I’ve been using Catch.com for some time. It’s a great note taking service. It’s web based, has apps for all the major mobile platforms, and it’s free. Evernote always lost out for me because Catch has offline support and with Evernote, you have to be a premium subscriber to access notes offline.

Google Keep has been out for the better part of two months now. It’s web based, an app in the Google Play Store, and coming to other platforms in the indeterminate future. It’s simple and good, but at any time, Google could do away with it as it has with Google Reader. Although, I’ve always worried about not very established companies going out of business as well.

It’s funny how to think how paper can last (kind of) forever but thoughts put down in electrons stored somewhere may go away at any moment. I shouldn’t think that hundreds of years from now a relative of mine would come across my torrid thoughts put down in writing and deem them a worthy of read. But I can’t help but think that my writing, as well as my life, may be impermanent.

What I like more about Catch is its useful and simple design where with a touch appears a wheel giving the option to create a voice note, what it’s the same as record something, take a photo or write any text note, everything online and offline. You can also share cheklists to collaborate on to do lists and you can set reminders so you never miss something important.

With catch you can find and save all your discoveries. I’ve been checking it for a couple of weeks and it’s truly helpful and fast whenever you need it. What is quite interesting about Catch is the save mode. You can colect your ideas into personal spaces using tags to label and find your notes easily. Likewise, it’s possible to backup automatically your notes for free with secure sync to Catch.com.

But all this stuff it’s not free at all. Catch offers three plans for three type of users:

• Free. The basic plan. The free, with 3 spaces (private or shared notebooks), +2 more when you create a Catch account, 70MB of new content per month to cloud service and text, web clips, photos and voice memos. 
• Pro. Paying $4,99 monthly or $44,99 annual you could add spaces, attach documents and upload more to the cloud. With 50 spaces, 1GB of new content per month to cloud service, attach office documents and double the referral rewards.
• Finally, the premier plan. Add even more spaces, content uploads. With 200 spaces, 5GB of new content per month to cloud service. The ideal plan for project teams. All this for $15,99 per month or $144,99 annual.

Sincerely, I didn’t check the payement plans, but I really liked what I saw with the free one and it’s enought by the moment. Here are the links for Android and iOS. Hope you find as useful as me!

One of the things I was able to successfully do before our mad dash from Roanoke to Dulles for our flight to Africa was to find an Android compass app that had GPS capability.  I didn’t have a whole lot of time to play with it after I downloaded and installed it but certainly put it to use on the ground in Ethiopia.

There are some minor glitches here and there like momentary freezing (black screen) but for the most part the app is easy to use and has given me relatively good data. Visit catch.com to check this and their other offerings out.

So now that I have GPS data, what to do with it?

Another cool thing I like is maps…making them, looking at them, and exploring them. batchgeo.com is a web based map making tool that uses the google maps api to help people take a variety of geographic data points like addresses, intersections, or place names and make maps. If you have a spreadsheet (tab delimited text files work too), you can make something informative with basic information such as an address but, of course, with more detailed data you can map better.

Obviously, there are some features that are restricted with the free version such as not being able to display more than 2500 points on one map and lack of Street View integration but this is still a very handy resource when you need to produce a map graphic.

What is great about it is that their creators made it real easy to enter a note and then search notes. And if you add their widget to your Android, it is one-click away from writing a text note, audio note(!), camera note.

All this is immediately synced to your online account so you can process your notes on your big computer. Online storage is free unless you upload more than 70 mb data in a month, which is a very good deal. And if you do, then its price easily pays for itself.

What else changed about me taking notes hi-tech way, is that now I can and do take audio notes. Sometimes you just can’t write e.g. in a car or during a walk or you need to put all your idea’s details our of your mind fast. It was a ground-breaking change to me, maybe it will be the same for you.

I’m happily using for 2 weeks now and have no intentions to stop that. Check it out.

Snaptic, which lets you capture, save and share notes, ideas, imagery, places and whatnot, has changed its company and service name to the far catchier Catch.com. Coinciding with the name switch, the company has released new mobile apps (called “Catch Notes” for Android and iOS devices.

The new Catch apps join the newly released Catch.com website, which uses mobile geolocation to help sort and find information based on locations sent from a mobile device.

The startup, which is backed by $2.3 million in venture capital and rivals Evernote and others in the note-capturing space, says there are currently 5 million active Catch users.

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/snaptic" name="Snaptic"]