Many people know of Xobni as the Outlook search plugin.  That’s not wrong – but it’s only a fraction of what we are today.  While we still love our Outlook customers, we are no longer strictly a desktop software company.  We’re a data-centric company, and our specialty is analyzing your data and transforming it into useful and relevant information.  Our first product provided fast search and people-oriented views around your Outlook email data – and that was a great start that helped us see the beginning of what was possible with data in email.

We’ve been building on top of email data for a while now, and we’re now focusing on developing technologies to deliver a set of products powered by a much more interesting and useful data set: your implicit social graph.

The Problem with Today’s Social Graph

Social graphs today are incredibly manual and tedious to create.  After you sign-up for a new social service, you are then asked to either invite or connect with friends one at a time, or in bulk by looking at some sort of established address book.  These address books present you an alphabetical, outdated, and incomplete list of your friends and family, from which you can either invite everyone en masse, or look through the entire alphabetical list and select people one at a time.

When you invite someone to connect with you, that person has to explicitly accept the request.  This person becomes a new node in a social graph that will inevitably become stale. I use the word “stale” because most people (including myself) do not take the time to prune their graphs (aka, remove people).  As Brad Feld mentioned, we are too promiscuous with who we accept into our graph.

What does this all mean?  Most of our social graphs are littered with people we don’t actually care about, and our feeds from these social networks start to lose value over time. While this graph still represents who I know, it’s no longer a real representation of who I care about.  In addition, as you move locations, change jobs, or meet new friends, both who you know and who you care about change over time.  Change is not something that today’s social graphs handle.  Without the work to manually remove people, today’s graphs can only get bigger.

The Implicit Social Graph – and some Xobni Magic

Your social graph already exists in real life: your spouse, kids, co-workers, family, and friends.  And we spend a lot of time and energy adding these important people to our social networks – manually. They have to explicitly ask to connect with you, and you have to manually accept that request.  This is a behavior that we’ve come to accept, but we at Xobni believe there are smarter ways to build these graphs in a more dynamic way.  Enter the implicit social graph.

The implicit social graph is one that is built using the data you are already creating day-in and day-out as part of your work and life: emails sent, calls made, texts sent, etc.  You are already exposing who your social graph is through your communication data.  By examining who you communicate with regularly, a social graph can be uncovered that requires no work from you to create. Indeed, you’re already creating it – we’re merely analyzing the data and exposing the graph underneath.

The beauty of the implicit social graph is that it discovers who is important to you and how important they are to you.

Stop and think about that for a moment, as it is vitally important.  The implicit social graph is one that has strength associated with each edge. Not only is this a graph of people that has been automatically curated, but it’s a graph that knows who you communicate with regularly, and how you communicate with them.  It’s a graph that automatically updates when you make new friends, change jobs, and stop talking to old friends.

This idea has wide applications.  To give you a taste of what I mean, the next time you click on one of those “Invite Friends” buttons right after you create an account, imagine this: what if instead of seeing an alphabetical list of people, you saw a list of people that made sense to you?  What if the list started with your spouse and close friends, followed by family members and co-workers?

How exactly does Xobni fit into this?

For the last two years, the Xobni engineering team has been building a system to create your implicit social graph from your communication data.  We’re at the forefront of developing this idea. We have a huge running start, and are best positioned to offer solutions using the implicit social graph.  We have built a few applications on top of it, including our Gmail product, our upcoming iPhone and Android products, and a huge array of hacks that experiment with the data.  That being said, these products and hacks are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is possible with Xobni’s platform.  We’ve been thinking and hacking on this concept for a while now, but we want more people to help us apply this big idea.

Bill Gates once stated that Xobni represents, “…the next generation of social networking”, PC Magazine said we are a “must have” and gave us the Editor’s Choice award, and TechCrunch says we “make the inbox smarter.”  In addition to these Xobni kudos, Fred Wilson wrote the implicit social graph represents, “…the next frontier in social networking”.  The next wave of social applications will be powered by our data and the opportunities are endless.  Come build with us.

UPDATE: We’re looking for various functions in engineering. A couple are listed on our jobs page, but we’re looking for many more.  Keep an eye out for this page to be updated.  If you’re ready to bring it and don’t see the right job match on our jobs page, feel free to shoot us an email – jobs [at] xobni [dot] com.

She and her team pulled together the “Top 10 essentials for relationship building with Xobni” so we thought we should share it with you.

Check it out

How do you use Xobni to help you manage your relationships?  Tell us in the comments – we’d love to hear from you.

Filed under: News ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/xobnis-top-10-for-relationship-building/feed/ 4 brittonmontalvo large icon http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/introducing-the-nimbb-gadget-ridiculously-easy-video-messaging-in-outlook/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/introducing-the-nimbb-gadget-ridiculously-easy-video-messaging-in-outlook/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:11:07 +0000 Josh Jacobson http://blog.xobni.com/?p=3369 ]]> by Josh Jacobson

In May, competitors from around the world participated in the Xobni Gadget Hack Day.  There were a number of very impressive entries, but the grand prize went to Montreal-based Benjamin Bérubé who created the Nimbb video gadget.  At the award ceremony, judge/blogger Michael Arrington praised its simplicity, usefulness, and integration with Outlook as the winning qualities.  Now it’s available for free in the Xobni Gadget Store.

Here’s a quick video of how it works:

In a nutshell, the Nimbb gadget has two parts:

• The Nimbb gadget appears in the Xobni for Outlook sidebar and  allows you to quickly record, review, and send video messages made with your webcam.  An account is not required, and it’s totally free.
• If someone sends you a Nimbb video via email, the video will automatically appear within the message,  allowing you to watch the video right inside of Outlook.

Nimbb‘s Benjamin Bérubé adds: ”Xobni’s OpenSocial container allows us to focus on our video subscription services and not have to worry about the hassle of working in Outlook.”

So, if you have Outlook and are interested in video messages, head on over to get Nimbb from the Xobni Gadget Store.  Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Also – Benjamin will be showing his gadget at the International Startup Festival’s “Hack Your Email!” event tomorrow, July 13th, in Montreal.  If you’re in the area, pop in to say hello – he’s a good guy

A (wo/)man may do an immense deal of good, if (s)he does not care who gets the credit for it.

While we agree with the theory behind this old teamwork saying, we still think you can sneak a little credit for bringing the new Xobni for Teams to your colleagues today!

Since launching Xobni 3 years ago, we’ve heard from our customers time and time again that they’d love to give the benefits of Xobni to their entire team (oh, you’re too kind!). While we’ve had Xobni Business Solutions available for a while, many of our customers aren’t looking to purchase at an enterprise scale with advanced rollout tools—they just want to get their small group or company working more efficiently using Xobni.  (Did we mention that the average user says they save 45-60 minutes per week by using Xobni?)

Go to Xobni for Teams to get your whole team up and running with Xobni in minutes.

Top 6 Benefits to Xobni for Teams:

1. Multiple people, one single bill
   Get all the benefits of Xobni and Xobni Pro for a group of people—bundled neatly into a single monthly or annual bill.
2. Manage with Ease
   Online management for everything: members, licenses, and payment. Never lose track of licenses that you’ve purchased over time. We keep the rollout super-simple: each team member handles installing Xobni on their computer or smartphone.
3. Flexibility
   New employees? Different employees? You can edit members and shift around licenses at any time.
4. Volume discounts
   Just $5/person for a monthly subscription or $45/person for the annual subscription.
5. Premium customer support
   If you have questions, we’re here for you.
6. Happy, productive team members
   Xobni users are up to 300% more productive according to Exigent, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

How easy is it? All it takes is 4 steps:

1. Log in.
2. Add people on your team.
3. Assign them a Xobni product.
4. Checkout and send invitations to your team members so they can enjoy Xobni. Done!

Oh, and step 5 is getting kudos (ah hem “credit) from co-workers for bringing Xobni goodness their way.  :)

While the technology we use to get work done has advanced impressively over the decades, the process of signing documents seems to have become worse since the dark ages.  Why, in this day and age, do we still have to go through Rube Goldberg-like contortions of printing, pens, faxes, couriers, scanners, call-confirmations and email-confirmations to complete simple document signing, especially when most documents start as digital files anyway?  Well, thanks to EchoSign, we can be done with all that.

EchoSign has already built an impressively easy web-based way to send and e-sign documents that has been catching on like wildfire. Over 3 million business people already enjoy its benefits.

Now, EchoSign has made it even easier to sign documents.  The EchoSign Gadget, available for FREE through the Xobni Gadget Store, saves you a round trip to the web browser, and lets you get on with your day.  Here’s how it works:

1. You receive a “Please E-Sign” email sent via EchoSign,
2. The EchoSign Gadget allows you to review the entire document and sign it right inside of Outlook.
3. Now your job is done!  Just delete or file the email as desired.

If you’re asked to sign documents often, this gadget is definitely for you.

It’s just one more way that companies have used the Xobni Gadget Platform to shave minutes or hours off of tasks that their users do every single work day.

Read more about how it works at tips.echosign.com or install the EchoSign Gadget today.

Here’s what’s new:

1. Min State
With this new update comes our top-requested feature: the ability to expand and collapse the Xobni sidebar at will. This enables you to have Xobni neatly tucked away to the right-hand side of your workspace for when you want to focus. When you minimize the sidebar, you’ll see summarized versions of contact profiles, inbox view, and even search results—all fitted discreetly into a slim 50 pixel-wide profile.

To expand or collapse the Xobni for Gmail sidebar, just click on the left margin of the sidebar.

2. New color scheme to match Gmail’s default “Bold” theme
Coming soon: pick your own color theme to match your unique Gmail setup.

3. Faster Contact Creation
When composing an email, Xobni Autosuggest now instantly recognizes contacts that you’ve just emailed for the first time. You may not have noticed this, but not only do we show you info on the contacts in your inbox, we also create Xobni Contacts for them. This means that you can search and find that contact even if you’ve deleted messages from them.

4. Faster Email Composing
What’s different about Xobni Autosuggest? When you compose a message, we suggest your Xobni Contacts. This comprehensive list includes everyone you’ve ever emailed with—whether it’s multiple Gmail accounts, Outlook, or BlackBerry. That means you have access to all of your contacts, ordered by who’s most relevant to you in your current account. To make things easier for you, Xobni Autosuggest now allows tabbing to navigate to the next text field.

5. Social Network Updates

• Social updates tab is now selected by default
• New “Add” button next to LinkedIn profile info
• Profile picker for Facebook and Twitter now includes links to view profile. You can even paste in a user ID for Facebook.
  

How do I get the new Xobni for Gmail?

• For those of you with Xobni for Gmail installed, simply reload the page. Easy!
• For those of you who don’t have Xobni for Gmail yet, sign up here.
• For those of you still waiting on the list to get in, know that we are adding thousands of people each week. Tip: tweet a compelling plea to @xobni – we may be vulnerable to persuasion

At left, Xobni for Gmail. At right, the people widget from Gmail

Yesterday Gmail released a new feature that occupies the same real estate as Xobni for Gmail.  This caused some of Gmail’s features to overlap the Xobni sidebar. Our engineers sprang into action and fixed the issue within a few hours. The Xobni sidebar now sits neatly in position and gets you back to goodness. All you need to do is refresh your Gmail page and your Xobni sidebar should be good as new!

This isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last time a major email client tries to add a little flava to the inbox or another product claims to be the “Xobni for xyz.” Since Xobni for Outlook was introduced in May of 2008, we’ve been saying that it’s the people in the inbox that really matter, not just the messages. It’s nice to see that companies like Google now agree.

Many people have asked us about the differences between what Gmail released and Xobni’s product for Gmail. Here are some of the benefits of using Xobni:

• Cross-platform freedom: Xobni now has products in Outlook, BlackBerry and Gmail (iPhone and Android coming soon), and we connect all these accounts with Xobni Pro. So if you’re in Gmail, you can access all your Outlook contacts and their information, and vice versa.
• Comprehensive contact creation: Our automatic address book creates Xobni contacts for everyone you’re ever interacted with in email—across any of your Gmail/Google Apps, Outlook, and BlackBerry platforms. Our feeling is that people don’t manage address books well, in general.  So we’re doing the work for you – and in a way that includes EVERY person, not just the ones you manually add to your address book.
• Lightning-fast contact search, ranked by who you interact with the most from that account.
• Rich social profile information from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter gives you a more complete picture of your contacts, including photos, job title, company, updates and tweets. As much as we are huge Gmail fans, not all of us manually add pictures to our Gmail contacts, and not all of our contacts use Gmail.
• Smart Visual Autosuggest: All of your Xobni contacts, right at your fingertips, ranked by who’s most important to you in the context of that mailbox.
• Social Autosuggest: Emailing Bob? Immediately add other people you frequently email with Bob right in autosuggest.
• Relationship History for the long-range view of how you know a contact

Xobni's Relationship History

In short, we are big believers in an open product that crosses platforms, external data and devices—because our real-life relationships don’t live within those boundaries.

If you’re not already using Xobni for Gmail Beta, sign up today. If you live in Outlook or BlackBerry, check out Xobni (free)and Xobni Pro—demonstrated to make you up to 300% more productive in how you manage contacts and email. Looking forward to connecting your smartphone? Get on the free BlackBerry app or sign up for the Android and iPhone alpha.

As always, feedback is welcome: visit our forums or email gmail-beta@xobni.com.

He’s now in a technical management role at Class Super, a company that produces SaaS Administration Systems for Retirement Funds.  His primary means of communication with hundreds of companies and customers is email.  He says “Xobni is a key means by which I tame the Email beast.”  Well said, George!

We noticed the below post in our forum offering up a tip from George and thought we’d share with a broader audience.  Thanks, George! 

George’s (irregular series of) XOBNI TIPS!

by George Janczuk

OK – I *LOVE* Xobni; and over the few years that I have been using it I have picked up a number of TIPS which I would love to share! So… this is the first in a (an irregular) series of “George’s Xobni Tips!”

This one is simple. Do you have a work colleague that you are trying to connect with on your social networks? You maybe have them connected on LinkedIn but not Facebook, and searching facebook seems to be an entirely ineffective exercise…

Well… you can let Xobni do your heavy lifting for you!

These handy steps will definitely lift your success rate:

1. If that person has multiple contacts in Xobni, consolidate them into one with multiple email addresses,
2. If you have that user on once social network and not another (e.g. most commonly for me I would have them as a link on LinkedIN but not on Facebook) – then check the social network for which you do have a like to see what email addresses they have listed there. They will often be different to those you have on email correspondence; add these to the consolidated contact as well.
3. Bring up the contact’s Xobni profile and press the tab for the social network for which you don’t have their profile (e.g. facebook).
4. Voila – in many cases Xobni will hone in of exactly the right contact – click on the little person silhouette button to open their profile.

The magic on this technique is that is searches directly by email address. I haven’t yet found a way to manually do an email search via the Facebook UI.

Superstar judges and the crowd take in the hacks.

On Monday, we hosted our first Xobni Gadgets Hack.  The hackers were quick, the pizza was awesome (Little Star FTW) and the judges were generous with prizes.  Well, Xobni was generous with prizes, but the judges were generous with their time!

The challenge was for hackers to build gadgets using Xobni’s new OpenSocial-powered platform.  We held this hack event 1 week after the launch of the Xobni Gadget Store (see TechCrunch story here), to allow developers to familiarize themselves with the new platform, which now brings services like WebEx, Evernote, Yammer and Salesforce into Outlook.

In total, we had over 100 attendees, 35 people hacking, 15 hacks submitted for the contest (2 virtually via WebEx), 150 beers consumed and 20 pizzas devoured – all in just 3 hours.  Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Joseph Smarr (Google), David Lee (SV Angels) and Mark Weitzel (OpenSocial) were the esteemed judges determining the winners and handing out the dough.

Prizes went to Best Overall ($500 or Xoom tablet), Most Useful ($250), Most Creative ($250), Best Crammer ($250 – def: /kram’ mer/ noun – one who crammed a gadget in from start to finish in under 3 hours), and Developer’s Choice (chosen by the crowds via Twitter). Box.net also kicked in another $250 to the best gadget using their APIs.

And the winners are: (drumroll please…)

• Most Useful – Google Docs Gadget created by the SheepDogInc team
• Most Creative – Link Preview (Bastian Hofmann)
• Best Crammer  - GoldMail Gadget (2.0) (Arsen Yeremin of GoldMail)
• Developer’s Choice Award – Wishery Gadget (Cooper Marcus and David Albrecht of Wishery)
• Box.net Award – Box Gadget (Ryan Gerard)
• Overall Best Gadget – Nimbb Gadget by Benjamin Bérubé of Nimbb

Cooper Marcus of Wishery with his prize.

Thanks to everyone who came out and made it happen!  It was so exciting to see so many smart and creative developers leveraging this platform to integrate their products and services into consumers email workflow, and this is just the beginning.  We’ll work with these developers to see which gadgets might be offered through the Xobni Gadget Store in the future.  We hope to see the Xobni Gadget Store fill up with even more gadgets that improve productivity, add new functionality or just inspire a smile. If you are thinking about a hack or just have a question about the platform, you can always post in the Developer Forum.

To see all photos, go to our Flickr set.

Today marks a major milestone for Xobni—and for our customers. You may already have been following the progress of our Xobni Gadget platform, available to developers to seamlessly integrate web-based services into the Xobni for Outlook experience. Having seen incredibly useful and time-saving gadgets created and beta-tested over the past few months, we’re now thrilled to announce the Xobni Gadget Store. Take advantage of direct access to a new world of productive services and applications from a wide range of industry-leading partners (press release).

Web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue monitoring and editing, note-taking—your inbox is about to get a lot more powerful.  Imagine being able to integrate great services like these right into your Xobni experience (without leaving Outlook):

• Productivity Gadgets: Dropbox, Evernote, GoldMail, Google Translate, JIRA, WebEx
• Collaboration Gadgets: Huddle, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer
• Content Gadgets: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, XING, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM Gadgets: Salesforce.com

Now you can choose any of the Xobni Gadgets you want—or the whole batch if you like—for prices ranging from free to only $9.99/year (with 30 day free trial).

We’ve made it easy for you to add Gadgets to Xobni. Just click on over to the Xobni Gadget Store and take your pick of the gadgets available. Then make sure you’re on the latest and greatest version of Xobni for Outlook. That’s version 2.0.1 for Xobni Pro subscribers and free users (most of you), and an updated 1.9.6 for existing Xobni Plus users (release notes).

For enterprises, the Xobni Gadget Platform now makes it easy to create private gadgets based on your existing internal services to help employees become more productive and effective. Xobni Business Solutions customers can deploy their own customized gadgets via the Xobni Enterprise Admin Portal. You can find out more about these programs here.

Today, Xobni Gadgets are available for Xobni for Outlook.  Over the coming months, we’ll be looking at ways to widen the platform to Xobni for Gmail and Xobni mobile as well.

Customers we’ve talked to are pumped up about the new era of Xobni Gadgets, and we hope you are, too. It’s just one more way we can make your inbox the best it can possibly be.

Developers – interested in creating your own gadgets, or just kicking the tires of the platform? Join us on Monday, May 9th, for the Xobni Gadget Hack day (you can start coding now). Hacks will be judged by Michael Arrington and others. Register now for free – limited spots available.  

Xobni for BlackBerry ended 2010 with a bang and received impressive awards and accolades both from customers and the press. Customer adoption, growth and usage were off the charts. With that came great feedback and recommendations on how to evolve the product for optimal efficiency and productivity, and that is what this release is all about. We have spent countless hours solving the pesky contact management woes.

Thanks to the great feedback from our users, we release Xobni for BlackBerry build 2.0.28. It includes significant user experience and feature updates and as well as some new feature additions from you, our loyal customers.

As always, you can get the latest build from: bb.xobni.com, App World, Mobihand, Handango, Getjar and PocketGear (Note: some stores may take a day or so to reflect the update).

Below the list of features and improvements:

New Features/Functionality

• Free users can now also enjoy the Universal Search functionality (w/ daily limits)
• Edits in native BB address book now are updated in Xobni
• A users account is temporarily locked after 5 failed login attempts (when user is logged out)
• Added a “show password” checkbox on login screen to assist with small keyboard typing
• Added low memory state manager, to detect when device is low on memory
• Ability to restart a stopped contact scan due to server issues

UI Updates

• Edit contact details improvements and refinements
• Edit recipient screen improvements for composing emails and ability to set cc:, bcc:
• Xobni Pro icon shown for Pro users in all screens
• Improvements on forgot password dialog
•  “Xobni Cloud” now used through app for updating Xobni Cloud
• Added a loading spinner to the LinkedIn login page for OS 5.0 and higher

Search & Ranking Improvements

• Search refinements for improved search recall and ranking
• Improvement to ranking to avoid new contacts from showing up too high in ranking
• Improvement on phone number parsing for 6.0 devices
• Merging improvements on initial load
• Ability to search for suffix titles (e,g: Dr., Mr., etc.)

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• International character (UTF-8) fix when posting updates, for foreign characters support
• Improvements and potential fix for email loss on app deletion/install
• Fix to be able to add Xobni contacts to bcc line
• Logout and login no longer prompts users to choose email accounts
• Login screen retry and error handling improvements
• Speed improvement for LinkedIn and Facebook profile rendering
• Fix for pictures taken on touchscreen device to be incorrectly rotated
• Only emails composed from Xobni, have Xobni signature appended (when on)
• Fix for properly showing the date of a meeting in Xobni for recurring meetings
• Loading spinner on facebook tab now detects if no profile match was found
• Fix for handling snooze correctly during initial contact loading & later resume loading
• Expanding the network section now selects the 1^st member in the network
• Various improvements and fixes

To upgrade to the latest version, simply go to http://bb.xobni.com from your BlackBerry or the store from which you’ve downloaded/purchased our app.

We’d like to thank all of our BlackBerry users for all their feedback, input and suggestions. It has been critical to help us further improve our app, and we’re very grateful!

Enjoy!

The Xobni Mobile Team

Xobni Pro automatically creates contacts for anyone you’ve ever email, called or SMS’d and makes them instantly searchable.  Every person, phone number, email and file will be available to you in Outlook or on your BlackBerry.  Whenever you need them!

Time is running out – Don’t miss your chance. Buy Xobni Pro now on discount via AppSumo.

SAVE THE DATE 

May 9th (day before Google I/O) - 2 pm – 6 pm, SOMA, SF (two blocks from Google I/O)

Join Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Yelp and give your company a prime spot in the inbox, where users spend 30%+ per day.  We’re making it easy for developers to build an Open Social gadget that will run in Outlook and Google Apps.  That’s right, build once, deploy twice.

