Let’s kick off the week on a positive note: innovative startups in the U.S. continue to attract capital from investors, and in turn are doing their part to counter the trend of the rising unemployment rate in the country.

Evernote, an information capturing service provider, recently closed a $10 million round while personal TV service Sezmi has been able to add another $25 million to its already sizable war chest. In addition, mobile advertising network operator Millennial Media scored $16 million in Series C funding. And, as we’ve already covered, Outright has raised $5 million in venture capital from Sequoia and other VC firms.

That means we can add over $56 million in funding to CrunchBase so far today. Not too shabby for one Monday morning’s worth of funding news for U.S.-based tech startups, and it’s good news for the economy, too.

According to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and StartUpHire.com, thousands of jobs are available at venture-backed startups today, despite the overall job-cutting trend that is still apparent in the wake of the financial crisis that hit the global economy unequivocally hard.

StartUpHire, one of the many job boards / search engines focused on startups, says it currently lists nearly 11,000 jobs that are available at more than 2,500 companies across a variety of industries, states, and functions (also check out our CrunchBoard, where you can find great places to work at, including TechCrunch).

As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009, the NVCA and StartUpHire will highlight the contributions of these young entrepreneurial companies to economic growth by releasing detailed jobs data throughout the week, improve the visibility of the job board on the NVCA website and by publishing testimonials from start-up company employees on their work experiences – in 140 characters or less.

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Reaching one million registered users is an important milestone for any startup. At the very least, it suggests that it is pointed in the right direction. Evernote, the app which helps you remember things you find on the Web or take photos of with your phone, just hit one million registered users a couple days ago, about a year after its public launch in June, 2008 and six months after it reached 500,000 registered users. The company raised $4.5 million at the end of last year.

Evernote’s growth is not rocket-like by any means, but it is steady and consistent. CEO Phil Libin shared some detailed stats on Evernote’s progress. You might know Evernote from its iPhone app, which won a Crunchie award and has been downloaded around one million times on its own. But the company also has Windows, and Mac clients, as well as a Web browser version. The breakdown by users is 36 percent on the Windows client (which is what Evernote launched first), 28 percent on the Mac, 20 percent on the iPhone, 11 percent on the Web, 2 percent on the Blackberry, and 1 percent on other mobile devices.

The desktop clients have been download about 1.7 million times and can be used in conjunction with the iPhone app. These numbers are instructive because the number of downloads (2.7 million total across all platforms) does not equal the number of registered users (1 million). So the next time a startup is touting how many downloads it has, cut that number by one half to one third just to get to signups.

Then you have to cut by another third. Registered users are great, but how many are actually active? Those are a company’s real users. Over the past 30 days, Evernote is tracking at about 360,000 active users, or a little more than a third of registered users. Evernote’s active users might be relatively small, but they are pretty active. Over the past year or so, they’ve created 36 million notes, or about 100 notes each. Notes can come in the form of Web clips (38 percent), text notes (35 percent), photos (17.5 percent), PDF documents (6 percent), voice notes (1.5 percent), digital ink (0.67 percent), and more.

The more active users Evernote gets, the more it can convert into paying premium subscribers. Premium subscribers get more storage, more support, more security, and no ads for $5 a month or $45 a year. Evernote has 13,755 paying premium subscribers, which comes out to about a 3.75 percent conversion rate. Both the number of premium accounts and the conversion rate is growing. Surprisingly, 82 percent of the premium subscribers opt for an annual account. That comes to an annual revenue run-rate of about $650,000, which is not much, but Evernote has other sources of revenues and Libin says he is ahead of estimates to become profitable. He just needs to get those premium subscriber numbers up a bit. If he can get premium subscribers up to 50,000, that would translate to about $2.2 million in revenues, 100,000 premium subscribers would bring in $4.5 million, and so on (I just used the $45 annual fee to calculate those numbers. Working in the monthly subscribers lifts the total a bit).

Now, if Evernote could ever get to one million paying subscribers, that would be a decent business.

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Evernote, which is up for a Crunchie award, rang in the New Year with an extra $4.5 million of cash from Russian investment firm Troika Dialog. A mid-December report had put the investment at $5 million, but the company did not actually close its B round until December 31. He is still trying to raise another $3.5 million tranche, but believes the current funding will hold the company through 2010. CEO Phil Libin says:

The rumors that circulated in the beginning of December were very premature—we still had unresolved issues and the closing was far from guaranteed.

