Here is an article I edited and translated for Nowte App:
[The following is a summary* of an article in Forbes Latvia, September, 2013 issue]:
When you watch the short demo video on Nowte’s website, you see that Nowte is a nice tool for organizing the photos on all your devices – phone, tablet, and PC. Yet, when you consider if there is a marketplace for Nowte, you find several dozen photo and note applications already out there, and that the market for these applications is legitimate.
Zigmars Rozentals, age 30 and founder of Nowte, studied Public Relations, and in 2004 he created his first company called HTML. It provided businesses web design and e-commerce solutions, and in four years he had already exported his services abroad. However, when more web design companies began to emerge, he started looking for new markets and niches.
The idea for Nowte came to Zigmars as a solution for his own problems. When he wanted to find a particular photo notes in his smart phone gallery, he encountered a disorganized mess of pictures he had taken. People like Zigmars who use photos as reminders and notes typically have photo galleries with thousands of images, but, when users search for something specific, they often fail to locate the image without a reference system.
The solution is auto-tagging. With auto-tagging, there is no need to create folders and categorize them one-by-one. OCR technology (optical character recognition) does all the work, scanning every photo taken, and, if there is a word or phrase in that photo, it adds that as a tag to that specific image. So, it becomes easy to later find that specific photo – a user just searches a word or phrase and the app will display all the photos that have that specific tag attached to them. Users can also create Nowte lists, similar to photo albums, but much easier to use and navigate.
Zigmars says it is now a global trend for people to use their mobile device camera to take notes. There are several applications out there that prove there is a very active marketplace for photo recognition tools for smartphone users. Companies like EverSnap, Evernote, KeepSafe, Olapic, and others provide different photo services, and each of them have tens of million users. Nowte has a unique value proposition and perfect niche that is already looking for tools like the Nowte App.
So far Nowte App is available only to a limited test audience, but, according to the company, plans are in place for a first open beta test that could come out in late fall, 2013. Nowte is also still in a pre-seed financing stage, however, the company has acquired initial pre-seed capital that allows it to cover some aspects of its overhead. Although the company has not opened the next investment round, those who are interested are still welcome to contact Zigmars, because the company has big plans and vision for the future. They don’t promise a return immediately, because the focus is currently on customer development. They don’t want to just take money for a product that is still in development.
Zigmars has a clear vision for Nowte’s business model: Nowte will have a premium account option where additional features drive revenues, with excellent customer value, which will be available for a small but fair monthly subscription fee. Nowte App is planning to go public by the end of this year, and there seems to be no doubt it will take off. Nowte has already been pitched at roadshows in Silicon Valley, and is now building a success story according to the “big guy’s” rules.
* I am glad we can provide this shortened Forbes article, featuring the Nowte App. The full article was a two page long overview of all the key features of Nowte and information about myself and the application. This is a free and paraphrased translation, published in the September 2013 issue (Latvian edition). If you want to read the printed version in Latvian, buy it here www.forbes.lv or in the iTunes store.
Zigmars Rozentals
2013-09-11
read more at: http://nowte.tumblr.com/