to Libin, this is largely attributable to a recent shift in the venture capital industry (Evernote itself has taken on nearly $100 million in funding, its most recent outside investment being a $50 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital this past summer). The impact of recent changes in how VC funding rounds are structured that allow early investors and founders to cash out parts of their company holdings before a larger “exit” cannot be understated, Libin says:

“The conventional wisdom used to be that there was no money for early investors or founders until either you sold or went public. That meant that people at startups were strongly discouraged from long-term planning and long-term thinking, because no one had any liquidity until the very end.

What Yuri Milner and Sequoia and other people have done recently is conduct investment rounds that break that model. Now, people can buy and sell their shares: Early investors can get out, founders can make a little bit of money but still stay with the company. I think this separation of liquidity and exit is maybe the most important thing to happen in business in the past decade. It’s what’s made the growth of companies like Facebook and Evernote and Twitter possible.”

However, despite the fact that it plans to be around for more than a century, Evernote still wants to retain the energy of its early startup days. That’s going to be a big focus in 2012, since the company has grown significantly in the past 12 months: Evernote began 2011 with 40 employees, and is closing the year with a staff of 130. Libin says he will direct a lot of his personal attention to fighting off the negative side effects of such growth:

“I have to go on a really active battle against encroaching corporate bureaucracy, and the stupidity that inevitably seeps into companies when they get past 100 people. I need to be on a mission to make sure that we don’t get to the point where we have stupid looking corporate clip art hanging in our offices, that we don’t have unnecessary procedures, that we don’t adopt passive-aggressive policies.

Naturally I’m very hands-off as a CEO — I’m not normally one of those people that obsesses about corporate culture. But now that we’ve hit that 100-person threshold, I feel that I have to be much more conscious of it going into 2012.”

That seems like a worthy goal — albeit a challenging one. But then again, New Year’s resolutions are not meant to be easy.

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Skitch is a Mac application that enables easy image editing and sharing. Skitch, which had previously cost $19.99 in the Mac App store, will now be completely free and will soon be expanded to “to every desktop and mobile platform under the sun,” Evernote said. The first Skitch Android app was launched Thursday just after the acquisition deal was announced.

Evernote’s marketing head Andrew Sinkov wrote in a blog post about the deal:

For years, one of our most requested feature areas has been related to improved handling of images and annotation capabilities. Our users take and share millions of photos and screenshots already, but the experience isn’t as good as it could be. We debated about whether to add the improved functionality into Evernote or build a separate app to handle it. Finally, we decided to do both. Thanks to Skitch, we will.

Evernote has been growing at a rapid clip recently. Last month, the company closed on a whopping $50 million in new venture capital funding to further fuel its growth. And according to a speech made this morning by CEO Phil Libin, the company now has more than 12.5 million users, some 200 percent more than the 3.9 million users it had a year ago. Nearly 570,000 of those are premium paying users, a 500 percent boost from last year.

Evernote’s user growth information sourced from TwitPic user @lizasperling

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Installing an extension to QuickFox Notes is not quite as straightforward as installing a browser add-on. You’ll firstly need to download the extension script, which is found here (right-click, and save it as a .js file). To install the script, open QuickFox Notes and then click on Tools->Add-ons->Open add-ons folder, then move the .js file you downloaded into that folder. You’ll need to restart QuickFox Notes for the change to take effect.

Once restarted, you’ll find that you now have an extra button in your QuickFox Notes window for uploading the note to Google Docs, as shown in the screenshot above. Hitting that button will pop up a window asking for your username and password before saving the note to Google Docs. Note that notes are only saved to Google Docs — this extension does not provide a two-way sync.

(Via Addictive Tips)

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With the rollout of Livescribe Connect, the company has now added sharing features to the gadget that should be useful for collaboration.  The system can turn the notes recorded by the pen into interactive “pencasts” that can be shared with anyone who has Adobe Reader. Files containing both handwritten notes and recorded audio can be sent to a number of applications and online services, including email, Google Docs, Facebook, Evernote, and the MyLivescribe service that offers 500MB of cloud storage to any Livescribe owner. Pencast files can also be sent to mobile devices, including the iPad and iPhone.

You can download a demo pencast from the Livescribe site. The files are modified PDFs with embedded Flash elements to provide the interactivity. Thus, you’ll need Adobe Reader 10 or higher to play back and interact with a pencast. Other PDF readers, such as Preview on the Mac, can only view the first page of the document.

The Echo Smartpen, accessories and apps are available from the Livescribe store and various retailers. The base pen includes 4GB of storage, and costs $149.95. Pens with more storage and features are also available.

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Once you’ve signed up, bookmarks can be added via the website or (much more conveniently) via Firefox and Chrome extensions, as shown in the screenshot above. These add-ons are a bit fiddly; you must be signed in for the Chrome add-on to work, while the button for the Firefox add-on is hidden down at the bottom-right of the window. It also took me a while to figure out how to clip content from a web page.

Once saved, pages can be tagged, shared with contacts and made public (note: this effectively publishes a public cache of the page you’ve saved; there may be copyright implications in using this feature). Editing bookmarks/saved content like this can only be done via the website, not at the time of saving it with the extension. Bookmarks can also be imported from Delicious, Firefox, Chrome or any other service that lets you export your bookmarks in Netscape bookmark format.

By default, the website shows your saved pages in “fancy” view (thumbnails) and displayed in chronological order, but you can switch to a list view if you prefer. Bookmarks/saved content is searchable via the search box, although, strangely, it doesn’t seem to include page titles in the search. Mobile support is provided via a mobile-optimized version of the website, which works well, and there are also RSS feeds available: a private feed that contains all of your bookmarks, and a public one only containing those you’ve marked as public.

Copyto.co is free for storing up to 50 bookmarks, which should be enough to give the site a try to see whether you might find it useful. More than that and you’ll need to purchase a subscription, which costs $15.99 per year, or $1.99 month. While Copyto.co is similar to traditional social bookmarking services like Delicious (recently sold to Avos Systems) and Pinboard, its clipping functionality also means it’s competing with note-taking apps like Evernote and OneNote. Combining bookmarking and clipping services means it’s something of a compromise. As a simple bookmarking service, it works pretty well, although it doesn’t have the more-advanced social features of Delicious, and it’s more expensive than both Delicious (free) and Pinboard (one-off payment of $9.33 currently), plus, I find its extensions to be a little clumsy. As a general-purpose clipping tool, it’s nowhere near as powerful and flexible as Evernote, and once again, its extensions aren’t as well-designed. However, it’s still a new service, so I expect the developers will work on making the extensions easier to use, and I can certainly see Copyto.co being useful for certain use cases: researchers who need to clip and share specific portions of webpages with others, and developers who often to grab code from the web, for example.

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ResophNotes feels incredibly familiar if you’re used to working with Notational Velocity: It’s minimal, has incremental search and supports keyboard shortcuts, so note-taking and review is just as fast as with Notational Velocity. Notes are optionally synced though the Simplenote server at predetermined intervals or manually. However, although the apps are very similar, there are are some differences: Notational Velocity supports formatting, while ResophNotes is plain text; ResophNotes supports Simplenote tagging, Notational Velocity doesn’t; ResophNotes supports Markdown-to-HTML conversion.

ResophNotes is a free download (both as a desktop install and as a portable app, suitable for running from a flash drive); donations to the developer are encouraged.

(via One Thing Well)

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