Evernote turns photos and Web clippings into searchable notes, so you never forget anything. (At least, that’s the idea). It has gained 630,000 registered users since its public launch last year, with more than half of those on the iPhone. Libin’s New Year’s resolutions are:

I want to end 2009 with two million users, high-value partners and a tested revenue model. The real goal is profitability in 2010. I think that there are going to be fewer shiny objects on the Internet a year from now than there were a year ago, but the general thrust of innovation won’t slow down for long.

Expect him to spend that money on apps that support more kinds of mobile phones, different language versions, and creating more premium services that he can charge for. Here is his Elevator Pitch:

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Some apps wander around the wilderness for a while until they can find the perfect home. For Evernote, that home is the iPhone. The note-taking, picture-capturing, voice-recording, handwriting-recognizing universal memory service has been under development for years and launched last February in private beta on the PC. But it wasn’t until May 29 that it debuted on the iTunes store as an iPhone app. That’s when it started to take off.

Now Evernote has 512,000 registered users, who have created 13.8 million notes. In addition to the iPhone app, Evernote offers its service thorugh a PC client, a Mac client, a Website, and other mobile devices. The iPhone app is the most popular, being used 57% of the time. It is followed by the Web (51%), the PC client (32%), the Mac (28%), and other mobile clients bring up the rear (8%). These numbers add up to more than 100 because nearly half of all users access the service via more than one app.

The PC and Mac clients are the most fully-featured, yet it is the iPhone app that gave Evernote its critical mass. Perhaps that’s because the iPhone app lets you take pictures using the camera, append a note and save it to your Evernote page, where it is archived and searchable. It is more difficult to capture memories with a laptop.

Here is Evernote’s Elevator Pitch:

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We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.

Things
This isn’t a web application yet, but hopefully one day it will follow Evernote’s lead and offer a web backup/ sync services as well. Things is a clean, simple Getting Things Done client for the Mac that’s helped me overcome my constant cases of email bankruptcy. It takes a little discipline (I process my email at once every morning and add everything requiring follow up to Things), but its been a godsend in terms of information management. Users can add links to emails, webpages, or simply make notes, and you can tag, categorize and set due dates on all entries. They’re currently testing iCal support, so I’m hoping that if this works well I’ll be able to sync the data, via iCal, across various computers.

Skitch
Michael put me on to Skitch initially and I’ve never looked back. Skitch is a Mac image editing tool that also links into web based image hosting. It’s not a Photoshop replacement, but it handles 95% of my own image editing needs. Simple, quick, brilliant.

See Michael’s review here

Plaxo

Plaxo is trying to be many things to many people, from activity streams through to social networking, but its core syncing product has unlocked my data across multiple computers and even my iPhone. Plaxo syncs data from your calendar, address book and elsewhere between computers. It can also pull data from LinkedIn and some Google services. This allows my laptop, desktop and iPhone to be always in sync, and in case of emergency I can get to my address book via the web as well.

TechCrunch coverage here

LinkedIn

I never really appreciated LinkedIn until Plaxo gave me access to the data elsewhere. LinkedIn remains the premium business social networking destination and I find myself regularly using details I’ve pulled from it. I use Facebook as well, but I find LinkedIn provides more value.

TechCrunch coverage here.

Twitter

Twitter is like being married, you love it dearly but some times you want to strangle it. Twitter has transformed my networking in the last 12 months. It served as a conduit to building new relationships in a way that Facebook, FriendFeed and others never will. I can walk into a tech meeting/ conference/ meetup anywhere in Australia now and although I may have never met anyone in the room in person, I’ll know at least one person (usually more) from Twitter; you cant buy that level of contact and its given me friendships and acquittances that could never have come around by any other means. Twitter still has problems ahead: like a complete lack of a business model, but expect Twitter to continue to grow, with somebody (maybe Yahoo, although Biz prefers a Google exit) acquiring the service before December.

TechCrunch coverage here.

Grooveshark

Until recently this would have been Seeqpod, but since reviewing the Grooveshark player I’ve found myself listening to music there regularly. MyPlayList is another service I’ve been using, although not as much. The bonus with Grooveshark is quality: as all songs are uploaded by users (legally) and the quality is usually first rate, where as Seeqpod can be hit and miss sometimes. I want to love Pandora, and I used it for years, but given it’s now georetarded I’m blocked out. Last.fm isn’t bad, but it’s not a team player in terms of the industry and it’s also owned by CBS; I’d rather support the little guy.

