Tool Kit: An App That Will Never Forget a File

Some photos are on your smartphone. Others sit on your home computer. Your digital work documents, favorite web clippings and notes from meetings? Scattered like confetti after New Year’s Eve.

If you’ve embraced a digital lifestyle, this situation is probably all too familiar. Thankfully, there are services available to help those of us in need. Dropbox lets you upload files to a central online repository. Google Drive has a search engine with image recognition technology so you can search for a photo of the Statue of Liberty from your last vacation. The Doo app is focused on organizing documents of any kind — presentations, receipts, tickets — on your phone. But the easiest catchall tool for saving anything you might need later is an app for computers and mobile devices called Evernote.

Evernote provides a comprehensive single archive of your digital life, giving you one location to store and find practically everything saved on a computer or phone. And the files are automatically backed up on Evernote’s servers. It even makes sharing things with others far easier than emailing attachments around — but it will do that, too.

The only real downside with Evernote is that it has so many features, which can make getting started with the app daunting. But once you understand how to do a few things with it, you can get working and worry about the rest later.

Here’s the big point to understand: Use Evernote as the place you put everything you might need later. You can drag it in, tap it in or forward it in, and then search for it, share it or post it later. When you need to dig it up, you don’t first ask yourself which device it’s on — it’s in Evernote, from whatever device is at hand.

The free version of the app lets you add up to 60 megabytes of content to your folders every month, enough for a couple of dozen full-size iPhone photos or a hundred big Word documents. The archive can grow as big as it needs to be. The premium version costs $5 a month, which increases the limit to a gigabyte a month, enough for hundreds of photos, and adds a few more features for heavy users.

To begin, download Evernote onto every computer and mobile device you own and create an account. Evernote works on Windows and Mac computers, and on iPhones, iPads, Android and Windows phones and tablets, BlackBerry devices, and even Hewlett-Packard’s WebOS gadgets. In other words, you should be covered. The interface is a little different on each platform, so plan a few minutes to figure out each one.

The best way to start is to toss a photo into Evernote. You can drag and drop an image from anywhere on a computer desktop to the Evernote app, or select the photo icon from the mobile version of Evernote to choose a photo already on your phone. Within a few minutes, the photo will be synced to Evernote’s servers and available on your other devices. By default, everything goes into one folder, but you can create new folders to keep things better organized.

The same trick works for Word files, PDFs, spreadsheets, MP3s and even videos.

And it’s possible to move files to the service even if you don’t have the app installed on the particular device you are on. Each Evernote user is given an email address for the account, and sending a file to that address will save it into the account. It’s a nice trick that lets you forward emails and attachments to Evernote for keeping. You can even specify which folder each forwarded message goes into by putting the destination folder in the subject line, like “@family-photos.”

You can also save the contents of web pages into Evernote. To do so on a desktop or laptop, install the Evernote Web Clipper found on the Products page at Evernote.com. It’s a web browser add-on that creates an extra button on your browser in the shape of Evernote’s elephant logo. Click it, and you’ll be prompted for how much of the page to save. For news articles, recipes or reviews, Simplified Article is best. It strips away the surrounding links and ads, and saves only the text and images of the main content of a page. The Web Clipper isn’t built for phone or tablet browsers, but someone has filled the void with an app called EverWebClipper for iOS and Android that costs about $3 and does the job.

Getting items out of Evernote is easy. Once you find the desired file in the app, use the Export Note menu option on a computer or tap the icon at the bottom of the screen on the mobile interface to export the item to your phone. Then send it as a message or post it to Facebook.

To find something you’ve saved, Evernote has a search function that will find just about any text anywhere in a saved file — it’ll even recognize text inside a photo. That makes it possible to use your phone as an archival scanner, by taking pictures of printed pages and then searching for words in these documents later. One important caveat: The free version of the app won’t search the text inside Word or PDF documents. For that you need the premium upgrade.

Individual items or entire folders can be shared with other people. Look for the arrow icon at the upper right of an item to create a public URL. Once you have that URL, you can send it to others so they can view your items or folders. The premium version also lets you allow other Evernote users to add content to your folders. This can be useful for group planning — say, for a trip for which several people want to collect suggested sights. You’re not restricted to sharing within Evernote, though. The same arrow button presents options to post an item to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or to forward it as an email attachment.

At first, Evernote may seem redundant to existing tools like email and iCloud, but the service is hard to give up after a week’s use. You won’t want to return to a life of running from device to device for your files. If you start to use the program frequently, you’ll probably find that the premium upgrade makes a lot of sense. With the upgrade, you will have a hard time reaching the storage limit unless you are saving a lot of video. Second, it allows you to search within documents, which can come in incredibly handy. Third, it will let you store copies of important items on your computer or phone, an inevitable lifesaver for anyone who travels without reliable Internet access.

