Evernote partners StarHub, gives free premium accounts to post-paid customers

Green is the theme in Singapore, as popular note-keeping app Evernote announced today a partnership with StarHub Mobile to offer one-year premium memberships to the telco’s new and recontracting post-paid customers.

In addition to all of Evernote’s premium features, customers can access Video Notes, which lets them shoot and upload videos using the main app. Existing Evernote premium users who sign up with StarHub can use the offer, available from today, to extend their subscription by an extra year.

The feature is exclusive to users who sign up through Evernote’s partner telcos. So far, it has tie-ups with NTT Docomo in Japan, Taiwan Mobile, and Orange in France.

Video notes is not offered to everyone because the feature requires robust mobile infrastructure that is not found everywhere, says Ken Gullicksen, COO of Evernote. Therefore, bringing it to all users would degrade customer experience.

Each video note is restricted to 100MB, just enough for users to create short snippets that include audio. Users can select the quality of the footage from within the Evernote mobile app.

On why the Silicon Valley company picked StarHub over Singapore telcos like SingTel, which has wider regional reach, Ken says that distribution is not a priority for the company as the core app is easily available on multiple platforms.

Instead, Evernote wants partners that can communicate the usefulness of its services to potential users. The company aims to increase engagement by educating consumers on how they can incorporate Evernote into their lives.

“For our successful telco partnerships, which is most of them, we see engagement double compared to users who sign up on their own,” says Ken.

Nonetheless, the deal still gives Evernote access to StarHub’s 1.2M existing postpaid customers. That is just under a quarter of Singapore’s population.

Evernote’s future is Asia

While StarHub is only making the offer available in Singapore, that could conceivably change due to the Conexus Mobile Alliance, which the telco is a part of along with peers in nine other Asian countries.

Evernote sees Singapore as a “showcase” market. While minuscule by international standards, the city state is an outlier with the largest per capita usage of any market at 400,000 registered users. In contrast, Taiwan has about 800,000 users with a population of 23 million. Generally, between 20 to 30 percent of registered users are active monthly.

Singapore is also a petri-dish due to its proximity to a mobile-first region that includes voluminous, emerging markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Philippines. Situated at the heart of Southeast Asia, residents from neighboring countries come to Singapore to work, making it a good jumping-off point for Evernote into the region.

Asia has been huge for Evernote in the past couple of years. It has set up small offices in Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea for marketing, business development, and public relations. It launched in China with dedicated servers in the country, and integrated with popular Asian chat apps WeChat and KakaoTalk.