There’s probably others as well I’ve forgotten about. One last shout out to 37Signals: I’ve used their services in the past when running a startup and they’re great (I’m not using them today) but their management ethos is a breath of fresh air in a world where people who want balance should (apparently) be working at Starbucks. If I were local and looking for a job, I’d be begging for a look in.

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In the words of CEO Phil Libin, “The main idea of Evernote is to create an external brain.” Evernote lets you highlight any portion of a Web page and clip it, or take a picture with your camera phone and send it to your PC or the Web. Each of these digital “notes” is archived and can be searched, including any words (even handwritten ones) visible in those pictures. For instance, you can search for “crazy milk sake” and all the pictures of sake bottles will come up, with the the word “crazy,” “milk,” and “sake” highlighted in yellow. (You can watch a video demo here)

Evernote has raised $9 million all from angel investors ($6 million in March 2006, and another $3 million in September 2007). It is looking to raise its first venture round of about $10 million. Tech luminary Esther Dyson and Slide founder Max Levchin are board members. The software is free for up to 5 GB of storage. The company hopes to make money by charging for premium services that will include more storage and priority access to the filtering and image-recognition technologies that power the site.

The company was founded by computer scientist Stepan Pachikov, who created the handwriting-recognition software that is in every Tablet PC. He created an even more sophisticated handwriting-recognition system for Evernote. (There is a Soviet expat connection here—Libin and Pachikov were born in Russia, and Levchin was born in the Ukraine). Levchin tells me what drew him to the startup:

The cool thing about Evernote is that as time passes it becomes inevitably more useful to its users in more than one dimension. As you age, the collection of memories not only grows, it automatically becomes harder to recall, so Evernote grows in value both with and without a user’s active involvement. That, and the handwriting recognition tech is awesome.

The handwriting-recognition capabilities are pretty amazing. Go try it out on this public Evernote page I created. Type in “Venetian” and it will find a photo of Libin holding up a CES ticket with a Post-it note that says “Stay at the Venetian” in cursive. Type in “auto collision” or “crazy milk sake” and you’ll get other impressive results. “This image technology is the only one that can pull out information from poor quality incidental images,” claims Libin.

Once the software is installed on your phone, you can go around taking pictures of business cards, name tags, receipts, signs, hand-written notes, and it automatically sends it to Evernote where it all becomes searchable. You can take pictures of people too and other things that don’t contain words, and Evertnote will geotag them if your phone supports that. You can also manually tag any image or note on Evernote. Says Libin:

This is a new use case for my camera phone, anytime I want to remember something I snap a picture. I wind up taking pictures of receipts. That is how I do my expenses.

It is also a new behavior that won’t come naturally to many people. People might look at you strangely if you insist on taking a picture of every single person in a meeting with your camera phone and their business cards. But I’ve seen people do stranger things in meetings. I could see Evernote being used incidentally at first and then the habit growing over time.

Evernote is not just about your phone. It is also about things you find on the Web. The desktop client and Web app come with a Web clipper that lets you add a portion of any Web page by simply highlighting it and clicking on a button on your browser. Every note gets stored chronologically, can be tagged separately, and organized into different “notebooks.” Notebooks are private by default—they are primarily for your memories, after all—but any notebook can be made public as a Website or RSS feed. A widget tool also will soon be released to make it easy to syndicate notes and notebooks across the Web with thumbnails and image search (Levchin made sure of that). Facebook and OpenSocial apps are also coming soon that will let members share notes with selected friends and embed widgets on their personal pages.

Further down the road, Pachikov is working on image-recognition technology that can identify different image types and facial emotions. Theoretically, you will be able to look for a picture of your son in a happy mood, or your wife in an angry one. That technology is still an R&D project, but as Evernote evolves there will be more and more ways to search through your memories. There are other Web clipping services out there like Kaboodle and other Web-based organizers of personal data like Twine, but nothing that quite approaches the problem the same way that Evernote does.

The big challenge for Evernote is whether it can make the jump from being a desktop note-taking tool to a true Web-based extension of people’s memories. The software still feels too personal, without enough hooks or APIs to other services. The company is working on APIs so that other sites can take advantage of its image search technology, as well as integration with blogging platforms to make it easy to publish notes to your blog. That is all great. But I have one more request. It should go the other way as well. I should be able to combine my personal and public memories in one place—my blog posts, my Flickr photos, my Twitters. I should be able to store (and search) all of those in my Evernote. Right now, the only way you can do that is by clipping each blog post, Twitter, or Flickr photo manually. It wouldn’t be too hard to accept feeds as well.

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