DealBook Column: Never Mind the Résumé. How Hot Is the C.E.O.?

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.

DealBook: Never Mind Facebook; Winklevoss Twins Rule in Digital Money

The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler — Olympic rowers, nemeses of Mark Zuckerberg — are laying claim to a new title: bitcoin moguls.

The Winklevii, as they are known, have amassed since last summer what appears to be one of the single largest portfolios of the digital money, whose wild gyrations have Silicon Valley and Wall Street talking. The twins, the first prominent figures in the largely anonymous bitcoin world to publicly disclose a big stake, say they own nearly $11 million worth.

Or at least $11 million as of Thursday morning — when trading was temporarily suspended after the latest and largest flash crash left a single bitcoin worth about $120 and the whole market worth $1.3 billion. At one point, the price had plummeted 60 percent.

To skeptics, the frenzy over the bitcoin network created by anonymous programmers in 2009 looks more like the mania for Dutch tulip bulbs in the 1600s than the beginnings of an actual currency.

“To say highly speculative would be the understatement of the century,” said Steve Hanke, a professor specializing in alternative currencies at Johns Hopkins University.

Whatever else it is, bitcoin has become the financial phenomenon of the moment.

In addition to the identical twins, Silicon Valley investment firms, while not holding bitcoins, are starting to show interest in the technology.

On Thursday, a group of venture capitalists, including Andreessen Horowitz, announced that they were financing a bitcoin-related company, OpenCoin.

Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesA sticker on the window of a pub in Berlin signifies acceptance of bitcoin for payment. Few places accept the digital currency.The New York Times

The Winklevosses say this week’s tumult is just growing pains for a digital currency that they believe will become a sort of gold for the technorati.

“People say it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s a bubble,” said Cameron Winklevoss. “People really don’t want to take it seriously. At some point that narrative will shift to ‘virtual currencies are here to stay.’ We’re in the early days.”

While little is known about the creator of bitcoin, or if it even was a single person, the work involved serious programming chops, building a system that could live on borrowed computer space around the world. It was determined that only a finite number of bitcoins could be created — the count is currently around 11 million. New coins are “mined” by programmers who solve mathematic riddles and can sell their coins on upstart exchanges.

For now, there are few places where bitcoins can be used. One marketplace is an online bazaar, Silk Road, where narcotics are reportedly the main wares for sale. But bitcoin believers imagine a future where the e-cash can be used at their local Starbucks. The Winklevosses have paid in bitcoin for the services of a Ukrainian computer programmer who has worked on their Web site.

“We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

This is not the brothers’ first gamble on an unproved technology. As students at Harvard, the twins founded a social networking site, ConnectU, and enlisted their schoolmate, Mark Zuckerberg, to help them build the company. After Mr. Zuckerberg went off to start Facebook, the brothers sued him, accusing him of stealing their idea — a story that was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” The case was settled with the brothers being given $20 million in cash and Facebook shares that are now worth more than $200 million.

They have parlayed that fortune into Winklevoss Capital. Their first two investments were in Hukkster, a start-up shopping Web site and SumZero, an online community for professional money managers.

The brothers began dabbling in bitcoin last summer when the dollar value of a single coin was still in the single digits. To keep their holdings secure from hackers, they have taken the complex codes that represent their holdings off networked computers and saved them on small flash drives, putting the drives, in turn, in safe deposit boxes at banks in three different cities.

It’s hard to verify how the Winklevoss holdings compare with other bitcoin players, given the anonymity of accounts, and the twins say they believe that some early users of the system probably have holdings that are at least as large.

A Maltese company, Exante, started a hedge fund that the company says has bought up about 82,000 bitcoins — or about $10 million as of Thursday — with money from wealthy investors. A founder of the fund, Anatoli Knyazev, said his main concern was hackers and government regulators, who have so far mostly left the currency alone.

These investments were all in an uncertain state on Thursday after the big price swings and the shutdown of trading on Mt. Gox, a Japanese-based company that claims to handle 80 percent of all bitcoin trades. Mt. Gox said in a statement that the problems were a result of the currency’s popularity, making it impossible to process all the incoming orders. It added that it was not the victim of hackers but “instead victim of our own success!”

The 6-foot-5 Winklevoss brothers were unfazed. The brothers said they took advantage of the low prices to buy more.

“It has been four years and it has yet to be discredited as a viable alternative to fiat currency,” Tyler Winklevoss said. “We could be totally wrong, but we are curious to see this play out a lot more.”

NBA Star Joe Johnson — Jeweler Billed Me $260k For Crap I Never Bought!

NBA Star Joe Johnson
Jeweler Billed Me $260k
For Crap I Never Bought! Brooklyn Nets guard Joe Johnson insists ... he's no jewel thief -- and now, he's lashing back against a lawsuit that says he stole $125,000 worth of bling from an Atlanta diamond dealer.

Aydin & Company filed a lawsuit against Johnson earlier this month, claiming the NBA star entered into a purchase agreement back in October 2010 for $125,500 worth of jewelry.

The items in question -- a white gold watch with diamonds, diamond beaded bracelet, black diamond stud earrings and a white gold bezel set rosary.

According to the suit, Johnson took the swag, but never foot the bill -- so Aydin's suing for the price of the jewelry PLUS legal fees, PLUS interest (which grows at a monthly rate of 2%) ... for a grand total of $266,333.05.

But sources close to Johnson tell TMZ ... the lawsuit is total B.S -- explaining, the owner of the store asked Johnson to wear the items on loan and allowed him to return them when he was done.

But when Johnson tried to give the items back, we're told the jeweler refused and slapped him with the bill instead.

Sources tell us, Johnson NEVER agreed to purchase the items and has since tried to return them on numerous occasions -- but no cigar.

A judge has yet to rule on the lawsuit.

Mega Man, Pac-Man Never Coming to Street Fighter x Tekken on 360

Capcom has confirmed that Mega Man and Pac-Man will remain exclusive to the PlayStation 3 and Vita versions of Street Fighter x Tekken. In an interview with Siliconera, Street Fighter x Tekken producer Tomoyaki Ayano commented that "Unfortunately for Xbox 360 users, Mega Man and Pac-Man are exclusive to the PS3 version of the game.”

When asked about the fact that hackers have found data for Mega Man and Pac-Man on the disc for the Xbox 360 version of Street Fighter x Tekken, Ayano commented that "Every game has data on it that is unused. In this case, Street Fighter x Tekken for the Xbox 360 did have the Mega Man and Pac-Man data on it, but we never intended to release these characters on the 360. They are PS3 exclusives and that was our intention from the very beginning. They are not going to be timed exclusives either. They’re PS3 exclusives."

While Ayano specifically referred to PlayStation 3, the characters will also be available on Vita. Pac-Man and Mega Man join other PlayStation-exclusive characters including Cole MacGrath from Infamous and Japanese PlayStation mascots Kuro and Toro.

Street Fighter x Tekken was recently featured in the EVO fighting tournament. The game will receive downloadable content for new characters later this month and will hit PlayStation Vita in October.

For a look at all of Street Fighter x Tekken’s characters (exclusive or otherwise), check out our Street Fighter x Tekken wiki guide.