Join the fun, build your gadget and drive more engagement and visibility with your brand.  And Bonus: 10 hacks will be selected to present at the event and judged by our celebrity guests: Michael Arrington, David Lee and Joseph Smarr.  Prizes are TBD, but they’ll be good.  ;)

Space is limited.  RSVP here - We’ll send the SDK to registered developers in advance of the event so you can maximize your time at the mini hack.

Schedule

2pm – 5 pm – mini hack, beer, pizza, jams, good peeps

5 pm – showcase of hacks; judges Michael Arrington, David Lee and Joseph Smarr

More details coming soon to registered developers.

We’re sending out the invites just as fast as we can and are stoked to have so many ready and willing testers to help us get the product ready for prime time.

Here’s to you!

Your Xobni friends.

by Jeff Bonforte

Today Xobni provides personal productivity solutions to over 6M people around the world.  With the release of Xobni 2.0, we continue to deliver our vision of being the ultimate in personal relationship management.  I’d like to elaborate on the previous post by Michael that introduced some of what is to come from Xobni.  To help illustrate the power of a connected Xobni, I thought I’d provide a little context.  So, let’s take a look back…

2008
May: Xobni for Outlook v1 – Public Beta on May 5, 2008

2009
July: Xobni Plus launched

2010
Jan: Xobni for Enterprise
Mar: Xobni for BlackBerry
Mar: Xobni One
Jun: Xobni for Outlook 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit)

2011 (just the first half!)
Jan: Xobni for BlackBerry 2.0
Mar: Xobni for Outlook 2.0
Mar: Xobni Cloud
Mar: Xobni Pro
Q2: Unannounced Product for business users
Q2: Xobni for Gmail
Q2: Xobni for iPhone
Q2: Xobni for Android

In fact, in 2011 we will ship more new products than in the last three years, combined. Here’s why: the Xobni Cloud.  We’ll go into our new cloud platform a bit more below, but first, let me tell you about the new Xobni 2.0 and Xobni Pro. Together, they allow you to seamlessly manage thousands of relationships and allow us to provide you with powerful tools for your inbox and smartphone.

Xobni 2.0 for Outlook and BlackBerry (both free)
Xobni for Outlook v2.0 includes hundreds of updates, improvements and new features from our v1 product. It sports a fancy new grey skin, which makes Xobni look a bit more at home in Outlook. It includeslight-weight access to our new Spam Rescue feature, which looks through the junk folder for any emails that may have been incorrectly quarantined by Outlook. It also includes a number of key speed and stability enhancements. Xobni for Outlook v2.0 is available now for free. You can learn more and download it here.

Xobni for BlackBerry v2.0 is the free version of our award-winning automatic address book and lightning fast search app for your BlackBerry.

Xobni Pro
We have wiped out all the complexity of upgrading to our premium products with one unified premium level – Xobni Pro. With one low monthly or annual fee, you have personal access to as many of our Pro products as you need – the list of platforms Xobni supports will grow rapidly this year. As a Xobni Pro subscriber, you can run the Pro version of our Outlook product on multiple machines at no additional charge. Same is true for our BlackBerry app. In fact, as new versions of Xobni come out for other smartphones and inboxes, you get all the Pro versions at no additional cost.

Xobni Pro for Outlook is the premium version of our Outlook product, and it is perfect for both email power users and for those for whom managing relationships is their business. It includes a number of great upgrades to the free version, including the ability to export a Xobni Contact to your Outlook address book. It also offers unlimited access to our new Spam Rescue feature, which looks each day for incorrectly junked emails and automatically rescues them. Xobni Pro includes our Xobni Rank-powered AutoSuggest feature (favorite feature by users), access to shared events with a contact, and allows search in unlimited PSTs. And our Pro product sports a beautiful new blue skin, so it looks like Outlook’s better-looking cousin.

Xobni Pro for BlackBerry is the premium version of the BlackBerry product: it includes advanced search, customization, unlimited access to our magic autosuggest in your email compose window, and the ability to export Xobni contacts to the BlackBerry address book.

Xobni Cloud – The new brains in the relationship
The key to Xobni Pro and the many new products and platforms you will see from us in 2011 is Xobni Cloud (replacing Xobni One). It is the most fundamental step forward for the company since it started five years ago. The Xobni Cloud is our new highly secure, scalable and smart platform, and it delivers three key elements to our products: Smarter. Faster. Connected.

The Xobni Cloud is easily the smartest product we’ve ever released, and because it is in the cloud, it gets smarter daily.  It has new intelligent algorithms on merging contacts, which is really important as you link Xobni to multiple inboxes and platforms.

The Xobni Cloud reduces the work done by many features and products, making them faster, more reliable and less resource intensive. It also allows our product team to deliver new products and features to you faster than ever and enables us to launch products in places we couldn’t go before, like Gmail, iPhone, Android and more. Accessing the power of Xobni in more places has been the single biggest request from customers over the past eighteen months.

Xobni Cloud connects you to your relationships. Your life and your relationships aren’t siloed into one email account or one device. With Xobni Cloud and Xobni Pro, the people you interact with can span multiple inboxes, devices, jobs and even years. It is incredibly powerful, and it only gets more powerful over time.

If you are ready to get Xobni Pro, sign up here.  Want to test the waters or don’t need all the power of Pro? Download Xobni’s full suite of free products.

I’ve answered some of the frequent questions I receive from our current customers below. If you have more, we have a few FAQs online. And, of course, you are welcome to visit our community support or contact our fast, friendly and helpful support team.

Jeff Bonforte
CEO, Xobni

Some Frequently Asked Questions
If I am happy with Xobni Plus now, can I just stay put?
Yes. We will continue to provide support for our Plus and Free users on v1.x releases of Xobni. Your Plus license offers “perpetual” access to those features on our v1.x releases.

Why the move to subscription vs. version licensing?
There are four reasons why we moved from a perpetual license model to a subscription model: release new features and platforms faster, simplify our premium offerings, make the system smarter, and allow it all to work together. In the old model, we had to hold back big improvements and features for the next big release, so we could deliver the value that warranted a new version license fee. Moving forward, we want to release great new features when they’re ready, and we want to make sure all our customers are using the latest and greatest from Xobni. With version licensing, many users stay behind causing significant development and support difficulty. As evidence of the long term complexity of this, consider Microsoft Office. There are four major versions in use today: pre-2003, 2003, 2007 and 2010. So each version has to get updates and QA against each other. Backwards compatibility becomes very complex, etc. About 50% of all Office users are still on Office 2003 or earlier!

We knew that 2011 was our year to expand Xobni to more platforms – and the new model sets us up to manage this much more elegantly. Plain and simple: for $4.99/mo (when you buy annual subscription), you get the Pro versions of all of our products. Today this includes premium versions of Outlook and BlackBerry, and soon much, much more. Considering over 80% of our customers have a smartphone and over 90% have at least two email accounts, this is a simpler path for users and helps us to deliver more value, quicker.

Is the new Xobni Cloud secure?
We have very demanding customers, including many government agencies like NASA and the US Army…not to mention over 90% of the Fortune 500. We have a lot of scrutiny on our security and system integrity. We take your privacy seriously. If you’d prefer, you can go Pro and opt out of us storing any data of yours in the cloud (though that kills the working across products and backup benefit). You can learn more here.

To view more FAQs, click here.

by Michael Albers

Not a day goes by at Xobni, without hearing “When will Xobni work on Gmail, Android or iPhone?”.  This is truly the #1 request from Xobni users, and we’ve been listening.

Last week, we deployed a new service called Xobni Pro. This service includes the robust “Xobni Cloud” architecture, which enables us to develop new products faster. More importantly, it connects Xobni’s relationship management service across multiple platforms and devices.

Previously, Xobni users could only unite their Xobni Contacts and rich profiles across Outlook and BlackBerry. Now, with the Xobni Cloud, we can extend this further. The Xobni Cloud is the foundation that will enable us to support new products and platforms going forward.

Today we’re announcing that Xobni is coming to Gmail, Android and iPhone.

Xobni for Gmail BETA – The Xobni sidebar comes to Gmail! Sign up for the Gmail BETA.

• Put a face and a name to every email
• Lightning-fast contact search
• See relationship history and mutual contacts
• Enriched contact info from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Xobni for Android & iPhone ALPHA – The Xobni app on your Android and iPhone providing quick access to your Xobni contacts and information.  Sign up for the Android ALPHA or sign up for the iPhone ALPHA.

• Bring your Xobni automatic address book to your Smartphone
• Access Xobni Contacts from Gmail, Outlook, BlackBerry
• See recent emails and mutual contacts
• Lightning-fast contact search

Testers Wanted

Over the past few months, we have been in Private Alpha mode with Xobni for Gmail with some of the most amazing Alpha testers in the world! This loyal team of testers has been invaluable: diligently identifying bugs, suggesting new features, and providing lots of encouragement along the way during our ALPHA. Thanks so much to each of you for your emails and posts in the forums—your participation makes a difference!

So, if you’re one of those really early adopters, and like to get an early peek at these products, or if you’re one of the thousands that has written us asking for Xobni in Gmail, iPhone and Android—we’d love to have you on our Alpha (or Beta) tester team. Sign up on the respective pages for Gmail BETA, Android ALPHA and iPhone ALPHA products.  We’ll be letting users in on a first come, first served basis. All  feedback, thoughts and ideas are welcomed.

You might be wondering: will there be a Free and Pro version of these products? The answer is: Yes! We aren’t sharing all those details yet, but we will in time.

We hope you’re as excited as we are, and we are looking forward to developing these products with you by our side.

Thanks!

The Xobni Product Team

When we launched the free version of Xobni for BlackBerry a couple of weeks ago, we were excited to offer our free “Super Address Book” to more new users, and get more people excited about what the free and paid versions of Xobni for BlackBerry have to offer.

Well, it sure seemed to have worked, in just two weeks, we’ve seen over 100K downloads of Xobni for BlackBerry! You can read more about this in the press release below.

This illustrates the clear need for an automatic address book that goes beyond simple contact details. Download Xobni for BlackBerry free today from Xobni, AppWorld, Mobihand or Handango and give it a whirl.  We always love hearing feedback, so please send along via the “Contact Xobni” link in the menu of the app.

XOBNI ANNOUNCES FREE APP FOR BLACKBERRY

Over 100K Downloads of Xobni for BlackBerry Since Free Launch

San Francisco – February 1, 2011 – Xobni, the service that helps people search and manage their contacts and communication across email and mobile devices, announced that they recently released a free version of their award-winning application for BlackBerry, and has seen over 100K downloads of their application since the free app launch in January.

Xobni for BlackBerry helps users effortlessly manage and build their relationships with an automatic address book.  And because these Xobni Contacts are stored in the cloud, they are backed up and available across devices. Jessica Dolcourt from CNET described it best when she wrote that Xobni’s premium app “dramatically expands your mobile address book by ingeniously scanning all incoming and outgoing e-mail for contacts and phone numbers it can capture. It builds a profile for every e-mail it detects, regardless of whether you’ve typed it yourself, or if it’s already in your address book.”  In addition to automatically creating an address book with contact information, Xobni also completes the profile with photos, contact info, recent emails, calls, texts and updates from LinkedIn and Facebook.

In celebration of the holidays, Xobni began a promotion in December for their premium product (regularly priced for $9.99, on sale for $1.99) which created much excitement and increased purchases. The downloads grew even more last week after the free version was officially made available in BlackBerry App World and promoted in the carousel. The significant downloads of the product in such a short period of time illustrates the clear need for an automatic address book that goes beyond simple contact details.

CrackBerry.com, the leading blog dedicated to covering all things BlackBerry, gave Xobni for BlackBerry an Editor’s Choice award in 2010, and revealed that 6 of their 9 bloggers ranked Xobni as one of their top 3 apps.  “This application is one you don’t have to think about- it creates contact entries for you,” wrote Ryan Blundell, blogger for CrackBerry. “With contact ranking and BlackBerry integration it makes for one powerful contact management tool.”

The free and premium apps for Xobni can be downloaded in BlackBerry App World, GetJar, Handango, MobiHand, PocketGear and at Xobni.com.

Bla1ze, another CrackBerry blogger continues, “Give it a go.  You’ll see why most of the CrackBerry staff swear by it over the default address book.”

Enjoy!

Aaron has been a great sport in helping us identify some bugs in our most recent alpha product – and been very communicative about what is working for him, and what’s not working. We’ve already learned a lot from his experience and opinion, which to us, makes him a perfect alpha tester.  But there’s more!

In between coding and designing, we took the time to open a mystery package.  In it we found 5 of some of the coolest watches we’ve seen in a while – Modify Watches (Aaron’s company). The watches were a thank you for all the hard work the Xobni team is putting in to creating great products, which was a wonderful recognition of what we try to achieve!  After each snatching up our favorite color like a game of Jacks, cooler minds prevailed and we systematically handed out the faces and straps (they are interchangeable!) based on preferences (notice gender norms weren’t considered).

So now, we feel supercharged with our new time pieces.  Thanks, Modify Watches – we’re stoked to have such great users to help us improve on current products and shape future ones.

If you’re interested in getting on our testers list (for alpha and beta testing), feel free to email xobnialpha@xobni.com.  No gifts required.  ;)

In addition to this promo, we’re also releasing a FREE version of Xobni for BlackBerry available for download today by any user that would like to give us a try before upgrading to the full version (Xobni for BlackBerry Pro). Upgrading to Pro can be done in the app and all the features will automatically activate after upgrading.

But the bigger gift (in our opinion) is our next major upgrade – version 2.0.11 – which includes the following features:

New Functionality:

• Universal Search – Universal Search integration for OS 6.x devices, Xobni results will show up in your native BlackBerry search! (Pro only)
• Contact Sharing – Share full contact details, emails/phone numbers via email or SMS (OS 6.x). Xobni users will see a notification dialog in Xobni.
• Export To Adress Book – Now users can export contact details from Xobni to the native BlackBerry Address Book (Pro only).
• Search by Company/Title – Leveraging the social and Outlook contact details from Xobni, search for Company or Title (Pro only).
• Free Version! - Xobni for BlackBerry can now be downloaded for free, which will include Xobni Pro upgrades with a few feature limitations (up to 3 compose screen lookups per day).

Other Application updates/improvements:

• Phone number extraction updates and improvements
• Meetings will show a 2 week past/forward timeframe for meetings
• Ability to delete contacts via the hidden contacts view under options
• Pro users will see a “Xobni Pro” icon
• Activation menu item was added to activate from home screen
• Search enhancements and improvements
• Updated contact support and report feedback section
• Selecting phone call or SMS log shows a details dialog
• Email and phone icons have been updated
• Stability and performance improvements

To upgrade to the latest version, simply go to http://bb.xobni.com from your BlackBerry.

We’d like to thank all of our BlackBerry users for a wonderful 2010 – their feedback, input and suggestions have helped us further improve our application, and we’re very grateful!  And we wish everyone a happy 2.0.11.

Enjoy!

The Xobni Mobile Team

‘Tis the season of giving, so this holiday season, we are slashing the price on our BlackBerry App to $1.99.  That is an $8 savings for those of you doing the math.

This year, we’ve received great praise for the Xobni BlackBerry App (CrackBerry, CNET, PC Magazine, BerryReview, Berryfication, BlackBerryCool) , so we wanted to make sure as many people as possible had it as we prepare to be more connected and more productive as ever in the new year.  You all have been great to us, so now we thought it was our turn to return the favor.  This is a limited time offer, so we encourage you all to get Xobni for BlackBerry at this great price while you can.

To get started:

1. Buy Xobni for BlackBerry
2. Install the app on your phone – m.xobni.com
3. Visit  m.xobni.com for a getting started tutorial

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

P.S.:  For those of you who are also Xobni for Outlook users, we also recommend you get Xobni One, so that you can connect your Xobni Contacts from Outlook and BlackBerry, and so they are all backed up and accessible from both devices (Note: this is different from your Outlook Contacts – Xobni creates a profile for EVERY SINGLE person you communicate with, and puts them in order of importance.  So, no more scrolling and no more hunting for the people you need.)

So… we did it again.  As you may recall, we did a survey about Americans’ email habits back in September, and found that 70% of people surveyed admitted to emailing after work hours – and 50% emailed while on vacation.  It was the last bit that inspired us to do the next survey.  Surely people aren’t emailing from the Thanksgiving table, eh?  Have we really taken it this far? Alas, the answer is yes – for some of us.

And not only are we checking email – 19% of us said we are “relieved” or “thankful” for the distraction of email on holidays!  Oh my, people.  What have we become?  Aunt Betty would not be pleased.  That said, 41 percent of respondents said they either annoyed, frustrated or resentful after receiving these emails.

In all honesty, living in Silicon Valley where it seems people reach for their smartphone every time our life has a pause, we aren’t all that surprised that this many people may be sneaking a peak at their email while dining with family and friends this Thursday (us? why never!), but we were surprised at how consistent this was across the US.

Now on to the results from the Xobni survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Xobni (2,179 respondents adults ages 18 and older) earlier this month:

• 79 Percent of U.S. Working Adults Say They Have Received Work-Related Emails on Holidays; 59 Percent will Check Work Email on Holidays
• 19 Percent Are “Thankful” or “Relieved” to Have the Distraction of Work Email on Holidays
• Of the people that admitted to checking work email on the holiday, 28% said they will do so multiple times throughout the day and over half (55%) check work email at least once.
• Employed middle-aged adults feel the greatest urge, with 65 percent of those aged 35-44 stating that they have checked work emails on holidays.
• 41 percent of those that received work emails from a co-worker/client while they had time off for the holidays said they were either annoyed, frustrated or resentful after receiving these emails – and younger people (ages 18-34) had the strongest negative opinion among the age groups.
• The survey also found that 12 percent of respondents actually “dread” seeing work emails populate their inbox and 10 percent even feel pity for those who do send work-related emails on holidays.
• Working Men are guiltier than working women when it comes to checking email on holidays – 67 percent and 50 percent, respectfully, admitted to checking email on holidays.
• And while the East and West coasts are traditionally considered to be the beating hearts of capitalism in the US, the survey found that the Southern region led the way with the most people sharing that they check work emails during the Holidays –63 percent (compared to 57 percent for the West and  59for the Northeast).
• One in ten people who admitted to checking email while off for a holiday stated that they did so while spending time with friends or relatives at Holiday parties/gatherings or during meals.

Full press release with results can be found here.

This Thanksgiving, we’re thankful for all of our customers (especially those of you who pay!) – and for each other.  We are fortunate to work on real problems with smart co-workers for great customers.

Earlier this week, our CEO, Jeff, wrote a blog post on Xobni’s thoughts around the Facebook Messaging announcement.  As players in the social inbox for nearly 2.5 years, we believe we have a unique perspective on this news and are excited by the possibilities it brings.

Jeff was asked by our friends at GigaOm to dive a little deeper into the announcement with respect to the multiple “identities” we have on and offline – and what impact that has on this announcement.  That blog post can be found by clicking the link below, or on GigaOm here.

Is Email the New Front in the Facebook/Google War?

Earlier this week, Facebook released its Social Inbox and set off a flurry of press about the perseverance of email and the epic battle between Google and Facebook. But this isn’t only about email, nor is the fight really between Google and Facebook (and others in the social web), because the relationships users have with each is vastly different (and fairly complimentary).

The rise of the social web (which in the interests of space I’ll simply call the Facebook Camp, but includes socially minded upstarts like LinkedIn, Twitter or Zynga) has encouraged most of us to pour all sorts of interesting data into the Internet, including our music preferences, our relationships, our likes and dislikes, our locations, etc. Facebook has done the best job of collecting this data from us. Of course, both Google and Facebook have amazing core assets when it comes to data about us. Google has leveraged amazing infrastructure assets to build productivity enhancing-applications I can no longer live without, such as Gmail, Search, Sites, Android, Maps, etc.

Monday’s announcement from Facebook that it’s entering the messaging space seemed one of the first head-on moves against my so-called Google Camp (which includes other large tech companies consumers rely on every day such as Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft). It quickly reignited deeply held opinions from my peers, many of whom worry about Facebook and all it knows about us. Not me. Some are convinced that, with their new messaging platform, Facebook has everything it needs to finalize world domination. Not me. But it appears the world wants a fight, and both camps seem ready to go.

Is there really a fight here? Of course, both camps want badly to control my identity. But there’s the problem. I don’t have “an” identity. I have many identities, and I like it that way.

Facebook Knows My Friends

With few exceptions, what Facebook knows about me results from my willingness to publicly participate in its primarily personal forum. Google and I have a much more private relationship. I don’t publish my searches on Twitter. I don’t expose my private email correspondence on my wall. And while I’m not sharing my location with Facebook, Google still knows where I am via its Android, calendar, search or maps applications.

When Facebook releases their social-enabled messaging platform, I will certainly use it for some communications, but I’m not ready to cross the line with Facebook. I’ve come to know it as a public-facing forum. I’ve come to expect my behavior on Facebook will be overheard by others I know (or don’t know as is often the case). When I’m engaging with Facebook, I have my “personal public” identity on. Because I know my behavior can being seen by hundreds if not thousands, I work to stay in character.

Facebook is my fun, chatty friend, and when I want to get the word out about something, I readily tell them. I often joke that Facebook has made me far more productive at being unproductive.

Google Knows the Real Me

Facebook certainly doesn’t know everything about me, nor does it have my entire network of relationships or, graph. Far from it. My graph includes thousands of other relationships that are important to me in both my personal and professional life. In fact, I would suspect that Gmail, Android, iOS, and Outlook know far more about my full graph.

Because I’ve used Outlook for over a decade and Gmail for more than five years for email, I’m aware that Google knows far more about me (without even considering what it knows about me from my search habits) than any other company in the world. What Google has learned, it has mostly learned via private (implicit behavior) transactions: things I do without the sense of being watched.

Of course, there are many other identities I maintain that Google doesn’t know as well. Google knows me much less as “son”, “husband” or “father”. Thankfully, many of these revealing interactions with my family happen off-network…that is to say, in person. Nor does Google know too much about my identity as CEO of Xobni, unless I’ve published it via the press or blogs. If anyone would know about this identity, it would be Microsoft or RIM, neither of which seem to be doing much listening at this point. (I go further into this implicit/explicit information on Xobni’s blog.)

So how does the new Facebook messaging platform change all this? Obviously, the easiest answer is “we’ll see”. But Facebook faces a massive challenge. For one, I actively choose to keep many of my identities obscured or hidden from Facebook, and that won’t likely change in the short term. Perhaps more importantly, it’s possible that if I did share this part of my identity with Facebook, it could spoil our “productive” social relationship.