If Evernote has a shortcoming, it’s that its interface is perhaps too enthusiastic. There are controls, options and messages all over the screen, which can be confusing for a new user. Once you’ve figured out its dozens of functions and options, though, it’s an invaluable tool for organizing a messy digital life. Where did you put that gingerbread recipe Mom sent to your other phone? You put it in Evernote.

Pogue's Posts Blog: Don’t Forget the Small Ideas That Make a Difference

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Unboxed: Big Data Is Great, but Don’t Forget Intuition

Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, led off the conference by saying that Big Data would be “the next big chapter of our business history.” Next on stage was Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor and director of the M.I.T. center and a co-author of the article with Dr. McAfee. Big Data, said Professor Brynjolfsson, will “replace ideas, paradigms, organizations and ways of thinking about the world.”

These drumroll claims rest on the premise that data like Web-browsing trails, sensor signals, GPS tracking, and social network messages will open the door to measuring and monitoring people and machines as never before. And by setting clever computer algorithms loose on the data troves, you can predict behavior of all kinds: shopping, dating and voting, for example.

The results, according to technologists and business executives, will be a smarter world, with more efficient companies, better-served consumers and superior decisions guided by data and analysis.

I’ve written about what is now being called Big Data a fair bit over the years, and I think it’s a powerful tool and an unstoppable trend. But a year-end column, I thought, might be a time for reflection, questions and qualms about this technology.

The quest to draw useful insights from business measurements is nothing new. Big Data is a descendant of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” of more than a century ago. Taylor’s instrument of measurement was the stopwatch, timing and monitoring a worker’s every movement. Taylor and his acolytes used these time-and-motion studies to redesign work for maximum efficiency. The excesses of this approach would become satirical grist for Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” The enthusiasm for quantitative methods has waxed and waned ever since.

Big Data proponents point to the Internet for examples of triumphant data businesses, notably Google. But many of the Big Data techniques of math modeling, predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence software were first widely applied on Wall Street.

At the M.I.T. conference, a panel was asked to cite examples of big failures in Big Data. No one could really think of any. Soon after, though, Roberto Rigobon could barely contain himself as he took to the stage. Mr. Rigobon, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, said that the financial crisis certainly humbled the data hounds. “Hedge funds failed all over the world,” he said.

The problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modeling came out of the sciences, where the behavior of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics.

In so many Big Data applications, a math model attaches a crisp number to human behavior, interests and preferences. The peril of that approach, as in finance, was the subject of a recent book by Emanuel Derman, a former quant at Goldman Sachs and now a professor at Columbia University. Its title is “Models. Behaving. Badly.”

Claudia Perlich, chief scientist at Media6Degrees, an online ad-targeting start-up in New York, puts the problem this way: “You can fool yourself with data like you can’t with anything else. I fear a Big Data bubble.”

The bubble that concerns Ms. Perlich is not so much a surge of investment, with new companies forming and then failing in large numbers. That’s capitalism, she says. She is worried about a rush of people calling themselves “data scientists,” doing poor work and giving the field a bad name.

Indeed, Big Data does seem to be facing a work-force bottleneck.

“We can’t grow the skills fast enough,” says Ms. Perlich, who formerly worked for I.B.M. Watson Labs and is an adjunct professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needed 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

Thomas H. Davenport, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, is writing a book called “Keeping Up With the Quants” to help managers cope with the Big Data challenge. A major part of managing Big Data projects, he says, is asking the right questions: How do you define the problem? What data do you need? Where does it come from? What are the assumptions behind the model that the data is fed into? How is the model different from reality?

Society might be well served if the model makers pondered the ethical dimensions of their work as well as studying the math, according to Rachel Schutt, a senior statistician at Google Research.

“Models do not just predict, but they can make things happen,” says Ms. Schutt, who taught a data science course this year at Columbia. “That’s not discussed generally in our field.”

Models can create what data scientists call a behavioral loop. A person feeds in data, which is collected by an algorithm that then presents the user with choices, thus steering behavior.

Consider Facebook. You put personal data on your Facebook page, and Facebook’s software tracks your clicks and your searches on the site. Then, algorithms sift through that data to present you with “friend” suggestions.

Understandably, the increasing use of software that microscopically tracks and monitors online behavior has raised privacy worries. Will Big Data usher in a digital surveillance state, mainly serving corporate interests?

Personally, my bigger concern is that the algorithms that are shaping my digital world are too simple-minded, rather than too smart. That was a theme of a book by Eli Pariser, titled “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.”

It’s encouraging that thoughtful data scientists like Ms. Perlich and Ms. Schutt recognize the limits and shortcomings of the Big Data technology that they are building. Listening to the data is important, they say, but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?

