Evernote expands into new territory, partnering with South Korea’s dominant messaging service

Evernote saves text, to-dos, and files to the cloud so they’re readily available. KakaoTalk is the dominant instant messaging app in South Korea, with a reported 95 percent of Korean smartphone users signed up for the service. Now, Kakao and Evernote are partnering to expand their market and their functionality at the same time. According to The Korea Herald, a new version of KakaoTalk should allow users to save their conversations to Evernote and share them with friends.

For Evernote, it could mean one more way the service could serve as a portal to quickly look up digital memories, as CEO Phil Libin told The Next Web:

“Evernote’s products have traditionally been quite introverted; keeping your own memories and information for your own use. But there’s a big demand for improving our sharing and collaboration capabilities, and we’re always looking for the most innovative ways to do that. With Kakao Talk, people will be able to share their memories more easily, as well as keep the conversations that are important to them. There is a lot we can learn about sharing and communication by working with Kakao.”

For Kakao, it could be a way to expand its market beyond South Korea, where it’s pretty much saturated. “The partnership (with Evernote) will elevate the status of Kakao Talk as a global mobile platform,” said CEO Lee Sir-goo at a press conference.

These days, instant messaging apps like KakaoTalk are becoming increasingly popular, but they’re all balkanized states where you have to remember which of your friends use each app. Perhaps partnerships like this could help determine a winner.