This is simply because my professional and personal identities are often in conflict, and the persona I project on Facebook is a carefully curated combination of the two. (Slight self-promotion alert) This is where a service like Xobni comes into play… the data that Xobni gleans from both my explicit self-promotion and implicit interactions is intensely useful to me, but certainly not something I broadcast for public consumption.

Similarly, Google hasn’t done a very good job of inspiring me to share too much with it about my public social identity. Yet, there’s so much room to improve the relationship we already have. Google is very well-positioned to improve its ability to listen to my many thousands of tiny, implicit signals I’m sending via my computer, phone and tablet every day. Google can still help me make massive advances in productivity and effectiveness.

Google is an able and intense competitor. In the end, Facebook’s biggest threat may be evoking in Google a distracting desire to win toe-to-toe. We’ll see.

Jeff Bonforte is the CEO of Xobni, and has worked in email, voice and messaging for more than 10 years. Prior to joining Xobni in 2008, Bonforte ran Social Search and Messenger at Yahoo. He was also President of Gizmo5 (acquired by Google), and founded and lead early online storage pioneer, i-drive.com. You can find him on Twitter using @bonforte.

For all you Xobni for BlackBerry fans – please cast your vote!  We’re proud to be listed as a finalist for the Pocket-lint Gadget Awards for 2010.  The competition in our category (Best App) is fierce, so we need your support!

Vote today (the higher the score, the better the rating. Hint: vote 5!).  Note that you need to cast a vote or mark “no vote” for each line for your vote to go through.

Thanks for all your support!

P.S. A little shameless promotion for Xobni for BB while you are pondering your vote… We recently received Editor’s Choice for CrackBerry App Awards, became 6.0 compatible, and got some great news/coverage from our blogger friends - Berryfication, TheBerryFix, PocketBerry - and of course one of our favorite blog posts about being a favorite among CrackBerry bloggers (6 out of 9 said it was a top 3 app for them).

A few of the big internet players have made big advances in email/messaging. Way back when, Aol let us know we, in fact, had mail. Yahoo! and Hotmail made it global and free. Microsoft made it work for business with Exchange and Outlook. BlackBerry made it portable. And Gmail took off the storage limits, which, lucky for them, increased the need for better search.

Facebook announced this morning they intend to make two more contributions. They will make messaging social and, undeterred by Google Wave, more realtime.

I will defer to others to address the importance of making messaging more realtime. To me, the biggest announcement is making messaging social, or socially aware as we say here at Xobni.

Making messaging social involves two big steps. First is identity. Messages come from people, not email accounts, yet with the exception of Xobni running in Outlook, no inbox seems to knows the correct answer to “who?”. The next key element of a social inbox is understanding relationships.

Let’s take a minute to understand the depth of the challenge.

The address book can’t help in understanding who is really most important to you. For most active business users of email (our sweet spot), their address book has about 400 contacts (albeit only 40% of that data is correct). But guess how many “people” are actually in the inbox? 4000. And that is average. You can easily interact with over 10,000 people from the age of 20 to 30. So even in the best circumstances, today, the address book doesn’t have even a starting point reference for over 90% of the people in our inbox. [By the way, I am not suggesting we cram 10,000 contacts into our current address books. Address books are even more broken than the inbox...but that is for another post and another product announcement ]

When it comes to handling all these thousands of relationships, our brains aren’t much help either. Humans have the capacity to maintain about 150 meaningful relationship (known as the “Dunbar number”) before our brains get muddy.

But people are the one thing Facebook (and Linkedin) understand very well. These social networks can keep track of the identities of tens of millions of people. And by doing this, they won’t just make us happier in our inboxes, they make us more productive. Before I talk about the big blind spot that will challenge Facebook here, let’s examine how understanding people makes the inbox much better:

Massively improved email search.

The first and most popular product we make at Xobni is our improved email search. There aren’t many things in the world a startup can claim to do better than Google, and almost no one can claim to do anything in search better. But when it comes to searching the inbox, Xobni (and Facebook) can do much better than Google.

Why? Perspective. The old inboxes try their best to make sense of our email using adjustments to keyword algorithm search technology. But searching personal data, particularly our inboxes with keyword-based search is mostly ineffective.

Even though we have trained our brains to take a simple query like “that link Terra sent me last week” and to translate it into a unique keyword search with varied levels of success, understanding people and relationships makes this query trivial, as Xobni users can attest.

You simply need to be able to answer the question “who?” and hopefully a bit of “why?”. With this knowledge, getting to the “what?” (the link Terra sent me last week) is pretty simple.

Without Xobni’s help, I don’t believe any inbox today can figure out the difference between Eric Grafstrom (my co-worker at Xobni), Eric Vandenberg (the center on my 8th grade basketball team), and Eric Van Miltenberg (a colleague from my Yahoo! days). Of course the problem is more complex. I don’t just know three “erics”. According to Xobni, I know over 60!

We know that understanding people improves productivity, captured by this simple stat: after a Xobni user tries their first “search by people” instead of keyword, that user is over 85% likely to become a long term active Xobni user.

The big challenge for Facebook: Explicit vs. Implicit data.

Even armed with the identities of over 500M users, Facebook has a big challenge in using social data to make messaging better. In fact, their blind spot might make the problem worse in some regards. The reason is the size and breadth of the index matters. Facebook’s perspective is too narrow. First, it is focused, primarily on our personal relationships, and more importantly, it is heavy in explicit (public) data and light on the more important implicit (private) data.

Explicit data is that which we tell others about ourselves. It is our marketing message to the world. Explicit data is the stuff I publish on social networks and on Twitter. It is what I want the world to think about me, and hear about me, and know about me. But explicit data hides our true relationships. It also can heavily skew relationship relevance, as it relates to improving our productivity.

Here are a few examples: Facebook tells me that the number one “Damion” I know is the lead guitarist of a big Journey cover band. Kind of right. Except, Damion, to me, is my painting contractor, not a guitarist playing next week. This is similar to how Linkedin incorrectly (for me) identifies Nancy as the Director of the Turf Club in Del Mar. She is that…but of course to me, she is my Mom. And Facebook doesn’t, actually, know her at all.

If Facebook remains a single perspective in my life, primarily focused on personal, explicit data, it will miss big opportunities to improve productivity, customize apps and simplify product interfaces.

Making messaging social is a great advancement. And Facebook has a big role to play in making it happen. But there remain significant challenges to Facebook, and their strengths, like for others, can quickly become their weakness. I could go on and on, but will end with this last statement/plea: The more open their platform the more likely we will look back in ten years and thank them for their great contribution to messaging.

Since the launch of the BlackBerry Torch and OS 6.x for BlackBerry, the most common request from our users, partners and friends at RIM was support of Xobni for BlackBerry on OS 6.  And today we’re happy to give it to you.  Xobni now officially supports OS 6.x and fully integrates with the Torch for an Optimal Xobni experience. The introduction of the touchscreen enhances the way the users can invoke, scroll and view their automatically generated Xobni Contacts.

In addition, we’ve included significant enhancements, improvements and fixes for the updated Xobni for BlackBerry app, thanks to user feedback and testing.

We will be making this available at: bb.xobni.com, App World, Mobihand, Handango, Getjar and PocketGear (Note: some stores may take a day or so to reflect the update).

Version 1.0.88.9 offers the following features/functionality:

OS 6.x Support!

• Touching the Xobni bar or flick up works on compose, reply and forward actions for OS 6 devices
• Updated High-Definition icons
• Touch scrolling enhanced for optimized scrolling experience
• Editing is now aware of virtual keyboard display and formats content shown on remaining screen
• Xobni bar now appearing in all relevant cases
• Add picture now available for contacts via camera

Interface updates

• Setup guide overhaul (New permission, sign in/create acct, trial start, loading contacts, etc. screens)
• Phone icon is now shown by default for all phones
• Icons for mail/phone have new dropdown to show additional emails and numbers
• Preserved focus on contact in search result when returning to home screen
• Push the device call button to call or sms when contact is selected
• Xobni appears on home screen after download, not download folder (5.x/6.x)
• Contact detail UI update (coloring changes; click calendar entry to jump to entry)
• Added keyboard shortcuts to options (edit, hide, merge, jump to top & bottom support)
• No longer will show Microsoft Exchange addresses for contacts
• Multiple bars should no longer show up in certain cases

Contact Extraction Improvements

• Phone number extraction fixes and improvements
• Fixes for scanning emails, sms, etc.
• Xobni One contact update and merging improvements

Contact Edit improvements

• Editing a content will now allow you to see snippets even after edit
• Contacts marked as list, now show up in the compose screen as well

Key stability and performance improvements

Improvements for activation & trial related issues

All user preferences are maintained during upgrades

Other bug-fixes and improvements

We’ve been proud to get rave reviews in the media and with our blogger friends, but we couldn’t do it without you.  Please continue to improve Xobni Mobile by sending feedback directly from the app by clicking the “Contact Xobni” menu item.  As evidenced in the notes above, we listen!

Enjoy!

The Xobni Mobile Team

As a BizSpark One partner, we get a lot of love from our friends at Microsoft. As mentioned in a previous post, our “partnership” (used loosely) with Microsoft goes way back. It started when we created a product that makes Outlook infinitely better, then spiked when Bill Gates demoed Xobni in 2008 at Microsoft Office’s Developer’s Conference. Late last year, we were selected to join the Microsoft BizSpark One program, an invitation-only program designed to accelerate the growth of high potential startups through a One-on-One relationship with Microsoft. We continue to get great support from our friends in Redmond (and the local BizSpark folks), and enjoyed participating in the BizSpark One Summit this week in Silicon Valley.

BizSpark has started a series of videos that profiles some of the companies in their program, and Jeff Bonforte (our CEO) was one of the first to be featured talking about Xobni.

Thanks to BizSpark for all your support!

By Michael Albers

(English post below)

J’ai le plaisir de vous annoncer la sortie de la version Xobni pour Outlook en Francais ! L’encadré Outlook qui vous permet de consulter votre boite de réception et d’y trouver rapidement et facilement les informations nécessaires relatives à vos contacts, est désormais disponible en Français.

Environ 50% des utilisateurs Xobni se trouvent hors des État-Unis. Suite à un succès de lancement sur le marché Allemand en début d’année, nous sommes maintenant heureux de présenter la version Française à notre base d’utilisateurs particulier et d’entreprises qui ne font qu’augmenter.

Ceci élargit aussi nos efforts pour étendre Xobni de manière globale et assurer une augmentation croissante des utilisateurs Internationaux et Europeens.

Cette version vient équipée de merveilleux gadgets désormais disponibles sur notre version 1.9.5 annoncée récemment (comme Flickr et YouTube).

Vous pouvez visiter notre site  http://xobni.com/fr/ ou bien allez sur xobni.com et téléchargez la dernière version, et voila ! Une fois celle-ci téléchargée, vous y êtes:

• Un processus d’installation en Français (si vous possédez le système d’exploitation en Français), et l’option de choisir l’interface Française, Anglaise, ou Allemande.
• 90% de Xobni, comprenant une vidéo d’introduction en Français et tous les formes générales d’interface, a été traduit en Français.
• Les gadgets localisés pour l’aide, YouTube et Flickr en Français.
• Basculez à tout moment entre le Français et l’Anglais grâce au menu de Xobni Options.
• Toutes les fonctionnalités et les gadgets 1.9.5 récemment annoncées.
• Cette version de Xobni pour Outlook 1.9.5 comprend aussi quelques correctifs de problèmes mineurs depuis la dernière version 1.9.5 dans les parties d’AutoSuggest ainsi que l’affichage gadget.

Nous ne fournissons pas pour le moment le support utilisateur complet en Français, mais nous ne manquerons pas de poursuivre nos efforts pour accompagner chacun de nos utilisateurs.

Veuillez essayer notre version en Français et nous espérons que vous en tirerez l’expérience Française de la version Xobni 1.9.5 et les Gadgets sous Outlook. Les enterprises interessées à l’amélioration de la productivité au travail peuvent contacter notre groupe de vente Entreprises au +1 (877) 899-6264 ou remplir le formulaire suivant.

Toujours en version Anglaise, nos utilisateurs Français pourront essayer Xobni for Blackberry et Xobni One pour avoir une expérience totale de Xobni et accéder ainsi à leurs contacts où qu’ils se trouvent.

Profitez-en !

I’m pleased to announce the release of Xobni for Outlook en français (In French). The Outlook sidebar that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy is now available in French !

About 50% of Xobni users come from outside of the US. After a successful German launch earlier this year, we are now happy to bring a French version to our growing French user base and enterprises.

This also furthers our effort to expand Xobni globally and support a growing International and European user base.

This version will come armed with all the wonderful gadgets available in our recently announced 1.9.5 release (such as Flickr and YouTube).

Please visit xobni.com/fr/ or go to xobni.com to download the latest version, and voila! Once you download, you’ll get:

• A fully localized French installation process (if on a French OS), and option to choose the French, English or German interface.
• 90% of Xobni, including the intro video and all major aspects of the interface, has been translated into French.
• Localized gadgets for Yelp, YouTube and Flickr in French.
• Switch between French and English at any time via the Xobni Options menu.
• All the 1.9.5 features and gadgets recently announced
• This build of Xobni for Outlook 1.9.5 also includes some minor bug fixes since the last 1.9.5 build in the areas of AutoSuggest and gadget display.

We do not yet provide full customer support in French, but we will continue to improve upon this and always make an effort to help any of our users.

Please give Xobni a try en français and we hope you’ll enjoy the French experience, 1.9.5 Xobni version (build 12633) and Gadgets in Outlook. French enterprises interested in increasing productivity in the workplace should contact our Enterprise Sales team at +1 (877) 899-6264 or fill out our Enterprise request form.

Although still in English, our French users should try out Xobni for Blackberry and Xobni One to complete the entire Xobni experience and have access to their contacts wherever they go.

Enjoy!

If you’ve ever tried to track tasks, document revisions, or ever-changing project status updates via email, you probably know that email has its limits.  Yet, the reality is, many of us must spend hours each day in front of Outlook to get our jobs done.

That’s why I am very pleased to announce the availability of Huddle in Xobni for Outlook.

What is Huddle?

Huddle is the cloud-based collaboration platform that lets you connect and work securely with your contacts. Use Huddle to manage people, projects, files and information inside and outside of your business.

Why Huddle and Xobni?

By bringing Xobni and Huddle together, you extend the power of your inbox with quick access to document versioning, no file size limits, discussion forums, and whiteboards.  Instantly search for a contact in Xobni, and see all their recent activities, uploaded files and discussions within shared Huddle workspaces.  Get one-click access to all your shared workspaces with each co-worker, keeping you keep up-to-date on every project.  So even if your data and activity live in the cloud, you can keep tabs on it right inside of Xobni for Outlook.

How does it work?

The Huddle gadget in Xobni for Outlook provides you a dashboard of all activity within the workspaces you share with each co-worker.

• Invite contacts to Huddle through Xobni for quick and easy collaboration
• Get instant updates on your contacts’ activity
• See who’s in your workspaces and quickly create new ones
• Instantly access shared whiteboards, files, discussions, comments and projects with direct links from Xobni

How do I try it out?

1. Download Xobni for Outlook 1.9.5 (released today, Oct 12, 2010)
2. Click the blue and white “h” tab in the sidebar
3. Create a Huddle account (or just sign in to an existing account)
4. Click the account activation email and sign in
5. Find others that you would like to invite to share files or information in a shared workspace, and click “Invite to Workspace”
6. When you or they post updates, you will see their activity in Xobni
7. When you see an update that interests you, mouse over to get more information, and click for a direct link to that item on Huddle in the browser

For more information about Huddle, please see http://www.huddle.com/xobni

This award was given to the 5 App developers that the Crack Team feels are absolute must-haves for every BlackBerry owner.  We are thrilled with this recognition.  This has been a big week for Xobni on the Mobile front with inclusion in the keynote at BlackBerry Devcon and in the BlackBerry App World carousel (where we are on sale for $4.99) – and this is the icing on the cake.

Thank you CrackBerry and congrats to the other winners of the Editor’s Choice Award - SmrtGuard, Sccope, App World 2.0 and CrackBerry Wallpaper Changer – Xobni is thrilled to share this honor with you.

And what perfect timing – Xobni is featured in the App World Carousel (featured apps) this week!  In celebration of BlackBerry DevCon and our debut in the Carousel, we’re offering a promotion on Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry for $4.99 (regular price $9.99).  This is for a limited time, so snatch it up now!  We’ve made it really easy for BlackBerry users to get it by scanning the barcode below.  Simply go into App World, turn on scanner and scan your computer screen.  And voila!  You now have the world’s best address book.

Last but not least, we released more tickets for the DEVCON party we are throwing at our offices this week in partnership with CrackBerry and BlackBerry Partners Fund.  CrackBerry is going to be giving out their 2010 App Awards, so tickets are going fast.  We’ll have light food and great drinks – not to mention a fantastic DJ and good company.  Please be sure to RSVP because we can’t let people in who aren’t on the list.

Months ago we decided to host a party at DevCon in support of RIM and the developer community.  Our friends at BlackBerry Partners Fund agreed to be a sponsor, so this enabled us to rent buses and move up a notch on the quality of beverages provided.  ;)  This seemed like a perfect venue for the CrackBerry App Awards, so we are pleased to be hosting them this year.

If you’d like to attend, please be sure to RSVP here – you’ll need a ticket/name on the list to get in.

We’ve been pleased to be a CrackBerry Blogger favorite app for a while now, and getting nominated for this award is incredibly rewarding – but we want to win, so please help by voting today!

Two weeks ago, we proudly announced that Xobni for BlackBerry was available in App World.

We’d like to thank all of our existing and new App World users for their continued feedback, support and input. We really do listen and work very hard to put your feedback into account and resolve any issues encountered.

As such we are happy to announce a major BlackBerry update (1.0.81.11/12*), available from App World for our App World users. And downloadable via your BlackBerry browser from bb.xobni.com. Additionally we now offer a Xobni for Blackberry free trial when downloading from our website.

Also, if you enjoy and use our app, please don’t forget to support Xobni by leaving a positive review in App World. As always, for any issues, feedback or bugs, use the “Contact Xobni” link from the Xobni app menu so we can respond to you.

New Features:

• A user can now use the convenience keys for launching the Xobni compose screen (in options)
• A user can choose to add a Xobni signature to outgoing emails
• Updated LinkedIn Login process
• New menu item labeled “Activate” allows a user to activate manually after purchasing a license

Summary of Improvements/Fixes:

• Compose integration for Xobni should only occur for native messaging app (fixing bars showing in other apps)
• Xobni bar now shows up for draft messages
• Compose integration is enabled when sharing media files by email
• Fixed several compose screen defects that occurred when device was holstered or locked
• Further improvements in search speed
• Speed improvement in scanning emails, SMS, call logs
• Improvements during contact updates to Xobni One
• Improved failure handling during Xobni One updates (app closure, manual stop, failure, etc.)
• A user can take a picture for a contact image from the image selection screen
• LinkedIn login for devices at or below 5.0.0.405 will retry it’s connections upon failure
• New, updated and recurring Calendar events are now scanned and show in the Meetings section
• Ranking improvements when scanning messages
• SMS messages are shown for all phone number types
• Speed improvement while viewing contact
• General UI update in contact detail section
• Stability problem resolved on certain 5.x OS versions

Thanks again for supporting Xobni and for your feedback and input – and reviews!

The Xobni Mobile Team

*Note: 1.0.81.11 is the Xobni.com  build; 1.0.81.12 is the App World build (these are identical feature wise).

UPDATE: Do be sure to check out some of the BlackBerry community, Fans and supporter blog response for this update at: BerryFication,  BlackBerryCool, BerryReview, Rimarkable and BlackBerryRocks.

It’s no surprise to us in the fast-moving valley of tech companies that our personal time and work time are blurring.  We conducted a study in the US and UK that confirms email is not-so-slowly taking over our lives.  A survey of over 3,000 people points to a shift of from relaxation on vacation or the weekend to – you guessed it – more time working on email.

Here are the key takeaways from the survey:

• The 9-5 work day is history! (Kudos to Computer Business Review for the headline of the day: Dolly Parton and the Death of 9-5)  There is no such thing anymore as the 9-5 work day in either the U.S. or the U.K. with the majority of workers regularly checking email on vacations, sick days, at home in bed, etc.
  • 72% of Americans and 68% of Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (vacations, weekends, non-work days)
  • 42% of Americans checking email outside of work hours shared that they do so when they take sick days compared to only 26% of Brits
• Relax on Vacation? Seems like Americans need to take a tip from the Brits:  50% of Americans check email on vacation/during days off compared to 29% of Brits
• Even the bedroom isn’t sacred anymore - 1 in 5 Americans who check email outside of business hours doing so in bed!  They are either checking in bed first thing in the morning or the last thing they do at night before falling asleep.
  • Interesting gender note:  Men are more likely to be checking email in bed compared to women – 21% compared to 16%

So, why do we do this to ourselves?  I mean, clearly we know we are doing it, but what keeps us addicted to email?   The results:  We’re more overwhelmed and under pressure that ever before.  Many people (43 percent) said they checked email outside of business hours in order to ease their workload and not feel so overwhelmed while in the office.  Another quarter of the people surveyed said they check email outside of work hours because they simply feel it’s expected of them.

These pressures brought on by our work and also ourselves, makes it difficult to fully unwind while on vacation or over the weekend.  We’ve been talking to people about their email for years, and often hear that the stress and overwhelming feeling people get on their first day back from vacation takes away all the relaxing/rejuvenation they experienced while out.  So in the survey, we asked people… are you overwhelmed upon returning from time away?  Over one-quarter of the people (26%) said they can’t handle/feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they received while out on vacation.  Further, nearly one in five people stated they find it difficult to be productive when they return to work because they have to spend too much time reading through old emails – many of which very well may not be relevant anymore.

At Xobni, we’re focused on helping people easily find the important information and people in their inbox – whether returning from vacation, or simply to manage the daily inflow of emails into your inbox.  Key Xobni features like threaded conversations can help people who have been out of the office quickly catch up on immediate issues without having to dig through message after message to get the full story.  To learn more about how Xobni can help you stay sane in Outlook, see some of our product demos/videos here.

Note: Survey conducted in partnership with Harris Interactive (in the US) and Opinion Matters (in the UK).  Full press release here.

Coverage of the survey so far has appeared in TechCrunch, Mashable, LifeHacker, CNET, and more.

Today, we are pleased to announce that Xobni Mobile is now available in BlackBerry App World! You can find our application for download directly from the BlackBerry App World application. Having Xobni in App World 2.0, our users now get the benefit of really easy carrier billing in addition to Credit Card or Paypal.

