As part of its emerging markets push, Evernote Business heads to South Africa

The to-do list app that has become the backbone of entire businesses is expanding its global roll out to offer its business products to more than 35 countries worldwide. The latest on the list? South Africa.

Announced at LeWeb Paris last year, Evernote Business targets the enterprise market, capitalising on the fact that two thirds of its 50-million users were already using Evernote on their computers and mobile devices for work purposes. Initially only available in France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the USA, the service hit 24 additional countries in Europe, New Zealand and Australia in early January before rolling out Russia, select Middle Eastern countries and South Africa today.

An expansion of the functionality in the original app, Evernote Business creates a new work section in users’ profiles and allows them to search for information in their colleagues’ shared notebooks, makes it easy to selectively share work with employees and clients, and quickly locate information from a larger business library. Since its launch in December, it’s been adopted by more than 3 000 businesses worldwide, although it’s targeting small and medium businesses and workgroups, not giant corporates. Pricing in South Africa sits at R80 (US$8.90) per user, who can upload up to 2GB of new content a month to their individual accounts.

In future, Evernote plans to roll out the service to more than 50 countries by July — Latin America and the rest of the Asian Pacific are next on the list.

According to Evernote COO Ken Gullicksen, “one of the biggest challenges facing fast-growth businesses like Evernote is how they can discover the knowledge of individuals and groups within their companies. Evernote Business addresses this by allowing every employee to collect their own knowledge, while also helping them to instantly discover what their coworkers know. It helps Evernote to operate as a small company even as it grows.”