Twitter was colourful with pictures of candidates and tweets from their supporters yesterday, Nomination Day for the Punggol East by-election in Singapore. There seemed to be more pictures of Lee Li Lian and more tweets supporting her, the Workers’ Party candidate, than of anybody else.
This was in line with the May 2011 general election when opposition supporters seemed more active in social media. Lee Li Lian lost in Punggol East that year by a big margin. She secured 41 per cent of the vote while the winner, Michael Palmer of the ruling People’s Action Party, bagged 54.5 per cent. But now that Palmer has stepped down as MP and Speaker of Parliament following an extramarital affair, Lee Li Lian is back in the fray and the spotlight again.
Later last night, I came across an article in The Week about the 12 best Android apps of the year. It had a big picture of the Evernote elephant captioned “Google says Evernote allows you to turn your Android device into an extension of your brain”.
Evernote is good. You can use it to take notes, save web pages, keep pictures, record messages.
But you can do all that with Microsoft OneNote too. And OneNote is part of Microsoft Office 2010. It used to come with earlier versions of Office too. So you didn’t have to download it separately like Evernote. And almost every PC user uses Microsoft Office.
So how did Evernote become so popular? Sure, using Evernote, you can store things online, in the cloud, instead of your own computer. But OneNote offers the same facility now that it can be connected with Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
So why is Evernote so popular? After all, the free version restricts the amount of content you can upload to your account every month.
OneNote enjoyed an advantage on Windows PCs, I would have thought, since it came with Microsoft Office – and yet that did not stop Evernote from growing in popularity.
And now the business is changing. Tablet and smartphone sales are up and PC sales are down. The Windows launch has failed to boost the PC market.
Microsoft is even giving away OneNote for free. OneNote is available as a free download on Google Play, just like Evernote. This shows the competition Microsoft is facing. OneNote, part of the Microsoft Office suite which you have to buy, is available for free for smartphones and tablets. It’s a big change from the Wintel PC world.