When we launched our first mobile product in March of this year, we set out to make it the best address book you’ll ever use (PC or Mobile). Too often we were finding ourselves in the situation where we needed to call or email someone quickly, but didn’t have their contact information available to us on our mobile phones.  So, with Xobni Mobile, we aimed for effortless address book management, contacts ranked by importance, lightning fast search and automatically created profiles with information from LinkedIn or Facebook.

The response so far has been fantastic.  Users have told us they love it – and the press seems to as well.  See what the folks at CNET, Berryfication, and PC Magazine have to say about Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry.  And of course, we loved the fact that the folks at CrackBerry have and love Xobni on their phones every day.

Having all your Xobni Contacts from Outlook with you via Xobni One, wherever you go, at any time, is essential to many of our users. That, combined with fast search, complete profiles and contact information directly accessible from your BlackBerry compose screen, we believe makes this a great app for any mobile user.

You can visit our page in AppWorld, and if you love it once you’ve used it, we’d love for you to post a review!  To learn more about Xobni for BlackBerry, go to: http://www.xobni.com/mobile.

Thanks for using Xobni, and thanks to our existing Xobni users, alpha-testers and our supportive blogging community to ensure we deliver a great application to BlackBerry users!

The Xobni Mobile Team

If you’re going to be at the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, we’d love for you to swing by our offices the evening of September 29 for the 2010 CrackBerry Awards.

Our friends at BlackBerry Partners Fund have partnered with us to host these awards (more info on awards here).  In addition to the ceremony, we’ll provide some great spins, drinks and merriment for all.  Space is limited, so you might want to sign up soon.  We’ll have a standby list, which we’ll definitely be diving into, so don’t give up hope if it’s full.

To register, go here.

Not only did we get 4 out of 5 “stars” review from PC Magazine, but Dan Costa (one of the kings of reviewers in our world, @dancosta) calls Xobni is “a must-have Outlook plug-in.” Certainly we think we are a must-have, but it’s nice to hear others think so, too!

Because we love this feedback so much, we’ve created a “testimonials” page with user and media/blogger quotes, as well as recent tweets about Xobni.  So, if you’re a happy Xobni user and want to spread the good word to your colleagues/friends, this might be a good page to share with them (that is if your recommendation isn’t quite enough to get them to download).  ;)

Xobni understands that first and foremost, your email experience must be fast, reliable, and stable.  Since the release of Xobni for Outlook 1.9.3, we have been focusing on improving Xobni’s core components and working with customers to make many of the highest priority bug fixes.

Xobni for Outlook 1.9.4 (build 11981) is now available and includes a number of improvements in stability and performance, as well as bug fixes, including:

Performance

• Many Xobni users would go off to lunch and then come back and feel that Outlook/Xobni was slow.  Xobni was running a number of background indexes and now pauses them as soon as you return so there is no slowdown when you’re working.
• The “precompute all profiles” stage of indexing will take less time.

General

• Your custom Outlook signatures are now shown when generating “Schedule Time With,” fun facts, and invitation emails.
• A number of crashes were diagnosed and fixed (thanks to those who are in the Product Improvement Program)

Phone Numbers

• Improved the automatic phone number extraction to recognize more international numbers

Conversations and Attachments

• Conversations are now grouped more reliably instead of occasionally being split into multiple conversations.
• Attachment indexing is now more thorough; some instances of missed attachments were fixed.

AutoSuggest

• Many improvements to the display & reliability of the Xobni AutoSuggest window
• Restart of Outlook 2010 is no longer required to disable Xobni AutoSuggest

Search

• Names with foreign characters can now be searched for in mixed case

Thanks to everyone on our community forums, our alpha users, and those who filed support cases with “Inspector X” files to help us track down issues and make the email experience more productive for everyone.  Now download Xobni and get back to work

Note: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. All of your data (Xobni profile merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.
If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks for using Xobni!

Download the Latest Xobni Now

Some would say it’s not a good idea to have media/bloggers on your beta list, but thanks to a pretty solid beta product and the fab BlackBerry blogging community, it ended up working out pretty well for us.  (Note:  We didn’t realize bloggers were on our beta list until the coverage came out.  Thanks to BerryReview, BlackBerryCool, CrackBerry, PocketBerry and RIMarkable for taking part and sharing Xobni love with your readers).

We started working on the latest release of Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry with one goal in mind – to make a product that people love even better. And thanks to all of our valued beta testers, we think we’ve done just that.  Primary focus was on performance and adding the top requested features by users.  Improved version includes

• Search speed improvements
• Performance improvements for BlackBerry local data integration (Thanks Frederic!)
• Performance improvements for scrolling in the search results
• Better integration with Blackberry Address book
• Trials and gift code activation
• Phone number source and email snippet from Xobni One/Outlook
• Xobni one status dialog and purchase flow
• LinkedIn Sign-in integration for additional data access (in Options)
• Icon fix for Storm (Thanks @Gordietm and @rezn)
• Contact update improvements
• Better image integration with LinkedIn and Facebook (Thanks, Saleh!)
• Fixes for recent message, phone and SMS data scanning

New users who want to give it a spin can go to http://bb.xobni.com for a free 14-day trial.  Existing users interested in upgrading, can either go to that link, or press “download” link on the About Xobni page in the app.

Thanks to the team, our beta testers who rock, and all of you who support Xobni!

See Yew, Xobni Mobile Engineer

It started as a discussion with Jim Winters, an accomplished artist in the Bay Area.  We told him a few things:

1) We were looking for a Seuss-ian feel to bring the sense of wonderment to our office (growing up in the 60′s/70′s/80′s leaves us all with a soft spot for Dr. Seuss).

2) We wanted to have a little fun with some popular Internet clichés and sensations over the years – i.e. “series of tubes” (Thank you former Senator Ted Stevens, formerly head of committee to regulate the Internet).

3) We also wanted to integrate the industrial office elements (exposed pipes, pilars, etc.) into the mural itself.

To put the finishing touch on the mural, we created a video to play on the flat panel… This turned our creative piece of art into a moving, working productivity machine.  See the connection to Xobni?

And that’s not all!  We had more walls to play with and thought it could be creative to theme all of our conference rooms with popular, but cliched form of email spam.  We carried over the Dr. Seuss theme, with each room focusing on the three top internet scams that have plagued the “intertubes.”  These pieces are appropriately titled “Cheap Meds,” “Mail Order Brides,” and “Money Laundering.”  The beauty of these pieces is that we’re creating videos to go on each monitor that also brings these pieces to life and ultimately the scam is captured by the email machine.

CrackBerry did a great post today about their bloggers’ favorite BlackBerry apps.  It was cool to get an inside look at what these BlackBerry die-hards carry around with them, but even cooler to learn that XOBNI was a top app for 6 out of the 9 surveyed.  Woot!  We love building good products that people use every day, and it gives us the warm and fuzzies when we get recognition like this from our users.

Aside from Xobni, they have some great selections in here that we wanted to share with you.  Below is a breakdown of the “chosen ones” from CrackBerry bloggers.  Thanks, CrackBerry!

by Brian Kobashikawa

Xobni has “gone retro” and is now officially in the boxed software business. As such, our product and marketing teams were thrust into the world of package design: a world inhabited by point-of-service displays, office store lighting, bleeds, crops, process colors, and really really large graphics. Our group sits comfortably in the land of desktop software and web applications, so we reoriented ourselves and began to think about Xobni from a new perspective. We grounded ourselves in our core design principles and got out the pens and paper.

1. Define (and redefine) your target audience. Visitors to the Xobni website probably learned about Xobni  from a friend or a co-worker, an article they read or they may have searched “outlook plugin” into their friendly web search engine. By the time these customers get to us, they already have a bit of backstory – not to mention, validation. However, the prospective customer in one of the big box stores may be  in an entirely different mindset. They may have decided to purchase Microsoft Outlook 2010, and start browsing for other software that may be relevant. Or, maybe they’re just making the store rounds after buying their fancy Twilight DVD. Either way, we had to assume that the audience knew nothing about Xobni. So, the first priority was to explicitly call out the connection between Xobni and Outlook, and cultivate our message from there.

2. Distill the message down to the core. On a website, we could (at least in theory) wax rhapsodic about Xobni’s features across multiple pages, product videos, and case studies. With a box, we had limited physical real estate: specifically, four 5×7” rectangles. This led to an extensive exercise with our marketing group to reduce, pare down, and focus the copy on the bare minimum. It also led us to question how we should present ourselves: should we visually communicate our product with symbols and concepts, or through concrete product shots? For the box cover, we opted for the former approach, as it helped us communicate the core message more effectively.

3. Rethink progressive disclosure in the physical world. With those four 5×7” rectangles, we needed to establish a simple visual hierarchy. Presumably, customers will see the front cover first. If they picked up the box, they might turn it around. And if they were really interested, they may open the box flap to see more inside.

So, we decided to have the front cover focus more on the “why and how” – why this product exists, and how it works for you (“Take control of your inbox” is front and center). The inner flap, in the meantime, focused on the “what” – what does the product look like, and what does it do for you. As such, the inner flap reveals screenshots of the product (mostly placed on the far right side, ensuring that they’ll be seen by the customer with minimal “unfolding” on their part.)

4. Help the customer with the product research. In a giant office supplies store, with a Xobni box in hand, the customer has little immediate access to review websites (such as Lifehacker or CNET) to help offer recommendations or guidance for their purchase. They can’t easily talk to their friends or co-workers who might have used Xobni before. The customer is largely alone.

So, as a newer company with an esoteric product name, we wanted to quickly establish credibility. We bubbled up  reviews and ratings we had received (from such publications as The Wall Street Journal and CNET) on the front and back covers. And as Fortune Magazine points out, we’re very likely “the first to have testimonial “tweets” printed on the outside (of the box) from customers.

5. You can only publish once. Make sure to review, review, review. The great thing about downloadable software is that it’s highly iterative, and relatively easy to correct little mistakes. With a physical box and CD-ROM disc, we had to be much more diligent in checking every detail. The extra time required for all these details was essential: to review trademarks and typos, quotes, system requirements, legal, and all the other minutiae.

Getting a proof from the printer not only helps check for accurate colors, bleeds, and typography, but also follows up on all the points above. Even before that, we printed out and folded some “paper prototypes” of earlier mockups  to solicit feedback from senior management – as well as randoms on the street. Holding the physical (albeit fake) product in ones hand can help reveal more insights and spur more conversations.

All in all, “the box project” resurfaced some really important, yet fundamental, design principles for us here at Xobni – and gave our designers a new fun way to think about our world – even if just for a little while. It was fun while it lasted, but we’re happy to be back to our iterative, fast-paced work online!

This week, Xobni entered new territory – The retail store.  Yes, Xobni, an online software company (with over 5 million downloads in 2 years) has actually gone to the effort to design a box, put our software on discs, and navigate the retail distribution channels to offer Xobni Plus for Outlook in retail stores across the country such as Fry’s and Office Max – as well as on Amazon.com.  It seems rather retro, but we discovered big opportunity…

The idea of putting Xobni in a box was initially met with resistance and doubt, but after a little digging, we saw big opportunity for sales and brand awareness.  From our research, we learned a few things – People of all ages, genders and demographics are shopping in stores.  Many of us do it.  And some people like to feel, hold, and see before they purchase.

We conducted a Harris survey (June, 2010; 2174 responses) which showed that 80% of respondents who plan to purchase software in the next 12 months said they were at least somewhat likely to buy software from brick-and-mortar retail stores (40% said they were extremely likely or very likely).  Being in-store also builds brand awareness and validation.  Something about being on a shelf makes it automatically more trustworthy to some.  According to our survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they are more likely to buy software if they’ve seen it in stores.  So while we are confident that being in retail stores will be a rewarding distribution channel for us, we also think it will have an impact on our online software sales.

In addition to the fact that some people are still buying some software in stores and the brand building benefits, it also didn’t hurt that millions will be flocking to stores starting this month to purchase Microsoft Office 2010.  As you probably know if you are reading this blog, Xobni is a great add-in for Outlook, and makes sense for us to have a presence right next to it in stores for consumers to easily purchase.

It’s been an interesting road… a fast-moving, agile online software company stepping into the notoriously slow offline world.  And a note to our environmentally conscious friends: We’re one of you.   All the packaging materials are made from sustainably grown forests.

We’ll be posting another blog post later this week about the adjustment our awesome in-house designers had to make when learning the ins and outs of designing a box that sits on shelves!

Filed under: Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/xobni-%e2%80%93-coming-to-a-store-near-you/feed/ 3 xobniblog box2 box2 - love again http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/xobni-featured-on-googles-developer-blog/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/xobni-featured-on-googles-developer-blog/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:27:17 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1899 ]]> by Terra

Today, Google posted a guest blog post from Jeff (Xobni CEO) on their Apps Developer Blog for our work porting Gmail contextual gadget development into Outlook. Jeff covers off on the trials and tribulations of working in Outlook, and how we’ve harnessed our Outlook ninja to help Gmail gadget developers get their gadgets into the world’s biggest email platform – with no additional work.

In Jeff’s words from the post:

“…The first step was to get Google on board.  We weren’t sure what to expect from them when we explained our plan. The first response we got from the Google team was puzzlement. Why and how would we do this? In a short amount of time, Google’s mood progressed from quiet to excited (phew).  So we set up the war room in the office, cleared our calendars and weekends for the foreseeable future and started cranking away.”

“The result: Developers can now write one application for Gmail contextual gadgets and will soon deploy not just to the millions of Gmail users, but also to the millions of Outlook users: the same code available in both worlds. Thanks to Google’s simple but powerful platform (and the hard work of Xobni’s engineers), you just write your gadgets for Gmail and they are ready to be used in Outlook as well.”

Want to give your gadget a spin in Outlook? You can get the build here (note: the product is in “Developer Preview now”). We expect to put our first gadgets live in Outlook in the coming weeks.

• Name: Sue Rothberg

• Position & Company: Principal, Sue Rothberg Productions, a Boston-based video production company specializing in a documentary-style storytelling approach for clients.

• Xobni user since: the Beta days (over a year ago)

• Product she uses: Xobni for Outlook

• Favorite feature: “the way Xobni indexes all my emails with sub categories such as attachments, network of other people, etc. What used to be a very time consuming task of searching for an email is now a breeze.”

• Product request: Xobni for the soon-to-be-released Outlook for Mac

Taking care of email to get to the real work

As she runs her own video production company, email is not the core component of Sue’s business (that status might be better granted to, say, producing video), but the time she spends in Outlook is still vital for client relations and putting the pieces in place for her work to get done.  We originally set out to help people spend less time searching their inboxes, so hearing accolades such as the following gets us PSYCHED.  Sue said of Xobni for Outlook: “I would say it is one of the best applications ever invented…and I am not kidding.  I have been an Outlook user for the better part of 10 years, and Xobni has made the application easier to use, more robust, and most importantly, it has made me more efficient.”  Awesome.

File deleted?  Not a problem if it lives on in your inbox

Sue’s Xobni to the Rescue story: “Once I had deleted an image, but when I searched, Xobni found the attachment within an email. There have been many other times where it saved me by finding something that was deleted or by getting to an email address very quickly so I could locate a file that had been exchanged…this application is a must for anyone who is an Outlook power user.”

Many thanks to Sue for sharing her Xobni experience.  Have a Xobni story you’d like to share?  Want to be featured in One User Per Week?  Let us know in the comments!

Four years ago, Xobni was still an idea, and I was 21 years old. The company and I have come a long way since the early days in my dorm room at MIT. Now Xobni has been downloaded over five million times, the company has raised over $30M, and at 25, I can finally rent a car without additional fees!

Founders’ roles change almost daily in a fast growing startup. For me, I was able to move off the engineering critical path when we convinced Frank Cort to join Xobni and lead our engineering team. Based on his great work, we promoted Frank to VP of Engineering last year.

In the last four years, the engineering team has accomplished remarkable things. Initially we were told that what we wanted to do in Outlook couldn’t be done. Later we were told that what we had in mind for the BlackBerry wasn’t technically feasible. And even people inside the company were dubious when we announced the time frame to port Google’s brand new contextual Gmail gadget platform to Outlook. It quickly became part of the culture to build things where others had failed; we thrive on hitting high notes nobody thought possible.

And it is in this spirit, I am excited to pass the flag to Peter Monaco.

In our quest to find the best and brightest CTO, Peter stuck out as the sure winner. Let me just highlight a few the things that impressed us. Peter earned his undergrad degree in CS from Dartmouth College, and his Masters in Computer Language Processing from Cambridge. After time at the world-famous Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Peter co-founded Nuance (NUAN) in 1994, and helped take it public in 2000. It is still the leader in voice recognition today. He was later vice president of application engineering at recognized technical leader Tellme, which was acquired by Microsoft for a reputed $800M in 2007.

The reference checks we made on Peter were remarkable. Everyone we spoke with about Peter raved about him. We heard over and over again, “one of the best in the business.” In fact, we felt challenged to find someone to say something bad about him, so we poked around for the grumpiest engineers from his former teams. But, alas, all we got was “about the only manager in my career I would work for again.” Just amazing.

I am pumped to have Peter join Frank to lead technology and engineering at Xobni, and I look forward to collaborating with them on our plans for world domination. And while I will remain actively involved in helping Xobni, I have decided this is a good time for me to give up my day-to-day role at Xobni and pass the reigns to Peter and Frank. I am keeping my seat on the board of directors and I will be actively involved as an advisor wherever the team needs me.

I’m more confident and more excited than ever about Xobni’s future. We’re in great financial shape, have solid revenue, strong leadership, and, most importantly, have a kick-butt engineering team to build the best products in email search and relationship management. For me, I need a little rest and will start dabbling around on some new ideas.

Thanks to all of our loyal customers and the amazing Xobni team for your support.

All the best,
Adam

(English post below)

Heute möchte ich Ihnen mit großer Freude die Freischaltung von Xobni auf deutsch bekanntgeben. Xobni, die Randleiste mit der Sie schnell und einfach Ihren Posteingang durchsuchen und Kontaktdaten auffinden können, steht nun auf deutsch zur Verfügung!

Rund 50% der Xobni Nutzer leben außerhalb der USA, ein großer Teil davon in Deutschland. Daher haben wir uns entschlossen, als ersten Schritt zu einer internationalen Expansion, unsere Präsenz im deutschsprachigen Raum durch eine deutsche Version zu untermauern. Unsere Produkte stehen damit ab sofort auf den deutschsprachigen Märkten (Deutschland, Österreich und Schweiz) zur Verfügung.

Natürlich wären wir nicht in der Lage, ein überzeugendes Produkt ohne die enge Integration von XING zu liefern, dem auf den deutschsprachigen Märkten beliebtesten Business-Netzwerk.

Ab heute stehen den Xobni Nutzern folgende Dienste zur Verfügung:

• Unter www.xobni.de (Deutsche website) steht die neueste Version von Xobni für Outlook 1.9.3 zum downloaden bereit.
• Eine komplett deutsche Installation (auf einem deutschen Betriebssystem), ist ab sofort möglich.
• 90% von Xobni, einschließlich des Intro-Videos und alle wichtigen Aspekte der Benutzeroberfläche ist ins Deutsche übersetzt
• XING wurde integriert und ist die Standard-Erweiterung in deutscher Sprache, zeigt Profil-Informationen an, Details und das Foto in der Randleiste von Xobni. Derzeitige Nutzer der Englischen Version von Xobni können Xing in den Optionen> Integration> Anpassen-Menü integrieren.
• Wechseln Sie zwischen deutscher und englischer Sprache jederzeit mit unserer Xobni “Optionen” Menü

Der Randleiste sind noch nicht vollständig übersetzt, und Einige Passagen auf unsere Website. Wir arbeiten jedoch daran und werden unseren Nutzern in absehbarer Zeit auch einen deutschsprachigen Support zur Verfügung stellen.

Wir wünschen allen unseren Nutzern viel Spaß beim Ausprobieren von der neuen deutschsprachigen Xobni, und integrierung von XING in Outlook!

Wir haben bereits sehr positive Reaktionen auf unsere Xobni für Blackberry (noch in englischer Sprache) und Xobni One, mit deren Hilfe unsere Nutzer den Xobni-Service auch unterwegs nutzen können.

Für Unternehmen Anfragen, können Kunden auch die Möglichkeit unseren deutschen Wiederverkäufer zu nutzen.

Viel Spaß!

English post:

Today I am pleased to announce the release of Xobni for Outlook auf Deutsch. The Outlook sidebar that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy is now available in German!

Roughly 50% of Xobni customers reside outside of the US. In the past, they had access to the one and only English Xobni for Outlook. No more. Our premier effort to expand Xobni globally and support a growing International user base begins today with the German-speaking markets (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).

Of course, we have also super-charged Xobni for Outlook with XING photos and business profiles. XING is the most popular business network for German speakers, and has lately been the #1 requested Xobni extension.

So please visit xobni.de (German page) or xobni.com to download Xobni for Outlook 1.9.3 (build 11166), which includes these new features (since Xobni 1.9.2):

• A fully German installation process (if on a German OS), and option to choose the German or English interface
• 90% of Xobni, including the intro video and all major aspects of the interface, has been translated into German.
• XING will appear by default for the German version of Xobni, showing job titles, photos, detailed profile information, as well as an “Add” button for people not yet in your XING network. Those using the English version of Xobni will need to “enable” Xing in the Options > Integration > Customize menu.
• Switch between German and English at any time via the Xobni Options menu.
• Other Outlook 2010-related bug fixes (ribbon menus appearing more consistently and improved AutoSuggest stability)

We do not yet provide customer support in German, but we will continue to improve upon this and deliver our German users the best experience possible.

Please join me in trying out Xobni auf Deutsch and we hope you’ll enjoy the new experience and tight integration of XING in Outlook.

Of course, our German users will also appreciate being able to use Xobni for Blackberry (although still in English) and Xobni One to complete their entire Xobni experience and have access to their contacts wherever they go.

For any Enterprise inquiries customers will also be able to leverage our German Resellers.

Enjoy!

Update May 21st: Build 11108 was replaced with build 11166 to fix a LinkedIn image issue.

Today, Google announced a brand new developer platform for Gmail called Gmail contextual gadgets. This powerful platform essentially allows developers to build web gadgets that display alongside email messages. If you are a Gmail user, you may have seen these gadgets in the form of YouTube videos, Yelp listings, Flickr previews, or Picasa previews directly below a message that contained links to those services. We can’t wait to build a full-featured Xobni gadget for Gmail, but we’ll save that for later; I’m here to talk about something very big that Xobni is giving developers today…

Bringing Gmail contextual gadgets to Microsoft Outlook

We know better than most the challenges of developing in Outlook. Since our early days, partners and customers have approached us with ideas and hopes for developing in Xobni (hence, Outlook), but didn’t have the resources to build and support a standard Outlook add-in. To address this, a Xobni extension platform has been on the drawing board for a long time. But when we saw the simplicity and power of Google’s new contextual gadget platform, we knew we had to bring it to Outlook immediately. Gmail’s new contextual gadgets platform provides a great alternative for developers looking to reach Outlook’s 600 million users, particularly for developers with more web development skills than desktop software experience.

