Peter Tamte believes the next revolution in personal-productivity software is upon us — and he wants in.
Tamte, the founder of Destineer, the videogame publisher and a onetime Apple consumer-marketing heavyweight, is launching a new company Wednesday, Aug. 1 with a single product: An iPad app to manage to-do items and organize digital notes.
Projectbook is hardly the first tablet app to take on such chores, but Tamte argues his product has enough new features to lure millions away from the leader in this tech category, Evernote.
To see a review of Projectbook go to Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s Your Tech Weblog
Like Evernote, Projectbook is intended to “replace paper clutter with digital notebooks,” Tamte said. “That’s the core reason I bought my iPad, but I couldn’t find a good notes app.”
He said his colleagues at Eden Prairie-based Destineer responded to his “whining” with a challenge: “Peter, you own a software company. Why don’t you do something about that?”
So he did, secretly assembling a development team that would eventually become theory.io, based in Chanhassen with an office in the San Francisco Bay area.
With tablets becoming increasing vital, Projectbook is the right app at the right time, Tamte believes.
“We’re in a post-PC era and on the ground floor of what is the biggest transition in computing in 20 years,” Tamte said. “Having the chance to work on a note-taking app is the equivalent of working on a word-processing product at the dawn of the PC era.”
And while Evernote boasts tens of millions of registered users, Tamte thinks there is plenty of room for a fresh player with a better product.
Fusing sophisticated task management with notes-organizing functionality is a key Projectbook strength Evernote doesn’t share, he said.
Searching is another crucial Projectbook feature, with various ways to pull together notes with similar information or corresponding to the same project, Tamte added.
Until now, “we’ve kept to-dos in one app, notes in another app and documents in another app, with none of these sharing information,” he said. Projectbook is a way “to keep all the kinds of information you need to get things done in one place, where it’s easy to find even if you forgot to tag it or don’t have an Internet connection.”
Evernote has a crucial advantage in that it works on virtually all kinds of computer and mobile devices, but theory.io aims to chip away at that lead with a Macintosh version of its app in the fall, the iPhone variation after that, followed eventually by Windows and Android incarnations.
The iPad app is due to be available Wednesday on Apple’s App Store at an introductory $2.99 price that jumps to $6.99 in two weeks.
Theory.io is the fifth chapter in Tamte’s long career as a tech entrepreneur and executive. He founded and operated the Macintosh-software publisher MacSoft in the 1990s.
Tamte later signed on at Apple, where he helped run consumer marketing. There, he had the unenviable challenge of convincing users of the hot new iMac that its infamous “hockey-puck” mouse was a good idea (most still agree it was a horrible idea).
In the late 1990s Tamte joined the Bungie videogame studio of “Halo” fame, then founded Destineer, a publisher of boxed video games.
Contact Julio Ojeda-Zapata at 651-228-5467. Follow him: ojezap.com/social
