Personal assistant app provider Springpad unveiled the Notebook Store today, a place where Springpad users can jump start their own digital notebooks designed for specific life tasks and projects. The idea is to get them motivated, organized, and help them get things done.

Springpad has partnered with more than 50 brands, publishers and influencers to create notebooks for the Cooking & Food, Home & Living, Family & Parenting, Tasks & Productivity and Travel categories.

“We’ve found that our contextual notebooks that include ideas, information and recommendations from industry experts help motivate our users to get things done,” says Jacqueline Hampton, Springpad CEO.  “We’re thrilled to offer this one-stop resource of notebook templates with customized workflows that make it easy for consumers to focus on specific tasks and projects.”

You can access the Notebook Store here, and it features a range of notebooks from Smarter Travel’s Trip Planner and Breville’sJuicing 101 to Peter Walsh’s Kitchen Organizer and Julie Morgenstern’s Task Manager.  Each notebook in the store combines Springpad’s world-class organizer and assistant technology that automatically enhances saved content with the approach and knowledge of industry experts.  The notebooks can be used privately or together with friends, family and colleagues.

“With our focus on notebooks that inform and help people accomplish their goals, we believe that our Notebook Store has the potential to become the ‘go-to’ resource for people committed to digital personal organization,” adds Hampton.  “We look forward to adding many more notebooks and categories to our store in the coming months.”

Mainstream appeal : a long time comin’

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When Apple launched iOS 7, Springpad was one of the first few apps that updated its service to complement the new platform.  It featured a new look, new notes, syncing so content in available in other devices, saving and sharing notebooks, and made tweaks in its code for developers.  It was followed by the enhancement of its website.  Search, Filter, and Advance Filter are centrally located; Display, Sort and Bulk Edit are bulked in one place; actions such as Settings, Collaboration and Sharing are now more visible; and the Board has been redesigned to be more spacious.  Then notebook templates were introduced to help people easily get started with organizing things.  There are templates that help you jumpstart with creating a notebook for recipes, or organizing our room.

image courtesy Springpad

The launch of the Springpad Notebook Store comes months after Evernote, its top competitor launched its own Marketplace.  Though it seems like Springpad is following Evernote’s steps, what they offer in the their stores are quite different.

For one, Springpad is offering digital notebooks created by popular content creators while the Evernote Market sells actual, palpable products that can be used to collaborate on projects or make users more productive, aside from just software applications.

• Springpad on Evernote

Yet the comparisons between Evernote and Springpad are only likely to increase after today’s release of Springpad’s Notebook Store, as the two continue to overlap services and seek mainstream appeal.

“We’re not going to be selling socks!” jokes Jeff Janer, Springpad co-founder.  “I think Evernote’s store is really more focused – at heart, they’re still a notetaking software, so they’re looking to make it easier to be a digital filing cabinet. We’re much more focused on helping you get something done. these notebooks in the store – and this is why we’re so focused on our partners – it’s not just a name, but advice, specific tips and recommendations.”

Next-gen content marketing

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Springpad’s been layering more and more consumer features onto its productivity app, enhancing the automated aspects to make those recommendations, integrate with your scheduling apps, create shopping lists and send alerts and reminders for things like price changes on a saved product or Amazon Prime availability for a saved movie. As the new features add up and more brands roll in, Springpad’s preparing a platform for the future of context-based advertising.

Speaking with advertising firms, Springpad found that next-gen content marketing looks to provide consumers with content, education and utility. “They look at content from those three buckets,” Janer explains.

“Typically you see apps addressing aspects, but Springpad is inclusive and takes it to the next level.  That’s not a direction Evernote is headed in at all,” Janer goes on. “At the broadest level, it’s pretty clear we’re headed down the mainstream consumer path than a business audience, where Evernote seems increasingly focused.”

• Educating brands & users alike

Springpad is relentless in its goals to go mainstream, and many challenges remain. In terms of brand partners and influencers, the personal assistant app is pioneering a new concept for its interactive tool. That means the burden of consumer and brand education falls on Springpad’s team.

To attract brands, Springpad’s been pounding the pavement and fighting for shelf space, as Janer puts it, to even gain brands’ attention and trust. To keep brands coming back, Springpad’s been building out the proper dashboard to provide the metrics and consumer data they require to empower next-gen content marketing.

Janer goes on to give me examples of the types of metrics Springpad provides brands, including the number of Notebook downloads, earned media components, shared activity and most popular items within a given Notebook. They’ll also provide engagement in context of specific content to build recommendations on brands’ next steps, as well as other metadata like the platforms, browsers and locations users are pinging from.

But as Springpad continues to win over brands utilizing its platform to create content that’s actionable by end users, Springpad hopes to entice more of the mainstream through brand familiarization.

“This is a different thing you haven’t encountered before, here’s an electronic, ultimate family organizer from this company you haven’t heard of, Springpad, and Cool Mom Picks, which you have heard of,” Janer explains.

co-authored by Kristen Nicole Martin & Mellisa Tolentino