Today we are releasing a Xobni for Outlook Developer Preview that will allow any developer to test their Gmail contextual gadget in Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Initially, only developers will have access to use and test Xobni’s new platform. Once deployed to users, these new gadgets will appear in Outlook via a horizontal bar at the bottom of messages, which easily expands or contracts, as needed. This is in concert with the current Xobni sidebar in Outlook, that offers lightning-fast search for information and contacts in email. Over the next few weeks, we will work closely with developers to finalize the details for distribution, monetization and placement of these gadgets.

So what’s the next step?

If you’re a developer, check out the docs on Google Code, then hop on over to http://www.xobni.com/developer, and dig right in.

On Monday morning we released an update (view release notes) for Xobni for BlackBerry. This is an exciting release for us because we got to spend some quality alone time with Xobni Rank. For those of you don’t know, Xobni Rank is our way of prioritizing your contacts. The simple explanation is that we prioritize them based on your communication habits but trust me, there is much more involved. This area truly excites us here at Xobni so keep an eye out as we continue to refine Xobni Rank.

We added/improved the product in 4 key ways to address feedback from our customers as well as our Enterprise partners. In summary, in this release, we:

• Improved Xobni Rank helping you get to the most important contacts fastest.
• Added seamless deployment and activation via BlackBerry Enterprise Server for our Enterprise customers
• Added support for downloading the client via Opera Mini and Bolt
• Lastly, we gave you more control over your contacts. You can now create new contacts, edit titles, companies, and the rest of your contacts profile information.

Thank you to all of our users for their fantastic feedback and endless desire to help us make the product better. Don’t forget to submit feedback and report bugs via “Contact Xobni” in the menu of the Xobni app.

Download the 1.0.63.1 release now by going to ‘bb.xobni.com/download’ on your BlackBerry browser.

• Name: Sarah Craddock

• Position: Residence Hall Director

• Company: University of Northern Colorado

• Xobni user since: 2007

• Product she uses: Xobni for Outlook

• Favorite feature: Files Exchanged

• Email philosophy: “Inbox zero, whenever I can”

Between carrying out closing procedures for the academic year and gearing up for the summer schedule of conferences and other events, Sarah had tackled one of the busiest weeks of the year at her job as a university Residence Hall Director just before I caught up with her.  The amount of activity Sarah is responsible for managing naturally leads to a flurry of time-sensitive email–and a great opportunity for Xobni for Outlook to have a big impact on her efficiency.

“What’s that thing on the side of your screen?”: Sarah has first-hand experience of the “over-the-shoulder” factor of Xobni’s sidebar in Outlook.  Coworkers walking by are accustomed to the standard colors and UI of Outlook, but when Xobni’s presence grabs their attention, they often stop and ask Sarah questions about the plugin.

Rising in Xobni Rank: Once she had shared Xobni with her coworkers*, their discovery of Fun Facts, including Xobni Rank, brought out the competitive spirit in some of them.  Developing strategies to get to the top of someone’s contact list has become a running joke in her office.  The winning tactic?  Of course, working closely with someone tends to lead to them becoming a highly ranked contact for you, but there was a quick and dirty method of making use of company listservs alluded to as well…

It was interesting to hear how Xobni works for Sarah in her position within Higher Education (especially since it was quite different from the experience of my first OUPW interviewee in Higher Ed).  If you’re interested in sharing how you use Xobni as part of the One User Per Week blog series, let me know in the comments, and I’ll be in touch.

______________________________________

*Oftentimes, Sarah uses our in-product invite system to share Xobni with others.  We love it so much when people do this that we give away one Xobni Plus license a week for a user who sends invites through the product.  Try it out: just click the heart button at the bottom of the Xobni sidebar, and Xobni will suggest Outlook users to invite from your contacts.

Last week we participated in making a video titled “Choose The Cloud.” For us this video is about how the software world is changing for enterprise customers. We teamed up with other startups who share the vision of building products that meet the needs of the end customer. It is a vision of quickly iterating on the needs of customers. It is a vision of enterprise customers taking the software they use at home to work. It is a vision of enterprise customers choosing what software works best for them. And it is a vision that all these changes happen in minutes, not months.

In the last year Xobni launched Xobni Plus – our first premium offering, Xobni Enterprise – a customizable and controllable version of Xobni for the enterprise, SalesForce.com & Sharepoint extensions, a BlackBerry app, our own cloud service Xobni One – a service that connects Xobni profiles across the web, and more. We want to continue to create products and services for our customers at this same pace, and through the same process of intense interaction and focus on the end consumer.

So join us, Box.net, Get Satisfaction, PBworks, SlideRocket, Socialtext, SugarCRM & Zuora in sharing this vision. Share this with your contacts by tweeting here.

• Name: Joe Troyen-Schwartz

• Position: Business Analyst

• Company: Opera Solutions, a technology-powered consulting firm

• Heard about Xobni through: Matt Mak, an Analytics specialist at Opera

• Product he uses: Xobni for Outlook

• Favorite feature: Attachments Exchanged

• Product request: Xobni for Gmail

I’m excited to feature Joe in OUPW this week, not only because he’s an enthusiastic Xobni devotee, but also because he exemplifies a user type that has yet to make an appearance on our blog: the recent (well, within 2 years) college grad.  Although frustration with enterprise software is widespread, using stodgy business software can be especially painful for those of us who have gone through school accustomed to using all the cool tech tools we choose.  The functionality Xobni brings to Outlook makes the office software behave in a way much more like what Joe and other Millenials have come to expect from the technology we use.  It certainly seems to resonate with Joe–here’s what he had to say about Xobni:

Detangling the inbox jungle: “Xobni organizes the jungle that is my mailbox into meaningful views.  Groups all conversations by contact, and then allows me to slice and dice from there- by conversation, attachments, links, or just superpowerful search.”

Attachments in a flash: “I don’t even save files on my hard drive anymore.  Seriously, it feels like cheating.”

Email invincibility: “Today my Outlook wasn’t working so I had to spend the day without Xobni.  I felt mortal.”

It’s always awesome to hear Xobni having such a dramatic impact on an Outlook user.  It’s particularly reaffirming that workers at Opera are adopting Xobni, as the consulting firm is known for leveraging the best tech tools for both internal and client use.

If you want to participate in OUPW and get your name in lights on the Xobni blog (and a free t-shirt!), let me know in the comments.

For my One User Per Week chat this week, I spoke with Ralph “Stew” Goss, a loyal Xobni user since learning about our Outlook product back when Bill Gates demoed it during his keynote at the MS Office Developers Conference:

Since February, Stew has been wearing many hats as an Application Specialist, Programmer, and IT wizard at the Portland, ME office of Redlon & Johnson, one of the nation’s leading wholesale distributors of industrial products.  Ever the evangelist, Stew told me one of his early moves there was to introduce his new Outlook-using coworkers to Xobni.  A highly technical data buff himself, Stew likes to share his appreciation for the power of Xobni’s approach to email search.  When he installs the software on new users’ machines, two of his favorite features to show off are Xobni’s attachment-finding speed and how you can zero in on a particular email by person, rather than typing in a keyword and choosing amongst every instance of that word in your email corpus.

Around the world with Xobni Analytics

At a previous organization, Stew worked in international customer service, frequently providing support on projects centered as far away as Korea and China.  With this extreme time zone difference came various logistical challenges, including an email schedule that caused his Outlook inbox to fill up during sleeping hours.  Rather than being daunted by this asynchronous flow of correspondence, Stew realized he had just the tool to manage it intelligently: Xobni Analytics!  When he read an email from a particular contact, he would take note of his or her sending patterns to get a sense of what time the contact was most likely to open his response.  Instead of constantly adding and subtracting hours to account for time zones, Stew said he could use the graphs* in Xobni Analytics to gauge the response time required and manage his work flow: if it was likely the middle of the night at his contact’s home base, “I knew I could wait until the end of the day to respond.”  This way, Stew could figure out which contacts would be apt to see his response first, and prioritize his emails accordingly.

Please sir, may I have some more Actions?

Stew was overall very satisfied by his experience with Xobni, but when pressed for constructive criticism, he did come forth with the suggestion that we could perhaps take better advantage of the “Actions” tab in the Xobni extensions panel.  Currently the actions available to users there are “Schedule time with…” (which auto-generates an email to set up a meeting with your contact with your availability as represented in your Outlook calendar) and “Email…” (which…well, opens a compose window so you can email that contact), and there is some unused space underneath the options shown there.  It’s interesting to think of ways we could capitalize on that spare real estate–keep an eye on that tab to see how that area develops, and if there are more actions you’d like to see available in the Xobni sidebar, do let us know.

In addition to his day job as a Xobni evangel–err, Application Specialist, Stew also runs GuruTech, a business that specializes in creating scripted products and doing custom work in Second Life.  Thanks Stew, for the great conversation.

If you’re interested in being featured in our One User Per Week blog series just comment on this post, and I’ll get in touch with you.  Phone calls are about 30 minutes long, generally pain-free, and have even been described by participants with words such as “enlightening,” “interesting,” “useful,” …and some even go so far as to say “fun.”

_________________________________________

*Even if you don’t actively use Xobni Analytics in the sidebar tab or popout window, it’s working for you every time you perform a search.  Your contacts’ Xobni Ranks dictate the order in which they appear in search results in the Xobni sidebar and in which they are AutoSuggested to you in the compose window (if you’re using Xobni Plus).

This week is a big one for us, as we launch the Xobni for Outlook 2010 campaign to go with the product launch/review posted last week.  For all of you in the Seattle/Redmond area, you will see the sky graced, the buses flanked, the radio waves singing and the sign spinners shaking with nothing but Xobni love.  Now Xobni and Outlook 2010 are together again.  At last.

Why did we launch this product with such fanfare?  The answer is easy.  Microsoft employees are some of Xobni’s best customers as they live and die in Outlook email.  We wanted to ensure they knew they could reunite with Xobni, now that it’s compatible with the Outlook 2010 software.

For all you folks in the Northwest, we have created a little fun… Take photos of the Xobni’s you see in the public; the plane, the bus, the sign spinners and post them to the Facebook Xobni Fan page – We will be randomly giving away t-shirts to some of the people who submit a photo.

There are also some great new features for Outlook 2003 and 2007, so take a look at this post for all the detail!

And don’t forget to download the latest version today!

We’ve been cranking on the some terrific updates to the BlackBerry product, and we’re excited to share them with you.

In the first release we focused on the Xobni Automatic address book – finding all the email addresses and phone numbers that exist in your inbox and in your BlackBerry address book. Not to worry, we didn’t forget that sometimes systems need human intervention. Thus our latest feature; the ability to edit and merge contacts.

We’re going to keep cranking and you can expect more rapid fire releases in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

Remember the massive effort undertaken to make sure that the world’s technology was ready for Y2K? The BBC reported that the work done in preparation for Y2K cost over $300 billion. Most of that work was considered a success if it remained completely invisible.

At Xobni, we’ve had our own little Y2K in recent weeks (minus the $300 billion price tag) and we call it “Y2K+10.” When Microsoft announced that Outlook 2010 would be available to consumers in June, we were excited to integrate with the updated platform. Since then, a select group of us have been heads-down (others were slightly pre-occupied). Integrating with the new 64-bit flavor of Outlook accounted for a hefty portion of the effort, though users of all versions of Outlook + Xobni will now benefit from that groundwork.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Xobni now fully supports Outlook 2010 – a full six weeks prior to the expected consumer launch of the brand-new version of Outlook. In addition, Xobni 1.9.2 is also fully compatible with the free Outlook 2010 beta that is currently available to the public.

While most of our focus has been on making Xobni work seamlessly with Outlook 2010 (in fact this has been the #1 feature request recently), we have also incorporated Xobni into the new Outlook ribbon for 2010-only functionality. In addition, there are a few features, detailed below, that will be attractive to Xobni users with Outlook 2003 and 2007 as well.

So please download Xobni 1.9.2 (build 10908) and enjoy the “invisible” features today.

Update: CNET’s Download.com has given Xobni five out of five stars! See the full review.
Update 2: Build 10605 has been replaced with build 10908 to fix an “Xobni not loading” issue that some were experiencing.

(All features mentioned below are new since version 1.9.1 build 10169):

Outlook 2010 Compatibility

• All features available in previous versions are now working and optimized for Outlook 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit) public beta version and later.
• New Quick-Access in the Ribbon (see illustration)
  - Search from Ribbon when Xobni sidebar is collapsed
  - Show/Hide Xobni sidebar with one click
  - Xobni menu always available
• If multiple Outlook windows are open, clicking “Show/Hide Xobni” will move the Xobni sidebar to your current Outlook window.

Non-Administrator Install

• Many users who are not “administrators” on their computers can now install Xobni.

Other Enhancements

• Fewer conflicts experienced with other add-ins (Trend Micro Anti-Spam, for example)
• Xobni AutoSuggestions can be deleted from the compose screen. Simply highlight the suggested email address you’d like to delete and hit the “delete” key. If you email that address again in the future, the suggestion will return after the next Xobni index process takes place.
• Twitter profile images now show in business card area if a Twitter name is already chosen (see illustration).

More Minor Changes

• Users of Xobni One who have more than one copy of Outlook will now see profile photos transfer from one Xobni sidebar to the other.
• Photos of people appear in the Network tab instead of small grey or orange icons.
• The Network section has been moved below the Files Exchanged section.
• Task bar is now to the left of the Xobni bar in Outlook 2010
• Xobni shows the recipient of the currently-selected email if the email is from you, no matter what folder it’s in. This is helpful for users that keep their sent mail outside of the default Sent Items folder.

Known Issues

• In Outlook 2010, the minimized Xobni is slightly wider than in Outlook 2007
• When the Xobni installer completes and runs Outlook for the first time, the message “Windows Desktop Search is not available” may appear at the bottom of Outlook. Restarting Outlook solves this permanently (details).

Please continue to let us know how we can keep improving your productivity through the Xobni Community, and thank you to everyone who participated in the topics that helped inform today’s update.

General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.
If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks for using Xobni!

Download the Latest Xobni Now

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Koni Konigsberg, Director of Operations at ROW Adventures, for this week’s One User Per Week interview.  After years of trip leading for the adventure travel company, Koni moved to the full-time position he currently holds, in which he coordinates the day-to-day operations of the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho*-based outfit.  Being Director if Operations involves a much-increased volume of admin work–including, inevitably, a ton of emailing.

Organizing email contacts, in and out of the water

Koni manages a group of full-time employees and seasonal trip leaders that tops out between 40 and 50 people.  Since a large number of the guides is on the road and in the water for rafting trips during the summer, he relies on email to coordinate this staff and ROW’s clients, to the point which he reports, like many of our users: “I live in Outlook.”  In the past, his method of organizing his email was to keep an individual Outlook folder for each employee and distributor he contacted, which required a lot of continuous maintenance on his part.  Xobni has totally changed his email habits since he discovered it a couple of years ago when Lifehacker gave away invites to our limited beta.  He now keeps only three folders: “Distributors,” “Guides,” and “Employees.”   Many Xobni users have reported doing away with Outlook folders altogether.

Keeping track of transients

While having a highly active group of guides clearly has its advantages for leading trips, it can be difficult to keep in touch with members of his staff in the off season, when they are often off on non-ROW-related adventures.  Yearly activities like sending birthday cards (and equally thrilling W-2 forms) used to be tricky when a guide changed email addresses and his manually-entered snail mail address from the Outlook address book was lost.  However, Koni has found that Xobni makes wintertime contact with his guides much easier, since by merging individual profiles as their contact info changes, he can keep an uninterrupted record of all of the communication he has had with them.  He’s also come to appreciate the Facebook friendships he was initially hesitant to accept from his guides, since he can see the cool stuff they’ve been up to in off season while he’s finding their contact info in Outlook.

Feature request: integration of companies’ social media profiles

Koni had a few interesting feature requests, including one in particular that struck a chord with me, since it applies to growing a company’s following across social media.  While he enjoys seeing the Twitter and Facebook streams of his individual Xobni contacts, he finds he’s often also interested in the social media action of his contact’s company, rather than just personal info.  Koni suggested that Xobni offer an option to set a contact’s profile to show her company’s Twitter and/or Facebook fan page stream, and perhaps the ability to toggle between the individual and company profiles.  I’d love to see this kind of functionality be added to the product.

It was great talking to Koni about his experience with Xobni.  If you’re interested in hearing more about ROW Adventures, check out their Facebook fan page.  And, as always, if you’re interested in being interviewed for One User Per Week (and gaining eternal Internet glory, as well as a free Xobni t-shirt), comment on this post and let me know.

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*If you’re looking for a beautiful, slightly-off-the-beaten-path spot to visit in the U.S., you could do a lot worse than Coeur d’Alene.  “Barbara Walters called the city ‘a little slice of Heaven’ and included it in her list of most fascinating places to visit.”

Now that the public has had access to Xobni for BlackBerry for a few weeks, I thought it would be an opportune moment to feature a user of the new mobile app in our One User Per Week blog series.  I asked Tyler, who heads up our alpha forum, to put out an interview request to those who had been testers, and I was surprised that I recognized the name of the first respondent: Nan Palmero, the winner of last year’s holiday letter-writing contest.  Eager to learn more about Nan and hear a seasoned Xobni for Outlook user’s thoughts on Xobni for BlackBerry, I gave him a call this morning.

Many email accounts, many contacts

Nan’s day job is “Chief Inspiration Officer” at Sales By 5, a position in which, as the name suggests, he performs many typical duties of a CIO, including evaluating new technology for the company (not coincidentally, everyone there uses Xobni for Outlook), as well as internal and external team building, crafting marketing messages for clients, and a variety of other roles.  As though playing the part of inspiring all of the employees within his organization as well as clients doesn’t keep him (and his BlackBerry) busy enough, Nan also works as a contributing writer for BlackBerry Cool, a leading blog within the BB community.  With unique email accounts from these two positions, as well as a personal Gmail account, all feeding into his BlackBerry, staying on top of saving contact information in the phone is a real pain point for him.  While the BlackBerry itself only keeps email from the last 60 days, Nan observed that Xobni’s ability to bring in contact info from all historical email allows users to “do a deep dive and find the contact that was otherwise lost.”

Dodge awkward phone calls with Xobni for BlackBerry!

I asked Nan if there had been any instances during his use of Xobni for BlackBerry when it really came through for him in a notable way, and he did indeed have a story to share.  Recently he needed to arrange a lunch with an acquaintance with whom he knew he had exchanged emails in the past and whose contact info he could have sworn he had saved.  When he went to email her, her address was not autopopulating, and Nan feared that he would have to call her up and do the ol’ “I know we’ve emailed each other before, but I can’t…seem…to find…your address…” call.  Instead, Nan remembered that Xobni could pull up her email address instantly, even though he hadn’t saved it, and bam!–lunch scheduled, via email, and the world saw one fewer awkward phone call.

It was especially cool to hear Nan’s perspective on the BlackBerry app development process, as he is a BlackBerry power user as well as an alpha tester of Xobni for BB.  We really appreciate the support we get from him and all enthusiastic Xobni users–in fact, we count on it in order for our products to succeed.  If you’re interested in participating in a One User Per Week interview, leave a comment on this post, and I’ll be in touch.

Well, today, I am pleased to announce: hiatus ended.  The One User Per Week blog series is being revived—and version 2.0 will include such enhanced features as a consistent schedule, posts addressing new Xobni products in addition to our Outlook sidebar, and a new author (err, that’s a feature alteration, rather than an enhancement ).  I’m excited to take over the reins and get an in-depth understanding of how individuals make use of Xobni.  And so, without further adieu, let’s jump right into One User Per Week: The New Class.

Mason Carpenter, Professor at Univ. of Wisconsin School of Business

My phone call last week with Mason Carpenter, Professor of Management and Human Resources at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, was a great jump-restart to One User Per Week.  We’ve never featured someone who works in higher education before, so I was eager to hear about how Xobni is getting put to use in a university setting, and Mason is an engaged Xobni evangelist, so it was great to hear about how he’s been spreading the word about Xobni, as well as how he sees it fitting in as a tool in the online social networking landscape.

The hunt for the “Ultimate Aggregator”

Mason is very interested in social networking and in particular, tools that incorporate social media into business.  He has a bold dream that one day he’ll encounter the “Ultimate Aggregator”, in which all of the information he is looking for about an individual is just there.  That dream is something that our company and Mason have in common, so it was pretty wonderful to hear him say that currently Xobni “is the closest thing I have to one-stop shopping.”  We’re working hard on becoming the Ultimate Address Book, so that “the closest thing I have to” will be omitted in future utterances of that statement.

Attachment magic: “It’s just there.”

The volume of email Mason manages working at an educational institution (over 100 non-junk email messages daily) qualifies him for the dually elite and painful categorization we refer to as Email Power User.  So while he initially was attracted to our Outlook sidebar, which he heard about through a friend at McKinsey & Co., for its social media integration, he has found Xobni’s search capabilities invaluable for hunting through his historical email.  He noted that he has become especially dependent on Xobni’s ability to find attachments: Mason, like most Outlook users, used to take for granted that finding an old attachment exchanged with a contact would be a pain.  With Xobni, he reported, “it’s just there.”  Again, that’s exactly our goal—you shouldn’t have to think about the right syntax to construct your search to get the information you need, it should just be there.

For recruiters, Xobni profile = instant snapshot of a candidate’s web presence

When I spoke with him, Mason was looking forward to a talk he’s giving in April to 100+ HR professionals who work in MBA recruiting.  He was excited about the prospect of sharing Xobni with this group, since, in addition to the major productivity boost Xobni provides its users in general, its social network integration makes Xobni specifically valuable for recruiters, in that it can instantly get them a snapshot of a candidate’s web presence.  By now, most of us know that recruiters often evaluate candidates’ online footprints to weed through the tremendous volume of applicants they encounter daily, and Mason confirmed for me that a basic Google search** is one of the top tools for this group of professionals.