At the M.I.T. conference, Ms. Schutt was asked what makes a good data scientist. Obviously, she replied, the requirements include computer science and math skills, but you also want someone who has a deep, wide-ranging curiosity, is innovative and is guided by experience as well as data.

“I don’t worship the machine,” she said.

Home Tech: Tracking Family With GPS (Don’t Forget the Dog)

So the other day, I slipped a GPS tracking device into my wife’s car before she headed off to work. I put another tracker in my 2-year-old’s diaper bag and sent him off to the nanny for the day. I still had a few trackers left, and my parents were in town, so I also threw one into their vehicle while they took my son out to the park.

Of course, I had never suspected any wrongdoing and, later on, when I reviewed the trails left by these GPS devices, they turned up nothing untoward. My spying was meant only as an experiment, but I still felt like a heel.

As well I should have. It’s precisely because of mischief like mine that tracking devices get a bad rap. These small gadgets work by connecting to GPS satellites and cellular networks to follow subjects and report back their locations to their masters. Once I sent them out into the world, I could look up the trackers online, either on the Web or through a smartphone app. They could also be configured to send me alerts based on various criteria. If my wife’s car left her office parking lot during the day or my parents’ vehicle broke the speed limit, I might get a text alert. If your mind reels at the universe of Maury Povichian possibilities contained within these gadgets, you’re not alone.

Yet after chatting with representatives at several GPS tracking companies and trying out their products, I learned that there are many less icky, entirely defensible uses for such devices. For example, some parents use trackers to make sure their children get to school and back safely each day. Others build them into their teenage drivers’ cars so they can be alerted if the kids drive recklessly. There’s also the elder-care market — GPS trackers embedded into medical-alert devices can help locate and provide emergency help for parents with Alzheimer’s.

And don’t forget the dog: a tracker attached to its collar can let you know if it wanders out of your yard, and help you find it if it doesn’t come back. The more I heard about these devices’ applications, the less unseemly they began to feel; indeed, for many people, GPS tracking could soon become a regular part of life.

Among the companies pushing for this future is Amber Alert GPS, a Utah-based firm that was founded in 2007 after Russell Thornton, a businessman, lost his 3-year-old son at an amusement park. After a frantic 45-minute search, Mr. Thornton found the boy hiding in a play structure, but he was traumatized by the incident, and it spurred him to build a device that would help other parents avoid that fate.

Amber Alert’s tracker is about the size of a child’s palm, and it looks a bit like an old-school pager. It can be slipped into a pocket or backpack, or placed in a carrying case attached to a child’s belt loop. According to Carol Colombo, the chief executive of Amber Alert GPS, most customers buy the device for children between the ages of 2 and 10 — children old enough to be mobile, but too young to carry a cellphone. Still, the Amber Alert can act as a quasi-phone; with a press of a button on the device, your children can send a text or initiate a voice call with you, and you can also dial in to the tracker and listen to their surroundings.

I found the Amber Alert extremely simple to set up and use. The company’s Web site, which allows you to configure and monitor the tracker, is well designed and intuitive, and its iPhone and Android apps also work quite well. Amber Alert offers more customizable alert settings than any other child-tracking system I tested: among them, there’s an option to receive an alert each time your child comes within 500 feet of an address listed on a sex-offender database.

The only downside to the Amber Alert is its price. The device sells for $200, and it requires a service plan, which goes for $14.99 a month for basic tracking features, and $24.99 a month if you would like extras, including voice-calling and sex-offender alerts.

Another child-tracking device I tested, the Securus eZoom, is slightly larger than the Amber Alert and doesn’t have some of that device’s advanced features (like voice calling), but it is also significantly cheaper. The eZoom sells for $99.99, and its monthly plan is $19.99. If you pay for two years at once, you can bring the price down to $12.99 a month.

Securus also makes a couple of GPS devices for other uses. The eCare is meant for seniors who need medical help. In addition to tracking, it has an SOS button that initiates a voice call to an emergency call center. The eCare sells for $99.99, with a $29.99-a-month service plan. Finally, there’s Securus’s dog tracker, called SpotLite, a water-resistant, two-ounce module that hooks on your pet’s collar. (The company says the device is best for dogs weighing more than 10 pounds; it’s not recommended for cats because of its size.)

Then there is a GPS device designed for keeping track of your most important possession: yourself. The SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger, which sells for $119.99 and requires a $99-a-year contract, is meant for adventurous types who routinely wander far off the grid.

If you find yourself in an emergency in a place without any cellphone connectivity, you can hit a button on the SPOT to alert rescuers to your location; the device works almost anywhere in the world as long as you have a clear view of the sky. If you’re not in trouble, you can use the SPOT to send a message letting your friends know you’re fine. They can also track your progress across the Outback on a map. The SPOT has led to dozens of rescues, including of two people whose plane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico early in October.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the name of the chief executive of Securus. His name is Chris Newton, not Newtown.