Xobni featured in Newsweek – Reinventing the Inbox

So a cool Google alert came across my inbox today. Xobni has been featured in a Newsweek story titled “Reinventing the Inbox.” We did an interview with Chris Flavelle a few weeks back on the innovation that is beginning to take place in the ancient internet communication application – email. Chris did an awesome job describing the recent innovation led by companies like Yahoo and us here at Xobni.

He even got the Bill Gates quote in there, calling Xobni “the next generation of social networking.”

Oh, and while I’m talking about Google alerts, I thought I would post a screenshot of my Xobni profile for the Google alerts I receive in my inbox.

For those of you that don’t know about Google alerts, read more here.

I’ve been running Google Alerts for a little over 1 year. I’ve seen 680 Google alert emails come across my inbox, and apparently the most popular time of day to post an article about Xobni is between 2pm and 7pm.

Jeff Bonforte Joins Xobni as CEO

Matt and I have hired a new CEO to help us build Xobni. As those close to Xobni know, we were not actively looking for a CEO. Nevertheless, when we met Jeff Bonforte several months ago we said We’ve got to get this guy on our team. We knew he had the chops to help us make Xobni into a lasting and valuable company.

Jeff was most recently the VP of Yahoo Messenger where he beat out AOL IM and took the #1 spot in the US. He increased Messenger revenue by 7x. Jeff understands both messaging and consumer desktop software. This experience is invaluable to Xobni.

Jeff also founded and ran i-drive.com during the late 90’s. It was the leading online storage company of its time. Jeff understands startups: building teams, building the business, and building products that people use every day.

So you can see why we are so excited about Jeff joining Xobni! Today is a big day. Today we make another step towards reaching tens of millions of users. Today we make another step towards bringing email happiness to the world.

We have huge challenges ahead of us and great accomplishments behind us. We wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

Techcrunch coverage here

Bill Gates Demoes Xobni!

Bill Gates demoed Xobni as part of his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California today.

See the webcast here. The demo of Xobni occurs 44 minutes into the webcast.

Bill called Xobni “the next generation of social networking.” He credited Xobni as leveraging the data in email to help users better manage their relationships.

Another quote (he actually pronounced Xobni correctly):

“Xobni – it’s actually the word inbox spelled backwards: This is where someone has come into Outlook and decided to add value. “You look over there to the right, that’s their unique display area. They help you understand how you communicate, what groups of people you work with.”

Thanks Bill!