One trouble with getting info about a candidate this way is that sorting through the search results to find ones that pertain to the specific person you’re looking for (particularly in the case of more common names) can wind up being a pretty time-consuming task.  Spending 5 minutes to enter a candidate’s name into a search engine (and maybe Facebook, LinkedIn, & Twitter) manually and then comb through to find relevant results might not seem like that much time, but apply that process to 20, 50, 100 candidates and suddenly you’re talking about serious time.   It was exhilarating to explore this use case with Mason because he had some really good insight into how using Xobni could improve this process for recruiters.  We’ve gained a lot of traction in the HR community already, and I’m excited to hear about how Mason’s presentation of Xobni will be received in his talk next month.

It was a pleasure to chat with Mason, and I’m looking forward to talking to more users for future OUPW posts.  If you’re interested in having your Xobni experience featured on the blog, please let me know by commenting on this post (be sure to leave your email…which will not be visible to anyone but our blog admins), and I’ll get in touch with you.

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*In our defense, we’ve had a lot to be distracted by during that time, including the release of Xobni Plus, Xobni Enterprise, and most recently, Xobni for BlackBerry and Xobni One.  But enough excuses—I’m willing to bet that we’ll be able to release some hot new products and maintain this blog series at the same time going forward.

**As a side note, if you haven’t noticed before, we have a Google search bar integrated into our Outlook client, should you want more info from the web than what’s already presented in the Xobni profile you’re viewing,:

Here at Xobni we are always inspired to read articles about the collision between email, social networking and productivity as this is the heart of what we do.  With so many new channels to communicate and broadcast our latest updates, moods and whereabouts, one has to wonder if email will become the telegraph of today.

It is always refreshing to see articles like Opinion: E-mail is dead. Long live e-mail! by Preston Gralla that reinforce what we have always believed here at Xobni – Relationships and contacts are of critical importance to all of our lives, and much of that information is found in email.  Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter help complete the picture – but email is and continues to be at the center.

If you find yourself in Las Vegas this week for CTIA (or other extra-curriculars), please stop by and see us.  Our friends at RIM have given us a home at the conference by asking us to demo our newly launched app for the BlackBerry in their booth.

RIM’s booth is 3506.  You can find us there selling our wares – with sore feet and smiles.  :)

So… we knew what we were doing was cool stuff, but we were thrilled that you do too!  The attention received around the world for the launch of our first mobile product last week was awesome.  From coverage in business outlets (Wall Street Journal, New York Times) to product reviews on top tech sites (CNET and CIO Magazine) and lots of love from mobile and BlackBerry blogs (CrackBerry, BlackBerry Cool, BerryReview), we feel we got a good start on getting the word out about our BlackBerry product and the Xobni One service, and are thrilled with the business received as a result!

Please allow us a tad bit of chest-beating…

• “If you use a PC, Microsoft Outlook and a BlackBerry, Xobni offers a smart solution for automatically organizing all of your contacts into one place and allows for your contacts to be stored somewhere other than just in Outlook or just on your mobile device.” – Wall Street Journal, Katie Boehret
• “If you’re one of the many BlackBerry-toting hot shots who fret about the fastest, least laborious way to get their work contacts onto their phones, I have an answer for you. Or rather, Xobni does…” – Jessica Dolcourt, CNET
• “In my opinion Xobni is one of the few “absolutely must have” apps for BlackBerry.” – CrackBerry.com, Adam Zeis
• “It’s a pretty exciting app. It works well and it saved me on several occasions when trying to reach people.” – Katie Boehret, Wall Street Journal (video)
• “You may never use your BlackBerry contacts application, or address book, in the same way again. I know I won’t. As long as the new Xobni for BlackBerry application is available, that is.” – CIO Magazine/IDG Sites – Al Sacco
• “Instead of a traditional alphabetical list (the alphabet is so uncool these days), Xobni for BlackBerry scours through your emails, text messages, phone calls, and other communication to create a new contact list in order of importance.” – FastCompany, Dan Nosowitz
• “With advancements like this from companies like Xobni, it’s comforting to know that the technology to merge address books and create rich profiles for my contacts is finally coming of age.” – ZDNet, Sam Diaz
• “Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. And when you leave your job, your contacts stay with you.” – TechCrunch, Eric Shoenfeld
• “If you’ve ever found yourself scrabbling back through your BlackBerry inbox for the address of someone you know for a fact you emailed once in 2008, then the newly-launched Xobni for BlackBerry may be just what you need.” –  Recombu, Kate Solomon (UK)
• “The new software will give BlackBerry users the ability to better manage and maintain their address book information by taking advantage of the program’s automatic indexing, profiling and ranking capabilities,” – V3, Dan Worth (UK)

As much as we love this media attention, we love even more to see the product going to work for our consumers!  We’ve already been able to improve the product based on your feedback, so keep it coming… As we’ve mentioned before, this cloud work is nontrivial stuff, and we’re really excited that we got such a great response – with the media and with our users.

Some of you may have noticed that it was about this time last year when we first announced that we would be building Xobni for the BlackBerry (given that we had just added the BlackBerry Partners Fund as an investor, I guess it made sense). We planned to release our BlackBerry product at the end of Summer 2009 (let’s say generously September 2009). In fact, we were ready with a BlackBerry product in September 2009, as planned. Most of the key features you see today were there, and it even had a simple back-end that allowed it to bring data from your Outlook Xobni to your BlackBerry…but we didn’t like it. So we made that ever painful decision not to launch, and went back to the drawing board to fill in the missing parts.

What emerged, the missing piece that we needed to make the BlackBerry product work as we knew it should, comes to you today as a new service called Xobni One.

We named it Xobni One because at the core the service takes information from any number of sources and gets them to behave like one. To be clear, Xobni One is not “sync,” as we are not adding and deleting contact data. We keep all data sets, fuse those data sets together for comprehensiveness, and surface the most relevant data at the top. Because volume of contacts is mostly the enemy of today’s address books, they break down unless they are maintained aggressively. Xobni maintains itself through the continuous flow of new information in your inbox, social networks, and now your text and calls.

Let’s consider a specific, but simple example. I might be connected to a personal Gmail account (jeff@gmail.com) on my BlackBerry and an Exchange account with Outlook (jbonforte@xobni.com) at work. Xobni One makes all the people and relationships from both accounts available in both places. So when my sister sent me an email from her new job to my personal Gmail account last week, Xobni for BlackBerry noticed the new email address automatically. Xobni One kicked in and appended the new email subject almost instantly to her profile in my Outlook account (and used the data to slightly change her relationship rank with me). The old email addresses didn’t delete. Even if it is not active, email addresses and phone numbers are an important point of reference to our past communication and related relationships.

My example above might make you wonder about privacy. After all, I just gave an example that crossing information between a work and personal account. But Xobni One is not moving the email message bodies between accounts. We are just moving the relationships, selected contact information and their ranking. The people are portable. The email stays put. Security and privacy are fundamental to us – after all, we have big enterprise customers, too!

The long term power of Xobni One will not be evident to customers from day one. This is partly by design. It is a scalable, powerful system that can today handle relatively simple, yet meaningful tasks of fusing Xobni profile data from your BlackBerry with data from Outlook (or even Outlook to Outlook). But Xobni One is capable of doing much more complicated tasks that we will show in the future. We know people want Xobni for webmail and other smart phones. Xobni One makes these much easier for us to build. We know people want to use Xobni with teams. Xobni One can do that, too.

From the company’s very founding four years ago in a dorm room at MIT, we assumed a future where Xobni would serve customers no matter the app, device or OS. Xobni One is our most significant step in that direction. And by no means is Xobni One the end of our love for Outlook. We will continue to make Xobni for Outlook the best addition on the planet for Outlook and the hundreds of millions people who spend almost 40% of their day there. But today we are excited to give you a glimpse of the future of Xobni and the products we are building.

As always, special thanks to all the amazing support from our customers, and to the great team at Xobni who make all these products come to life.

I am very excited to announce the release of Xobni for BlackBerry. It makes managing your address book a thing of the past – You will never need to “Add a Contact” again. Early feedback from our alpha users is that they have stopped using their native address books completely and use only Xobni for BlackBerry.

The power of Xobni for BlackBerry is found in exposing connections you never knew you had as well as in the depth of the profiles that are created. All profiles are created automatically and are as complete as the information we have to complete them – including recent emails, phone calls, SMS messages, upcoming and past meetings, and the network for each of your contacts. You can even view information and images from your contacts using the LinkedIn and Facebook. Everything you need is a single click away, so you can immediately contact anyone the way you want.

With Xobni Rank, we learn who you communicate with most often and order your address book by that – you always have the most important people at the top. Search for “Mike” and even if there are 20 Mikes in your Xobni address book, the most important one rises instantly.

We built our first mobile application on the BlackBerry platform because we could deeply integrate within the native OS to provide an impactful and seamless experience for our users. If you’re composing a message using the native BlackBerry compose screen, you can access all of your Xobni contacts with a flick up of your trackpad/ball. We love being able to improve our customers’ existing work-flow instead of forcing them to change it.

The icing on the cake is Xobni One. Xobni One leverages our new cloud-based service to connect Xobni for Outlook and Xobni for BlackBerry, giving you all your Xobni contacts on your phone, where you need them most. A separate post on the magic of Xobni One is coming soon.

This is the stuff that excites me – Creating great products that solve real problems!

Note: To connect to Outlook, Xobni One requires Xobni for Outlook 1.9.1 (build 10169 or later). This is an optional download for other Xobni users, and contains the following new features since version 1.9.0:

• Xobni One will update automatically when the computer is left idle (after the regular Xobni index process)
• New “Update Xobni One” menu item (see screenshot)
• Ability to delete Xobni One data from the server at any time in the Xobni Options window (under the “indexing” tab)
• Nearly unlimited phone numbers and fax numbers can be added for an existing Xobni profile (though still only the top two will show in the Xobni sidebar)
• When two Xobni profiles are merged, their phone numbers merge as well
• Numbers from Outlook Contacts are shown in the Xobni profile “edit” screen to help show the source of those numbers

Learn More about Xobni for BlackBerry

At Xobni, we’ve dedicated ourselves to helping you work smarter, not harder, by developing powerful email products to reduce the time you spend digging around your inbox so you can focus on…well, whatever it is you were actually hired to do (we assume it wasn’t to search unsuccessfully in Outlook ).

In the years we’ve spent in this space, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of knowledge about email and workplace productivity in general, and rather than sit on what we know, we want to share it with you, our valuable users.  To that end, we’re excited to announce our first-ever Live Twitter Q&A, during which we’ll spend a concentrated hour fielding as many of your questions as we can.  We hope you’ll join us for our inaugural Work Smart Wednesday:

Xobni Live Twitter Q&A
Work Smart Wednesday, March 3rd
11:30AM-12:30PM PST

It’s easy to join the conversation: Direct your questions to @xobni and end them with the hashtag #WorkSmarter between 11:30AM and 12:30PM PST this Wednesday.  Questions tweeted using Xobni’s Twitter extension will receive priority, so if you can, post your questions from Xobni.

If you’re not available then, write your question on Twitter or as a comment on this blog post (please tag with #WorkSmarter and keep it <140 characters) ahead of time, and we’ll answer as many of those as time permits during the Q&A as well.

Example:

• BillGates: @xobni I want to impress my coworkers with my taste in Outlook tools–what’s the easiest way to invite them to use Xobni? #WorkSmarter

• Xobni: To @BillGates Open up the Xobni Options menu and click “Invite Users”. Select your invitees there & get a chance to win Xobni Plus for free!

Of course, we’re always listening to you on Twitter (you should take a moment to follow us if you haven’t already), but we’re especially excited to dedicate this entire hour just to answering your top questions.  Get your questions ready, and we’ll see you there!

Linkedin For Dummies by Joel Elad
Xobni is a great tool for heavy email users, and even becomes more powerful if you use Xobni’s LinkedIn integration. LinkedIn For Dummies is a how-to book on how to get the most out of LinkedIn. Xobni is definitely a great way to get the most out of LinkedIn. Joel includes download instructions, features, and a lot more about Xobni in his book.

Upstarts!: How GenY Entrepreneuers are Rocking the World of Business by Donna Fenn.
In her book Donna talks about the features of Xobni’s Outlook product, but also tells the business story of how Xobni was founded, funded, and how it flourished.

Human Computer Interaction: New trends by Julie A. Jacko.
There are several academic books that reference Xobni and the new paradigms we introduced to email. It is quite an honor to be mentioned in academic work.

And finally, Xobni is featured in the New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek: Expanded and Updated by Tim Ferris. Here is a quote from the book:

“It [Xobni] offers many features, but the most relevant to this chapter is its ability to indentify “hotspots,” or periods of time when you receive the bulk of e-mail from your most important contacts. These “hotspots” are batching times that will enable you to keep critical contacts (clients, bosses, etc.) smiling even while you reduce checking e-mail to 1-3 times per day.”

We talk about many of Xobni’s features here on our blog, but we don’t often talk about the analytics engine that sits beneath the software. Tim has latched on to one way he suggests that his readers can use Xobni’s analytics features to work smarter, not harder.

We thought being in this many books was pretty cool, so we wanted to share. We’re honored.

(All features mentioned below are new since version 1.8.5 build 9142):

Improved Outlook 2010 Beta Compatibility

• The Xobni sidebar displays more reliably and consistently for various view configurations of Outlook 2010 beta (32-bit). Of course, we will fully support all versions of Outlook 2010 when Microsoft releases them for sale to the public.
• Installer screen is now more informative when installing Xobni into Outlook 2010 (screenshot)

Note: If you have a 64-bit operating system, and would like to test Outlook 2010 beta + Xobni today, simply install the popular 32-bit version of Outlook 2010 beta and then install Xobni.

Brand New “Out of Box” Experience

• If you install Xobni for the first time, you’ll see a new video display inside the sidebar (no more video pop-up). We’re really proud of it! See it in full size here.
• If you’d like to share fun facts with your contacts, we now open a message for you to customize instead of sending the email right away.

Improved Invitations (the Heart Button)

(Just click the heart button at the bottom of Xobni to see these improvements)

• Brand-new interface for inviting contacts to join Xobni, including photos and improved suggestions (based on Xobni Rank and whether they’ve sent you mail using Outlook)
• Users will also randomly receive the chance to win Xobni Plus when they invite others.

Twitter

• If signed in to the Twitter Extension, more data is shown about each Twitter name to help you choose the right one for your Xobni contacts — just hover over each name to see more information (you only need to do this once per contact).
• Twitter feeds are checked more often (every two minutes)

Better Automatic Phone Number Extraction

• Better recognition of phone numbers and fax numbers
• Filtering out more conference call numbers and bridge lines

Productivity Enhancements



• This may be a big time savings for many of our users: Now you can right-click on an email anywhere in Xobni to open that message in a new Outlook window (instead of clicking through to see it in detail in Xobni first).
• Support for the “shift-delete”, “shift-insert,” and “control-insert” keyboard shortcuts for cut, paste, and copy in the Xobni search bar
• The “Copy Email” command now copies the date of the email and everyone in the to: line.
• Photos and job titles for your highest-ranked contacts are fetched as soon as you install Xobni (instead of waiting till you access their Xobni profiles)
• Other minor bug fixes and performance improvements

Whew! Please continue to let us know how we can keep improving your productivity through the Xobni Community, and thank you to everyone who participated in the topics that helped inform today’s update.


General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks for using Xobni!

Download the Latest Xobni Now


Filed under: Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, outlook2010, releaseupdate ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/xobni-1-9-improved-outlook-2010-beta-compatibility-a-new-way-to-win-xobni-plus-and-more/feed/ 13 xobniblog New Xobni Invitations Xobni Twitter Improvements Xobni Productivity Update http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/share-the-xobni-love/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/share-the-xobni-love/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:31:18 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1472 ]]> Valentine’s Day is upon us and we’re doing a giveaway to those we love most – our customers.  <blush>

Tweet about your love for Xobni and enter to be one of the 14 winners to receive two Xobni Plus licenses – one for you and one for your Valentine (or anyone you think would love Xobni as much as you do).

To enter, simply go to this page and click the “post to twitter” button.  Winners will be randomly selected this week, finishing up on the big day of love.


Filed under: Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/share-the-xobni-love/feed/ 3 xobniblog xobni_valentinecard http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/blackberry-update/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/blackberry-update/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:26:49 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1384 ]]>

Hey there friends and fans of BlackBerry!

We just wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with the Xobni for Blackberry product as well as some exciting news. We really appreciate the excitement and anticipation for the product and can’t wait to share it with you!

So what’s the good news? The good news is that we’re in alpha and really close to having a truly compelling Xobni for BlackBerry product. We need your help! We’ve got the product built and we’re all using it internally (and loving it).

To help move this process along, we’re looking for some of our most passionate Xobni friends to dive in and take it for a spin.

If you’re up for the alpha, please send us an email. Don’t forget to put BlackBerry alpha in the subject field and then tell us what model BlackBerry you have and whether or not you use Xobni for Outlook.

While we may not be able to include everyone in the alpha, we’ll sure try.

Disclaimer: IT IS an alpha. We’ve done a pretty good job buttoning up our product but we certainly expect some bumps in the road as we scale, so make sure you can tolerate some (hopefully small) hiccups if you want to participate. Thanks in advance for your help! We’re committed to reinventing the address book for smartphones and are one step closer today.


Filed under: Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/blackberry-update/feed/ 5 xobniblog Xobni for BlackBerry http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/our-new-digs/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/our-new-digs/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:55:51 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1340 ]]>

A few weeks ago we took up camp in Twitter’s old office space on Bryant Street in San Francisco.  We loved the location of our last office, but we moved into that space with 4 people in 2007 and found ourselves bursting at the seams when we finally left with nearly 30 team members crammed into that space.

Now we are at 539 Bryant, and we love it!

In addition to the awesome views, sprawling space, and great lighting, we’re also hoping some of Twitter’s good karma will rub off on us. 

As we were packing our desks, Adam (cofounder) and I took some time to reflect on the offices of Xobni over the past four years.

“Office” #1



Adam started Xobni in his dorm room at MIT back in 2006.  As you can imagine, he clocked lots of hours trying to understand the wealth of data hidden in email.  A few months later I got a call from Adam. After some persuasion on Adam’s part I moved from the University of Maryland, where I dropped out of grad school, to focus on turning this email project into a business.  I moved into MIT’s East Campus dorm with Adam.   We lived and worked in that 12 foot by 12 foot space.

“Office” #2



With school on hold* for both of us, and the dorm room getting a bit crowded, we rented an apartment near Harvard Square and were able to fully commit to this business we now called Xobni.  And that we did.  We worked all waking hours, usually until 5 or 6am when we’d rush to bed at daybreak, hoping to fall asleep before the sun would start to convince us otherwise.  It was a crazy time.

“Office” #3


When our summer lease ran out, we temporarily moved into the apartment of fellow Y Combinator startup founder, and now Xobni employee, Bryan Kennedy.  Again, back in a cramped space, but this time with about $100k of angel funding in the bank.  We began to contemplate our future.   It wasn’t long before we realized we needed to be in the Valley if we wanted to give Xobni the greatest chance for success.  We made the decision over a weekend and on Monday we started the 3,000 mile drive to California.

“Office” #4



Office #4 was a “deluxe apartment in the sky” at The Crystal Towers in San Francisco.  This “office” still has probably the best view of any office I’ll ever have.  The place was so great that many other Y Combinator startups moved into the building.  It became known as the “Y Scraper.”

Now that we were in San Francisco and closer to the action, it wasn’t long until we raised our first big round of funding, $4M bucks.  Finally with cash in the bank we decided we could do two things: hire employees and get a real office.

The employees came first.  Greg and Gabor.  They both moved into the Y Scraper.  They worked out of our apartment with us.

Office #5 (no quotes this time!)



Finally in June of 2007, over a year after starting the company and after working out of 4 different “offices” we moved into our first legitimate office** at 211 Sutter Street, one block from Union Square.  This is where we launched Xobni to the world.  Everything feels like it’s been on fast-forward since then.

Office 6



Four million downloads and many employees later, here we sit at 539 Bryant Street in a space that will be able to hold us for at least the next year or two.  (Note: we are growing fast – check out these current positions we are hiring for.)   Looking back, there’s not one move that we regret.   It has been a lot of fun and we and even a bit nostalgic to think about the places we’ve called Xobni’s home.

* We never went back. 

** One that wasn’t our primary residence (though we did sleep our fair share of nights in the office).

Photo credits (new office): Mitch Aidelbaum


Posted in Press, Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/our-new-digs/feed/ 10 xobniblog IMG_7077 IMG_8210 IMG_7148 office with Zoe Dorm Room 2 Harvard Sq 4 2 Taylor Apt Sutter Street IMG_7148 http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/xobni-ces/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/xobni-ces/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:18:44 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1337 ]]> Our friends at RIM kindly invited us to show our upcoming BlackBerry app and integration at the BlackBerry booth (South Hall #30851) at CES this week.  While talking for hours on end day after day about the same thing can get exhausting, talking to our users and being reminded of the need for Xobni on mobile devices has been rejuvenating and encouraging.

We’ve also received some love from mobile/BlackBerry media and bloggers.  Inside BlackBerry posted a demo of the product, CrackBerry did a great roundup of the day, and LAPTOP Magazine listed us as a candidate for the CES Readers Choice Awards in the smart phone apps category.  Vote for us, please!

If you find yourself lost in the madness that is CES this week/end, find your way to us.  We’d love to see you.  And if you happen to practice reflexology, we promise to give you extra Xobni love.




Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/xobni-ces/feed/ 2 xobniblog blackberry booth http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/xobni_1-8-5_major_improvements_links_exchanged/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/xobni_1-8-5_major_improvements_links_exchanged/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:30:48 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1226 ]]> As a few have heard via TechCrunch, or while test-driving the Xobni Salesforce Extension, a new improved version of Xobni has been in the works. Xobni 1.8.5 (build 9142) is packed with useful improvements for everyone, including a brand-new feature that is free to existing Xobni Plus members. Download it now or read more about the latest enhancements.



(All features mentioned below are new since version 1.8.3 build 8997):

Links Exchanged (Xobni Plus feature)

• Instantly see a list of links you have exchanged with a contact, ordered by date. Easily filter the list by URL.
• Right-click any link in Xobni to preview and access the original message that contained it.
• Links contained in any Xobni message search are now shown separately, for easy scanning.

Laptop-Friendly Tabbed Interface

• New tabbed interface makes better use of your limited screen space and allows for more resizing and flexibility within Xobni
• View a familiar summary of your communication with a contact, or switch tabs to show only one type of data (thanks to alpha testers for their feedback with this).
• Filter the items in any tab with a quick search (Xobni Plus users have access to more advanced options)
• More compact “business card” area
• Extensions (such as Twitter and Facebook) can be resized to show more information. The LinkedIn, Hoover’s, and Salesforce extensions have been redesigned to take advantage of this as well (To get the Salesforce extension, please follow the instructions here).
• Fans of the original panel-style interface can still switch back in the Xobni options.

Improved Phone Number Extraction and Display

• Xobni is now smarter about finding the right phone number for your contacts in their emails.
• A new “i” icon appears next to phone numbers that are automatically extracted from emails by Xobni. Clicking this will show you the text that the number came from. Numbers from your Outlook Contacts, or numbers that you edited yourself, do not have this icon.
• Phone numbers are de-duplicated, and Outlook Contacts numbers are given higher prominence (thanks to cassianofonseca, Fred Greco, and Rob)

Productivity Enhancements – Saving You More Time

• Click the folder icon when viewing a message to jump to that folder in Outlook (thanks James, Nick, and others for the idea). Please note that the message itself will not be selected in Outlook.
• Enhanced drag-and-drop support for messages, conversations, and attachments. Drag any email, email thread, or attachment to any other window.
• Drag messages to folders to add a copy of that message to the target folder.
• Right-click any message to copy it and paste it into a new message as an attachment instead of as text.

Other Features & Fixes

• New “share” button in the Xobni Statistics tab allows an easy way to show someone what time of day they most email you. “Hey, look what a night person you are!”
• Direct Messages are now available in the Twitter extension (just click the “D” button when available)
• Email addresses sent to you in message bodies are now indexed and available in people search. This is especially helpful when trying to see if you know anyone at a given company — just type their domain name into Xobni’s search and you might be surprised at whom you already know!
• Bug fix: Adding LinkedIn contacts that were more than three levels away from you works more reliably (thanks Daniel)
• Other minor bug fixes and performance improvements

General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. If you’re already using Xobni 1.8, it is recommended that you re-index your mail to see all Links Exchanged. Simply select “Index Outlook Mail” from the Xobni menu to complete the index. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks again for your feedback and thank you for using Xobni!


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, majorrelease, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/xobni_1-8-5_major_improvements_links_exchanged/feed/ 5 xobniblog Xobni 1.8.5 Screenshot http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-love/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-love/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:36:19 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1229 ]]> Well, the day came and went before we even had time to boast about it, so we’ll do it now.  Yesterday, Microsoft named us the Startup of the Day.  Yip yip!

Our love affair with Microsoft goes way back.  It started when we created a product that makes Outlook infinitely better, then spiked when Bill Gates demoed Xobni last year at Microsoft Office’s Developer’s Conference.  We were recently chosen to be part of BizSpark 100, and are very excited about being the Startup of the Day (yesterday).

To read the BizSpark interview with Jeff (our CEO), click here.


Posted in Press, Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-love/feed/ 0 terrablu http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/get-your-xobni-on-this-holiday-season-giveaways/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/get-your-xobni-on-this-holiday-season-giveaways/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:40:11 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1206 ]]> It’s been a big year: 3 million downloads, Xobni Plus, Xobni Enterprise, Xobni for Salesforce & Xobni Mobile soon.  While we’re very proud of our accomplishments so far, we have a lot we want to do, and know that we wouldn’t be where we are without our loyal fans and users.

As a small token of our appreciation, we’ll be giving away Xobni Plus to 25 people who tweet and/or post to their public Facebook wall: “All I want for Christmas is Xobni! http://xobni.com/holiday” (Of course, you can replace “Christmas” with a holiday of your choice.)  We’ll choose the winners randomly from the posts we see by searching on Twitter and Facebook.

And for those of you limited in your choice of software, or the ability to buy Xobni Plus due to your employer’s well-intended policies, we have come up with a fun (and hopefully productive) way for you to get Xobni Plus at work.  Click here http://xobni.com/holiday to see a quirky, ad-libs-like letter for you to download or cut/paste/email to your IT person of choice.  It briefly explains the benefits of Xobni for professionals and the new Xobni Enterprise that will allow you to start using Xobni’s full functionality at your company.  We’ll also be offering a discount on Xobni Enterprise for companies who mention your letter.  And if that’s not enough, we’ll be giving away an Amazon Kindle to the person who uploads to most creative letter to Scribd, so have fun!

Cheers!


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/get-your-xobni-on-this-holiday-season-giveaways/feed/ 0 terrablu xobnigift http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/first-round-gives-susan-boyle-a-run-for-her-money/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/first-round-gives-susan-boyle-a-run-for-her-money/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:35:55 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1197 ]]> If we ever doubted we had the best investors in the world (we didn’t), this sealed the deal.  First Round Capital just released their annual holiday card, which is a compilation of First Round portfolio companies singing “Building Big Dreams” (Les Misérables).  This is turning into a nice tradition from First Round, and we look forward to participating in years to come.  (Last year’s theme was dancing, inspired by WhereTheHellIsMatt, and Rob Hayes is simply spectacular.)

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/first-round-gives-susan-boyle-a-run-for-her-money/feed/ 0 terrablu http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/adams-advice/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/adams-advice/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:59:37 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1184 ]]> Our very own Adam Smith spoke at MIT (his alma mater) in November where he gave a great overview of Xobni’s history, and advice for future entrepreneurs.  Besides just looking cool on stage, he covered a range of topics based on his experience building Xobni, including learnings on hiring pace, how to be nimble and execute well, and where to live and raise your startup.  He also shared his top reading suggestions for entrepreneurs.  While we like to think you’ll watch the full 28-minute talk, just in case you don’t, the top 3 reading suggestions are Founders at Work; High Stakes, No Prisoners; Paul Graham’s Essays.

Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/adams-advice/feed/ 1 terrablu http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/xobni-and-the-outlook-social-connector/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/xobni-and-the-outlook-social-connector/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:50:34 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1172 ]]> As some of you may have seen, Microsoft announced today that they are integrating some social networking features into Outlook 2010. Our favorite tweet of the day was, “Dear Microsoft, we already have Xobni.” (via @_aishaf)

This wasn’t a surprise to us. We have a close working relationship with the Outlook team at Microsoft, and have since the early days of Xobni. And they’ve been watching us too. Bill Gates himself called Xobni “the future of social networking” at the Microsoft Office Developer Conference last year.



In addition, we’ve been selected as part of Microsoft’s BizSpark One program, an invite-only program to help accelerate the growth of high potential startups chosen by Microsoft. We have shown that bringing in social elements into the inbox is very powerful, so this announcement seems like an obvious step by Microsoft to bring Outlook up to speed – kind of.

After 3 years of your feedback (thank you, beloved users) and 3 million downloads, Xobni already provides all of the social stuff you will be able to do with Microsoft Social Connector – and much much more. And even more importantly, we aren’t going to stop innovating. We will mention that the product they are scheduled to launch next year doesn’t have improved search functionality (key Xobni feature), won’t allow users to interact with social networking sites, no automatic phone number extraction, no shared network information, no Xobni Rank, which brings the most important emails and people to the top and many more Xobni features you’ve come to love.

We are also bringing Xobni’s innovation to new areas. There is a lot of excitement out there for our upcoming Blackberry product. We want to get this in your hands as soon as possible. And just yesterday we launched our Salesforce Extension. We are getting a lot of visitors at our Dreamforce booth sharing their excitement for Xobni’s Salesforce Extension.

Microsoft is a massive company that has to serve 500+ million Outlook users with each new
release. Our nimble 30-person startup is happy focusing on those Outlook users that live in email and need a companion like Xobni to make their work day more bearable. We’re excited that Microsoft will bring more awareness to the possibilities of turning email on its side – and making it about relationships again. We’ve been at it for over three years, and there is a lot more to come.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/xobni-and-the-outlook-social-connector/feed/ 12 xobniblog http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/on-a-roll-dreamforce-pdc/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/on-a-roll-dreamforce-pdc/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:13:58 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1169 ]]> We’re on a roll over here at Xobni, and we ain’t stopping anytime soon.

Two weeks ago, we announced our first enterprise product and got a great response from IT administrators at Enterprise 2.0.  Last week,  Jeff demoed our coming BlackBerry app on stage at the BlackBerry Developer’s Conference with David Yach.  And this week we have more cool things cooking:

1)      Yesterday we announced our availability of our Salesforce extension (well, actually M.G. at TechCrunch beat us to it when also reporting on UI improvements).  And it’s not only available to business users, it’s available to all Xobni users interested in getting Salesforce data in Outlook.  This marks our third revenue stream (behind Xobni Plus and Xobni Enterprise) in a matter of a couple months.  As M.G. reported, “revenue streams can be addicting.”    If you’re at Dreamforce and want to see it, check us out at booth 1308.

2)      Also announced yesterday was that we were selected by Microsoft to join their new BizSpark One program, an invitation-only program designed to accelerate the growth of high potential startups through a One-on-One relationship with Microsoft Corp.  We’ve had a close working relationship with Microsoft for a while now, and are honored to have been chosen with such an elite group of companies.

3)      Lastly, we set out to make an impression at Microsoft’s PDC conference this week by having Xobni ambassadors handing out Xobni-branded t-shirts… and giving away prizes (like $1000 cash, Amazon Kindle, etc.) to the lucky people who are wearing them.  Here’s a video highlighting the promotion.

Gotta love startup land – where things move a million miles a minute, even when working with the big dawgs.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/on-a-roll-dreamforce-pdc/feed/ 1 xobniblog http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/xobni-for-outlook-releases-free-preview-of-salesforce-extension-now-available-to-everyone/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/xobni-for-outlook-releases-free-preview-of-salesforce-extension-now-available-to-everyone/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:22:25 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1151 ]]> It’s no accident that we hand-crafted our own Xobni Extension for Salesforce. We’ve been listening to our users asking us to help them squeeze every ounce of productivity out of Outlook. Today we’re taking a huge step in that direction by opening our Salesforce Extension up to everyone.

Last week we mentioned that our Enterprise customers were going to get access to our Salesforce Extension, and this week the offering gets even more exciting. We’re offering a free preview of our Salesforce Extension to all of our users.



After the preview period, we’ll be offering the Extension to of all of our users for a reasonable price. By then we think you’ll see the value in viewing your Salesforce Account, Opportunity, Activity, and Cases information for a given contact right inside of Xobni.

Similar to our other Xobni Extensions, when you click on an email in Outlook, Xobni automatically fetches related Salesforce information. For example, if I click on an email from Mr. Wyatt Turlock I’ll be shown Wyatt’s account information and account activity using the Salesforce API. It’s just that easy. For those of you that live in Outlook and Salesforce, we have just made your life much easier. Please thank us by using our new Salesforce Extension Preview, and then provide feedback so we can take our new extension to the next level.

Please note: Users of this Extension will need an API-enabled Salesforce account. Please contact your Salesforce Administrator to make sure you have this feature enabled in Salesforce.

Get started now and try out our Salesforce Extension.

Please let us know what you think here.
Read the full Press release here.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/xobni-for-outlook-releases-free-preview-of-salesforce-extension-now-available-to-everyone/feed/ 2 xobniblog Xobni Salesforce Extension for Outlook http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/bug-fix-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8997/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/bug-fix-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8997/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:43:31 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1134 ]]>

Working together with our dedicated and helpful users, we have uncovered and fixed two issues in Xobni 1.8.

Xobni 1.8.3 build 8997 is a minor bug fix release and is recommended for anyone experiencing the issues below. It is available now at http://www.xobni.com/download/latest, and includes the following changes since builds 8559 and 8734:

1) Crash Fixes for Some Plug-in Conflicts

If you have been experiencing any crashing in Outlook after installing Xobni, please try this build. We have focused on resolving conflicts with other Outlook plug-ins, including Symantec Enterprise Vault. Thanks to “Gemster,” Mike Maccana, Ralf Vissers and many others for helping us identify and test this fix via our support community.

2) First-run startup screen now only happens on first run

For a handful of new Xobni 1.8 users, a “Welcome to Xobni 1.8; now with Xobni Plus!” screen was appearing every time they started Outlook. Wow, that was annoying… and completely unintentional. This is fixed. Thanks to Jay Johnson and others for reporting this issue.

General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. If you’re already using Xobni 1.8, no new mail indexing will be required. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks again for your feedback and thank you for using Xobni!


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/bug-fix-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8997/feed/ 3 xobniblog 1.8 Updated http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/on-stage-at-blackberry-developer%e2%80%99s-conference-with-rim%e2%80%99s-cto-david-yach/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/on-stage-at-blackberry-developer%e2%80%99s-conference-with-rim%e2%80%99s-cto-david-yach/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:17:07 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1106 ]]> A few months ago, we showed the very beginnings of a Xobni application for BlackBerry at a mobile meet-up in San Francisco. While we weren’t expecting it to get broad attention given the closed environment, we were pleased that there was so much enthusiasm for the product.

Since then, we’ve been making great progress. However, the more we work with RIM, the more ideas we collectively come up with to make Xobni Mobile more useful to BlackBerry users. Expanded functionality has caused the development time line to extend. We are anxious to get Xobni Mobile in the hands of users soon. We didn’t plan on speaking again about our BlackBerry product until it was on the market, but then we were asked by RIM to demonstrate Xobni. They asked for an example of a compelling integration with the BlackBerry to show at their biggest developer conference, and we just couldn’t resist.

More details about Xobni Mobile

Update: Watch the video of Xobni’s demonstration at the BlackBerry Developer Conference Keynote.

At Xobni, we think that you should have access to every person that you need to reach, when you need to reach them. Surprisingly, there’s not an easy or quick way to do this on our phones now. Unlike a static address book of the people you have deliberately put in your Outlook contacts and/or mobile phonebook, Xobni for mobile will be more like your automatic address book made up of all the thousands of people you may have communicated with over the years. Our data tells us that the typical user has 5-10X the number of contacts in their email inbox versus their Outlook address book. If you put all of those contacts into your address book it would be, well, a bit overwhelming – imagine scrolling through 5,000 contacts! Enter Xobni Mobile…




Our coming mobile product will give you access to your whole automatic address book and maintain the integrity of your key daily contacts by not inundating you with details that you don’t need. We do this with Xobni Rank – a list of contacts, in ranked order, depending on the freshness and depth of your relationship.

Anyone that carries a smartphone knows the frustration of wanting to call or email someone you have communicated with but not having quick and easy access to their contact data because it is buried somewhere in an email. Our application helps you quickly find anyone you’ve ever communicated with, along with context to your relationship, in ranked order. For example, most people know more than one Mike. Xobni Rank delivers every Mike you know in ranked order based on how often and how recently you communicated with him. So, the Mike Zander, whom you just spoke with yesterday and email one time per week will be listed above the Mike Andler, who was CC’d in an email once by your coworker. Cool, eh? Manually typing in contact information is so 2008!

We’re thrilled to have been on stage today with our friends (and investors) at RIM demonstrating our partnership and product – and look forward to bringing Xobni to mobile devices early next year. To be notified when the product is available, please sign up here , and stay tuned.


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: blackberry, mobile ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/on-stage-at-blackberry-developer%e2%80%99s-conference-with-rim%e2%80%99s-cto-david-yach/feed/ 5 xobniblog bb_screenshot_profile_withdevice bb_screenshot_searchresults_screen http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/music-to-enterprise-ears/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/music-to-enterprise-ears/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:37:13 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1099 ]]> As the new kids on the block, we don’t want to break too many rules in the enterprise world, but we did get a little creative at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this morning.  Our offices are in the financial district, and we get to hear a beautiful violinist playing from time to time as we walk about our neighborhood.  So, we decked her out in a Xobni t-shirt and asked her to play for our new friends outside Moscone and bring a little startup flavor to this great conference.

Feel free to come by and say hello (booth #26) if you are at the conference.




Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/music-to-enterprise-ears/feed/ 1 terrablu Violinist http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/thanks-enterprise/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/thanks-enterprise/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:32:17 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1097 ]]> If you ever had to switch schools when you were younger, you probably remember what it was like on the first day…. wondering if the kids would accept you, what the teachers would be like, and if the school food would be as disgusting as your last school’s cafeteria food.  Well, that’s a little how we felt about entering into the enterprise world after spending 2 years focusing 100% of our efforts going direct to consumer.

We had a good feeling that the kids would like us because the enterprise community had been recruiting us for quite some time – and the vast majority of our users use Xobni in the workplace – but we wanted to make sure we approached this opportunity in the right way.  We posted a link in a somewhat hidden area of our site asking companies interested in deploying Xobni to their employees to get in touch with us.  We were absolutely overwhelmed with the response.  We immediately began having conversations with a slew of IT administrators at companies of all sizes and soon had a product for them to test.  So after hundreds of conversations with IT administrators, systems integrators and CIOs and hard work by our product, business and engineering teams, we pulled the cover off Xobni Enterprise yesterday.

We were met with great interest from the media and the enterprise – now we are following up with all the interest.  We appreciate the warm welcome, and think this is a big step in our mission of bringing email happiness to all 500+ million Outlook users.

A snapshot of coverage from yesterday:

IDG (CIO, Computerworld, NetworkWorld, InfoWorld, The Industry Standard) – Xobni CEO Talks About CIO’s, Gmail, and Getting Things Done

CNET – Personal Services Get Business Flavor:  Xobni and SugarSync

eWEEK – Xobni Enterprise Launches as Salve for Corporate Microsoft Outlook

ReadWriteWeb – Xobni Goes Enterprise 2.0

VentureBeat - Xobni launches an enterprise version of its improved email inbox

IT Pro (UK) – Xobni moves to enterprise with new release

V3.co.uk – Xobni adds enterprise appeal

OfficeDeveloper.NET – Xobni Sets Its Sights on the Enterprise

Seattle Post-Intelligencer/The Microsoft Blog – Popular Outlook Add-On Makes Move for Enterprise


Posted in Press, Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/thanks-enterprise/feed/ 1 xobniblog http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/introducing-xobni-enterprise-including-salesforce-com-sharepoint-ldap-more/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/introducing-xobni-enterprise-including-salesforce-com-sharepoint-ldap-more/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00:41 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1067 ]]> As we’ve grown (3 million downloads and counting!), we’ve been hearing more and more from IT managers about their interest in deploying Xobni to their employees. We’ve managed to excite executives from all over the globe and they want to see their companies become more productive using Xobni. We’ve taken all the feedback in and have an exciting announcement today.

We’re announcing Xobni Enterprise, our second revenue-generating product in three months. Xobni Enterprise consists of a web-based admin portal that allows IT administrators to easily control, customize and deploy Xobni across their organization. We’ve also updated our Xobni Extension platform to give our enterprise customers the ability to easily create and integrate high-value services and applications into the Xobni client. The first two enterprise extensions are for Salesforce.com CRM and Microsoft SharePoint, and you can expect many more to come. We can’t wait to see what compelling extensions our customers build, surely things we’d never even considered.

See the official press release here.


Xobni Enterprise Admin Portal

Imagine, for example, a Xobni user who wants to email a customer of theirs, but currently flips back and forth between Salesforce CRM and Outlook in order to get it done. No longer necessary. In addition to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Hoovers tabs, we’ll have a Saleforce extension that allows you to immediately see all the relevant information on the Contact or Account without leaving your inbox. IT administrators can also easily incorporate company profile information via LDAP into Xobni with just a couple clicks. We hope that by opening these extensions to development will create a rich ecosystem that supports our effort in making the inbox a more productive, useful and happy place


Xobni Client (portion of) showing Salesforce and Sharepoint extensions.

So, you won’t see us sporting business suits anytime soon, but we are growing up, folks. If you like Xobni, tell your favorite IT manager to check out our new baby today –

Sign-up here to learn more about Xobni Enterprise


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/introducing-xobni-enterprise-including-salesforce-com-sharepoint-ldap-more/feed/ 13 xobniblog Xobni Admin Portal Client_w_extensions_2 http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/xobni-to-be-compatible-with-windows-7-and-outlook-2010-at-public-availability/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/xobni-to-be-compatible-with-windows-7-and-outlook-2010-at-public-availability/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:25:29 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1052 ]]> As part of Microsoft’s BizSpark 100 (a program designed to help startups thrive with early access to key resources), we’ve had the opportunity get an early peek behind the curtain of the soon-to-be-released Windows 7 operating system and the Outlook 2010 software scheduled for distribution next year. This early access gave us a chance to bang around on the product to ensure optimal compatibility for our users before it hits the market.

Given our focus on offering relationship management and productivity tools for the 500 million professionals using Outlook around the world, we began work right away to ensure we continue to offer the best possible experience for Outlook users, no matter what version of Outlook or Windows professionals are using. Both the free product and Xobni Plus ($29.95) will be compatible with the upcoming versions of Windows and Outlook.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/xobni-to-be-compatible-with-windows-7-and-outlook-2010-at-public-availability/feed/ 8 xobniblog Windows 7 Image http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/xobni-launches-affiliate-program/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/xobni-launches-affiliate-program/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:28:39 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1047 ]]> Due to the high demand from online publishers wanting to help us promote our products, Xobni has partnered with Commission Junction to launch the Xobni Affiliate Program. We are excited to be able to reward our publisher partners, aka affiliates, that have been sending new users our way.

If you love Xobni and sell software, have a website, or blog, the Xobni Affiliate Program might something for you to consider. Our program works like most traditional affiliate programs, in that we pay publishers for every successful sale of Xobni Plus. The commission earned is 20% for the sale of each Xobni Plus license. Before signing up, affiliates must submit an application Sign Up Here. The application is quickly reviewed and once approved, affiliates begin earning money.

We provide our affiliates with media assets along with relevant information about Xobni products to assist with the promotions. In addition, through our partnership with Commission Junction, affiliates have access to tracking, performance, earnings, and program information. We will add additional Xobni premium products to our affiliate program as we launch them. There is no cost to join the program so if you are interested in earning money on your website traffic, check out this link to learn more.

That’s it. Take a read through the fine print and see if you qualify to become a Xobni Affiliate Partner. We’d love to have you. And if you have any thoughts regarding the new program, shoot us an email at affiliates@xobni.com.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/xobni-launches-affiliate-program/feed/ 0 xobniblog http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/with-regards-to-valediction/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/with-regards-to-valediction/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:40:58 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=955 ]]> Over here at Xobni we’re always interested in anything email – so we were naturally pretty intrigued to find this cool survey from our friends at lifehacker.com. They asked readers “How do you end your emails.” I’m personally a bit surprised that “regards” beat out “best” by so much!



Source: Lifehacker.com





Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/with-regards-to-valediction/feed/ 2 xobniblog image001 http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/xobni-now-featuring-twitter/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/xobni-now-featuring-twitter/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:01:52 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1018 ]]> Tonight we’re launching a feature we’ve wanted to launch for a while and one which we’ve been using internally with much glee. Twitter is now integrated with Xobni. When you click on an Outlook email message from a contact, that contact’s Xobni profile will now contain their recent tweets. You can reply, retweet, follow, view that contact’s Twitter profile, or even post a new tweet. This feature will be a powerful addition to the existing integrations we have with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoover’s, Skype, and Yahoo! Mail. The integration of web and email data about your contacts makes for a powerful 360-degree view of your relationships.


How To Get Twitter in Xobni
Existing Xobni and Xobni Plus users must download the new version of Xobni for the Twitter extension to appear. This is a free update for everyone, and your Xobni Plus status will be retained once the update is installed.

Functionality
• See a list of recent tweets for every contact– right inside Outlook
• Reply to a tweet
• ReTweet
• Follow or unfollow a contact on Twitter
• Post a new Twitter status update from within Outlook

The Twitter extension will appear on the far right side of the extensions section in Xobni profiles. You can view this extension by clicking on the Twitter icon. Xobni will use the contact’s name to search for possible twitter accounts. Select the account that matches, or you can manually enter the Twitter name for the contact you are viewing. Once you select or enter a person’s Twitter name, every time you view a contact’s Xobni profile you’ll see their most recent tweets. From any screen inside the extension you’ll be able to login to your own Twitter account which will allow you to reply to tweets or post your own Twitter updates instantly inside of Outlook.

We are constantly looking for new ways to complete Xobni profiles with more information about your relationship with your contacts – whether that information is from your inbox or from the web. We hope you enjoy the latest step in making this vision complete.

Detailed list of features and changes in Xobni 1.8.3 (build 8559 and 8734) since build 8135:

Search Improvements

• Search speed increased dramatically (2-5 times faster depending on the search type)
• Directly access the advanced search builder by clicking on the big magnifying glass icon (previous builds required you to type text first) (thanks to Joe Myrick for the suggestion)
• Attachment results moved above tasks and calendar items

Extension Updates

• New Twitter extension
• Reorder or hide individual extension tabs (accessible through arrow button to the right of the tabs) (thanks to Hans van Leeuwen for the suggestion)

Other Changes

• Windows 7 compatibility fully tested and now added to our list of supported system configurations
• Xobni menu ordering changed slightly to be the same when accessed from top of Outlook or bottom of Xobni
• More detailed Xobni Plus data is shown to Xobni users in search results and AutoSuggest

Bug Fixes

• AutoSuggest menu displays more consistently
• Outlook keyboard shortcuts are passed through to Outlook more consistently when Xobni is being used
• Fixed occasional Outlook hang when sending mail (available since build 8175)
• Fixed occasional Outlook slow shutdown (available since build 8175)
• Many other minor bug fixes & stability improvements

Note: builds 8559 and 8734 are identical. The different build numbers are used for internal purposes.


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/xobni-now-featuring-twitter/feed/ 6 xobniblog xobni and twitter - terra http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/an-international-take-on/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/an-international-take-on/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:02:05 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=673 ]]>

While English speakers call “@” the “at” symbol, other nations are far more clever.

“Send : The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe provides this entertaining list of what the ”at symbol” is called in other nations.

• Czech (Czech Republic): Závinaĉ, which means a herring wrapped around a pickle.
• Danish: Snabel-a, “elephant’s trunk,”
• Dutch: Apestaartje, “little monkey’s tail,” though sometimes apeklootje, a rude word for another part of the monkey’s anatomy.
• Hebrew: Shablul or Shablool, “snail” or Shtrudl, “strudel.”
• Hugarian: Kukac, “worm or maggot.”
• Italian: Chiocciola, “Snail.”
• Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan): Xiao Lao Shu, “little mouse,” or Lao Shu Hao, “mouse sign.”
• Russian: Sobachka, “doggie.”
• Thai: Ai tua yiukyiu, “wiggling worm.”

Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/an-international-take-on/feed/ 7 xobniblog elephant-trunk2 http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/zen-and-the-art-of-inbox-maintenance/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/zen-and-the-art-of-inbox-maintenance/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:40:10 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=421 ]]>
Email can lead to fits of unholy rage.

Everyone has a torrent of email to parse through and sometimes it feels impossible to keep up.

The method for dealing with this headache is unique to each email user. For the 30 people in your office, there might be 30 different ways that people organize (or don’t organize) their email inbox.

I see inbox organization as akin to how clean people keep their desks. For instance, I can tolerate a certain level of clutter, but I reach a breaking point when I simply have to clean my desk or I will become overwhelmed and perhaps even a little disgusted with myself.

By contrast, I have worked with absolute neat freaks, who always filed papers in drawers, aligned their stapler and mouse pad and never left a stray pencil on their desk. And then there was the guy in the back corner who sat at a workstation teetering on the brink of disaster; piles of papers, books and discarded snacks stacked so high that I feared for his well-being.

A days worth of Googling reveals that email users can be bucketed into three general types. Of course, these three “types” form a spectrum and people can fall anywhere on the line. You might not see yourself as staying completely true to any one of these “types”, but instead feel like you are somewhere in between.

To File or Not to File: A Profile of Three Emailers

The Zealot: They use folders and labels religiously. An endless list of folders lines the left side of their inbox. Sometimes there are folders within folders. The Zealot often uses color codes, flags and stars to create a sense of order. These people are generally very organized in other aspects of their lives and find meaning in religiously filing emails by category, project, administrative task or client.
 
The Monk: The Monk uses only three folders. That’s it. The goal is an “empty” inbox, which provides the Monk a sense of calm. Inbox Nirvana. This method is popular and it pops up quite often on blogs, productivity websites, etc. I’ve seen it referred to as, “The Trusted Trio”, by Gina Trapani on lifehacker.com. The Trusted Trio is: A Follow-Up or To-Do Folder; an Archive Folder; and a Hold Folder. Trapani suggests that users should either respond to an email in under two minutes or, if it requires a lengthier response, place it in the Follow-Up folder to tend to later. All the emails that you might need to reference in the future are placed in the Archive Folder. Finally, the Hold Folder is for those emails that you might need in the next couple of days, such as correspondence on your upcoming meeting or the invitation to a dinner that you’ll attend in two days.

There are several variations on this method, but the general concept remains the same.

The Non-Believer: And, then there are those who do nothing. The way they organize their inbox is by not organizing it. They simply go through their emails, delete, respond, or mark as unread in order to respond at a later time. This person often keeps an archive of prior years. The Non-Believer relies on search tools to retrieve information and relevant emails. As recently as a couple of years ago, the Non-Believer got a bad rap. Their method was viewed as lazy, disorganized, even negligent. All this has changed. The advent of new technology (such as Xobni), allows the Non-Believers to more easily justify their existence. They posit, “Why waste time filing and organizing, when Xobni can find whatever information I need in seconds?”

I would argue that the Non-Believer raises an excellent point.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/zen-and-the-art-of-inbox-maintenance/feed/ 4 xobniblog 1189107_mail_in_a_box 12065642501242564915sarxos_closed_simple_yellow_foldersvgmed11 http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/email-addiction-survey/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/email-addiction-survey/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:50:13 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=858 ]]> Business email is part of everyone’s life these days. We wanted to dig deeper into this phenomenon and learn a bit more about how people are using email. The findings we found from AOL were interesting, so we decided to share them with you (most recent data was from 2008). Enjoy!

According to AOL’s Fourth Annual Email Addiction Survey reported in 2008:

• 46% of email users said they’re hooked on email (up from 15% the previous year).
• 51% check their email four or more times a day (up from 45% the previous year).
• 24% of email users don’t use a salutation.
• 74% said they excuse errors when emails are sent from a mobile device like a BlackBerry or iPhone.
• 62% of at-work email users said they check their work email over a typical weekend.
• 19% check email five or more times in a weekend.
• 28% said they feel obligated to check work email while on vacation, and 19% choose vacation spots with email access.

Percentage of people checking email from the following places:

• In bed in their pajamas: 67%
• From the bathroom: 59%
• While driving: 50%
• In a bar or club: 39%
• In a business meeting: 38%
• During happy hour: 34%
• While on a date: 25%
• From church: 15%

And, finally, the most email addicted cities are:

1.   New York
2.   Houston
3.   Chicago
4.   Detroit
5.   San Francisco
6.   Sacramento
7.   Orlando
8.   Minneapolis-St. Paul
9.   Denver
10. Phoenix


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/email-addiction-survey/feed/ 4 xobniblog http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/free-minor-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8135/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/free-minor-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8135/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:05:14 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=983 ]]>

Thank you for making the latest version of Xobni and Xobni Plus a huge success.  We’ve been listening closely to your feedback via the Xobni Community on Get Satisfaction and Xobni Support. Today an update is available that fixes a handful of issues reported by our loyal and extremely helpful users.

Xobni 1.8.3 build 8135 is a minor update and is available now at http://www.xobni.com/download.

Changes between this release and the original Xobni 1.8 release:

Search Improvements

• Accented and international characters can now be found via search  (thanks to our community for reporting this).
• Search now correctly finds phrases with upper-case characters
• New icon for emails in search results that were sent by you ( vs )
• Dashes in attachment names show up more reliably in search results
• Journal entries no longer appearing as half-indexed mail items; removed completely

AutoSuggest Improvements (AutoSuggest is a Xobni Plus feature)

• AutoSuggest has been greatly improved all around, especially with regards to filling in the proper name/email when a name is selected for some Exchange configurations
• Deletion of Outlook’ email suggestions in AutoSuggest is now possible (just use the “delete” key after using the down arrow to select the Outlook suggestion you’d like to delete).

Contacts Improvements

• Outlook Contacts’ names are used in the Xobni profile more reliably
• If there are two phone numbers in Outlook Contacts, both show up in Xobni (instead of just one)

Other Improvements

• Xobni displays better with various DPI monitor settings
• People with IMAP-only Outlook configurations will not see “locked” messages as often when using the free version of Xobni (reported in the Xobni Community)
• The “heavy” email indexing process is smarter about waiting until you are not using your computer to begin
• Certain key commands for other programs now re-enabled and not blocked by Xobni
• Improved Xobni Plus account access and activation from the Options menu
• Assorted performance improvements and minor bug fixes

After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed.  If you’re already using Xobni 1.8, no new mail indexing will be required.  All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software and you will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Existing users will not be automatically updated to this build, as we are working on even more fixes for an “auto-update” release in the near future.

Thanks again for your feedback and thank you for using Xobni!


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/free-minor-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8135/feed/ 5 xobniblog Xobni 1.8 Updated sent mail received icon http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/information-overload/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/information-overload/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:24:16 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=851 ]]>

As difficult as it is to remember what my personal life was like before the Internet and cell phone, I really have no idea how businesses operated prior to the Digital Age.

In today’s workplace, technology is essential to productivity.

It also provides a lot of distractions.

According to business research company Basex, distractions at the workplace are costing the United States $900 billion per year. An article in the New York Times discusses the loss of productivity due to too many emails, cell phone calls and text messages. The article sites a Basex study which found that 28% of a typical information worker’s day is spent on interruptions by things that aren’t important-such as unnecessary emails-and the time it takes to get back on track.

Workers have a lot to deal with these days. RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits, found that the typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times. This is in addition to visiting 40 websites each day.

With so much going on in our workspace, how are we expected to remain focused and productive? And, it’s only going to get worse. According to the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, estimated worldwide email traffic will rise from 294 billion per day in 2010 to 419 billion per day in 2012.

Tech companies recognize the problem. In 2008, Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M. formed the Information Overload Research Group, a nonprofit organization. The group studies and drives awareness towards the topic of information overload.

Ideally, technology can be used to combat overload. Tools such as Xobni organize information to make it a little less overwhelming.

A more simple piece of technology is Gmail Labs’ “Email Addict,” which allows users to take a break from email and chat for 15 minutes by blocking the user’s screen. A message pops up that reads, “Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack. We’ll be back in 15 minutes!”

A 15-minute reprieve from information overload certainly isn’t going to solve all of your problems, but it might just provide a nice break. And, don’t forget, you can always use the OFF button.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/information-overload/feed/ 1 xobniblog 4836672_e7250a908f_m http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/in-good-company%e2%80%a6xobni-wins-a-%e2%80%9cbasey%e2%80%9d/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/in-good-company%e2%80%a6xobni-wins-a-%e2%80%9cbasey%e2%80%9d/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:20:31 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=952 ]]> It’s always a great feeling when your work is recognized, and surpassing 2 million downloads definitely gives us the warm & fuzzies. To stoke the fire even more, today at the first-ever Information Overload Awareness Day, Xobni received a Basex Excellence Award (aka the “Basey” award).

We received this recognition from Basex for providing leading service that is allowing people to be more productive by improving inbox management and reducing information and relationship overload. As Jonathan Spira, Basex CEO and chief analyst, shared last month, “tools such as Xobni have the potential to increase an individual’s efficiency and effectiveness by organizing information in a more natural manner.”

Basex Excellence Awards are given to leaders in the information technology world. The award recognizes companies who have made noteworthy contributions to the industry through outstanding products and service offerings. We’re thrilled that Xobni has been recognized and joins some good company as a Basey award winner (other recipients include Microsoft, IBM, Open Text, Xerox, among others).

For those of you wondering what’s next for Xobni, we’ll soon be announcing the availability of Xobni for BlackBerry (more details here ). And of course we’re going to continue to improve upon the current versions of Xobni. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Xobni Plus, there is a free 14-day trial (no credit card information required). Here is a video that demonstrates many of the new powerful search features that are included: http://www.xobni.com/press/videos


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/in-good-company%e2%80%a6xobni-wins-a-%e2%80%9cbasey%e2%80%9d/feed/ 1 xobniblog http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/xobni-presenting-at-information-overload-awareness-day-10-free-tickets/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/xobni-presenting-at-information-overload-awareness-day-10-free-tickets/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:40:37 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=949 ]]> Tomorrow at 11am EST (8am PST) the inaugural Information Overload Awareness Day event will be taking place. This event is hosted by research firm Basex and Xobni is being featured as a visionary vendor. This is an online event that will be attended by over 500 people interested in identifying and solving the problem of information overload in the workplace. Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina will be speaking at 2.15pm EST (11.15pm PST) as part of the visionary vendors panel and will be discussing how Xobni combats the challenges of information and relationship overload.

Free Passes
Basex has provided us 10 free passes ($50 value each) for us to share with our users. Simply use the code ‘MattGuest’ when registering for the event. You can register for the event here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/379835097 These 10 free passes will be provided on a first come, first serve basis.

If you are interested learning more about this event and the problem of information overload please visit the Information Overload Awareness Day website here. The full agenda, including speakers from companies like Microsoft, Xerox, Dow Jones and of course Xobni can be found here.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/xobni-presenting-at-information-overload-awareness-day-10-free-tickets/feed/ 2 xobniblog http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/james-brown-sales-one-user-per-week/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/james-brown-sales-one-user-per-week/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:19:14 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=617 ]]> I keep on meeting cool people doing these One User Per Week interviews. James was no exception.

First, James lives in the UK. Xobni has a lot of international users, with the UK holding first place outside the USA. After I managed to add some more Skype credit to my Skype iPhone app, I was able to call over to England and have a nice chat with James.


James does sales for a large media company. He specifically sells into the British Government. He described his job as “pretty basic sales, lots of contacts, lots of emails, and lots of relationships to manage.”

The Ideal Xobni User

James sounds like an ideal Xobni user – and it ends up he is more than just that. James is the Xobni Champion within his company. He was the first to discover Xobni and now he has over 40 people in his 80 person office hooked on Xobni. The one bad thing is that all of his coworkers act as if he works for Xobni. He hears all of their feature requests and bug reports. As a company, we can’t thank people like James enough for what they’ve helped us do.

Compliments, Bugs, and Feature Requests

Just like most user calls, James had both compliments, a few bugs, and lots of feature requests. James had one compliment that I made sure to write down word for word, he said “Xobni opened up my archive of email, I can easily reach back and pluck and email from 2 years ago.” When asked, James admits to having over 40,000 emails in his inbox. He has accumulated those emails over 4 years, and if he doesn’t have to file or delete emails, he doesn’t. With Xobni he doesn’t have to. James described his historical emails as his greatest asset within his job, and Xobni makes that asset accessible.

James did have some requests: he wants to delete whole profiles from Xobni – some people he just simply doesn’t need to communicate with ever again, and he’d rather them just not show up in search results. James also found it hard to reset a Facebook profile for a contact after he had already selected wrong Facebook profile for a contact. Xobni allows this, but we need to make it more obvious.

A Great Efficiency Tip From James

James gave me a good tip that I could share with other Xobni emailers out there. He said that Xobni’s fast search and conversation view has changed his behavior. He now writes emails to himself, and uses the subject line of the email to “tag” the email with relevant keywords. This way he can always go back and find an old note by looking at his own Xobni profile and filtering the subject lines in the conversation view. Nice tip!

Sharing The Xobni Love

Finally, James told me of one other common instance when Xobni shines. James will be on a call with a customer, and they’ll be discussing some previous conversation or contract. James can hear the customer typing away on their keyboard – looking through folders in Outlook, attempting to use Outlook’s prehistoric search function, and scrolling through months of email. James is calm and collected on the other side of the phone line – armed with Xobni. He simply says “I have that conversation right here – would you like me to resend it to you?” And more often than he can count he also offers another helpful suggestion “If you haven’t heard of Xobni for Outlook, you should download it. Xobni is the word “inbox” spelled backwards, and it will make your job much easier.”


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/james-brown-sales-one-user-per-week/feed/ 0 xobniblog jamesbrown http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/get-to-the-point/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/get-to-the-point/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:15:31 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=433 ]]>

Writing Effective Emails

They’re lurking in every office. You may sit next to one. You may be one. They are the people who write overly formal, overly complicated and sometimes painfully long emails.

They just can’t help it.

Even inter-office emails on topics as mundane as the kickball game on Wednesday carry an air of formality appropriate for the Elizabethan Era. You expect to see a family crest embossed in wax below their electronic signature.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am an ardent supporter of the use of proper grammar and punctuation in emails. It aggravates me to no end when people write only in lower-case letters or stream of consciousness. However, I do believe that the best emails are the most concise emails and that there is room for a certain level of informality when emailing at work.

I have done a good deal of research on the art of writing concise and effective emails. Below are links to the most useful tips that I’ve found.

Some general rules of thumb: use a good subject line; stay on point; and keep it brief.

This piece by Leo Babauta from WebWorkerDaily provides seven general rules for keeping emails concise:

• Use the minimum amount of sentences.
• State what you want right away.
• Write about only one thing.
• Leave out the humor and emotions.
• Use “if…then” statements.
• Review for ambiguity, clarity.
• Revise for conciseness.

On the Harvard Business Publishing website, David Silverman offers “4 Tips for Writing Better Emails.”

• Make clear what you would like the recipient to do.
• State the purpose of your email up front.
• Do not presume that the recipient has any pre-exisiting knowledge of a topic or necessarily remebers things that were stated in previously sent emails.
• Do not forward long email chains to get a point across.

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker.com believes that emailing is a two-way street and recipients can do their part to break the bad emailing habits of their colleagues.

• Edit poorly written subject lines of a received email when sending a reply.
• Lead by example by sending organized emails that separate different thoughts or questions ito ensure that all points are adequately addressed by the reader.
• “Get outside the inbox.”  There are times when walking down the hall to discuss something with a colleague or picking up the phone to talk to a client can save tons of time and might even eliminate misunderstandings.

And, in case it weren’t complicated enough, don’t forget that many people are using wireless devices these days. Here’s a good piece from the Microsoft Small Business Center on email etiquette for the wire-adverse.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/get-to-the-point/feed/ 2 xobniblog pulling-email-hill http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/xobni-plus-people-are-talking/ http://xobniblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/xobni-plus-people-are-talking/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:56:41 +0000 malbers http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=748 ]]>

Xobni Plus has arrived. It’s an upgraded version of Xobni and provides valuable features such as better, faster search, and Xobni Rank ™-powered AutoSuggest. I absolutely love the new features.

But, why take my word for it?

People are buzzing about Xobni Plus. I hit the web and found some great stuff on Xobni’s amazing new features and some really wonderful real world examples of when Xobni Plus saves valuable time.

“The idea is to do searches on top of searches to find that proverbial e-mail needle in the inbox haystack.” Clint Boulton, eWeek.com

Boulton described his experience when he returned to his Outlook inbox after a four-month hiatus from his job. Sounds like a nightmare, right? Luckily, Xobni Plus helped make his life a little easier.

He was able to utilize the Advanced Search feature to dig up old emails:

“Clicking Advanced immediately gave me the options to search From, To and Has Attachments. Clicking the + button next to the Has Attachments option added search filters for CC’d, All, With, Date, Body, Subject, Type and Folder fields. Narrowing the search to find e-mails with the word “Google” using these filters is a big leap in efficiency, which is what the tool is all about.”

The powers of Advanced Search were just beginning. Clint was able to easily pinpoint the email he needed by specifying the recipient of the email and the fact that it had an attachment.

As a journalist, Clint is sent mass emails that have hundreds of recipients. Using the Advance Search feature, he was able to only search emails from people with whom he had had direct email contact. This filters out much of the “junk” when searching for something important.

You can read the rest of Boulton’s article here.

“The ability to dig out ancient and obscure emails in seconds floored me the first time I used it,” Tim Slavin, reachcustomersonline.com

Slavin, a web designer and coder, had a great experience using Xobni Plus with his overflowing inbox. Xobni Plus searched his archived emails, as well as more current ones, which is a huge advantage to someone like Slavin who archives his email regularly.

Read the rest of Slavin’s article here.

“Xobni Plus includes some interesting new options that give Microsoft Outlook some much-needed smarts.” Doriano Carta, Web Worker Daily.

Carta enjoyed the Xobni Rank™-powered AutoSuggest feature, which auto-completes contacts in the “To” field, providing a drop-down list of ALL contacts, including those who have been included in the “cc” field or people who have written you, but you never wrote back (which is ignored by Outlook search).

Xobni Rank ™ then ranks those people and puts the most relevant contacts at the top of the list.

Read the rest of Carta’s comments here.

Finally, I took at look at what people are saying in the Twitter-sphere:

“Been using XOBNI Premium for a few days and I must say it is worth it .. i can locate emails in a flash with its advanced search strings.” @timbauer

“Upgraded to Xobni Plus, faster, better search and contact auto-complete. Price point of $30 makes sense as well for such a great product.” @seanmullaney

“Two days using @Xobni Plus and I’m actually hating my Outlook inbox a lot less again (Sending mail is better too!)” @refinch

“enjoy the use of @xobni plus… fast search and easy access to your contacts’ social media profiles” @mkhawaja

“Really liking some of the enhanced features of Xobni Plus. Finally controlling my inbox instead of it controlling me.” @HighTechDad


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