Xobni is banking on the fact you are with its launch today of a new product line under the brand Smartr, aiming to bring order to more inboxes. The San Francisco-based startup came out of the Y Combinator program and has been trying to improve the Outlook and Blackberry email experience for a while now (they’re also a sponsor of GigaOM’s Mobilize event going on this week). Their latest contact management apps are for Gmail and Android and are free to download.

Based on a new Smartr platform that allows the products to rank and index your contacts, the new offerings aim to be “easier and more powerful than anything we’ve ever done,” according to CEO Jeff Bonforte (who makes his pitch for the new products in this short video.) So what exactly do they do?

Smartr for Gmail is a sidebar for your email that lets you search you contacts and, once you’ve found the one you’re looking for, pulls up all your past conversations via mail, message and voice, as well as their photo, job details and Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter updates. With one click you can add them to your other social networks.

Smartr for Android smartphones makes your contacts (up to 10,000) searchable and ranks them by importance, providing a complete profile with a photo, job details, email history, common contacts and social network information for each.

A leader in the field of “social CRM,” Xobni is competing with plenty of other companies offering to bring order to your online connections, including Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. But while the Smartr Gmail offering seems to share a lot with Rapportive on the surface, Xobni is highlighting differentiators such as the ability to generate contacts from more sources like Facebook, Android and Blackberry, better search options, and the ability to view profiles for all members of a multi-party conversation simultaneously.

The Smartr launch follows the release of a collection of gadgets to integrate tools such as Yammer, Evernote and Saleforce with users’ Outlook interface earlier this year. But the company remains in a brutally competitive space. One that Bijan Marashi, the co-founder of another email-indexing service, Xoopit, which was acquired by Yahoo!, warned entrepreneurs against, saying “trying to fix consumer email platforms is like trying to fix the phone system — a startup simply can’t afford to do it.” Xobni is obviously not heeding his advice.

Image courtesy of Xobni.

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The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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Xobni for Gmail, which works via a browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox, adds a sidebar to Gmail to help you search and manage your contacts. Like the Outlook version, you can get at-a-glance information about individual contacts, including their name, picture, job title, company and full social network details.

Xobni for Gmail, however, isn’t merely a clone of its Outlook version. For example, it includes unique relationship history tools, suggestions for related contacts whenever you email an existing contact, and a multimedia module to view social updates from people in your network. What’s more, subscribers to the premium Xobni Pro subscribers, which provides access to additional features in the product, will be able to use the Xobni cloud service to sync contacts across Xobni for Outlook, BlackBerry and Gmail, and also across the upcoming Xobni for iPhone and Android (private betas of which will be available shortly).

This all sounds great, but it’s a bit late — to say the least. When Xobni launched its sidebar for Outlook back in 2008, it was a novel idea that attracted a significant number of users. Since then, many useful Xobni-like products, such as Rapportive and MailBrowser, have been released for Gmail. We’ll have to see whether Xobni can tempt Gmail users away from the social CRM tools they currently use. My take? Xobni for Gmail looks polished and offers good features, and I really like the ability to sync contacts across multiple email clients on the desktop and mobile devices using Xobni Pro.

Xobni for Gmail isn’t yet broadly available, but you can request access to the private beta at the Xobni website. We have an invite code for 100 readers to get priority access: Use XOBNI-GO when signing up. The basic Xobni service is free, while Xobni Pro (which provides access to the Xobni cloud service and some additional functionality, such as advanced search and “Spam rescue”) costs $7.99 per month.

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• Gist is an online service that “connects your inbox to the web,” automatically building a profile for each of your contacts from the data that’s available in your inbox and via their social networking profiles. Like Etacts, it will also remind users if they haven’t been in touch with an important contact for a while. It’s available as a Chrome extension, Firefox add-on, and also as iPhone and Android apps, and can work with Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The service is currently free. See Scott’s review of Gist here.
• Rapportive uses social data (pulled from the controversial Rapleaf service) to provide additional information about your contacts. It replaces the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc) and works via a Firefox add-on or Chrome extension. As the information is taken from the Rapleaf database, the results are sometimes hit-and-miss, depending on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie a particular contact’s email address to various social media accounts. Rapportive is free. See my review of Rapportive here.
• Plaxo is an online address book that can store contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Like Etacts, it’s “socially aware,” tracking social feeds from Twitter and Facebook to keep users up-to-date on their contacts. The basic Plaxo service is free; Plaxo Premium adds sync with Outlook Contacts, Google Contacts and Windows Mobile and some additional features and costs $36.95 per year. See Judi’s review of Plaxo v.3 here.
• MailBrowser. Webyog’s MailBrowser is another CRM app that works with Gmail to provide additional data about your contacts, and can automatically keep contact information up-to-date by pulling data from emails. However, it doesn’t provide easy access to social network profiles or updates. Unlike some of the other services here, MailBrowser is a locally installed app, so it may be a better choice for users with privacy concerns. MailBrowser is free, and is available as an IE plugin, Firefox add-on and Chrome extension. See my review of MailBrowser here.
• Xobni is a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that provides a sidebar offering additional information about your contacts culled from their social network profiles and emails. It can automatically extract information like phone numbers from email messages, and also provides a threaded conversation view and easier ways to find attachments. The basic Xobni product is free, while Xobni Plus costs $30 and adds advanced search features, auto suggest, support for more than one PST file and more. See Scott’s hands-on review of Xobni here.

What are your favorite social CRM tools?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user GretheB

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As Xobni has added support for Gmail contextual gadgets (third-party email applications for Gmail that pull information from the web to augment the data in a user’s inbox) to this release, we can probably expect to see more useful gadgets, like Huddle, coming to Xobni’s sidebar.

Gmail gadget support in Xobni is interesting, because it means that it is essentially providing a bridge for third-party email application developers, who can now build applications for one platform (Gmail) but also have the same app work in another (Outlook). That’s good news for web app developers, like Huddle, who may have previously found integrating with a desktop email client like Outlook tricky, although it should be noted that only a small percentage of Outlook users will have Xobni installed.

Xobni is available for download from xobni.com. The basic version is free, while Xobni Plus, with additional features, costs $49.95 (currently on sale at $29.95)

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Xobni — an app that aims to help people get more from their email — is coming to the BlackBerry with Xobni Mobile. The models supported will be the Curve, Storm and Tour lines. Just as the Xobni plugin does for Microsoft Outlook, Xobni Mobile offers the ability to gather more information about your email contacts. You’ll be able to see not only threaded email conversations but also the contact’s social networking details,  such as their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.

Here’s what it looks like when you enter the Xobni Mobile app. You’ll see what looks like a regular contact list:

However, click on any contact and you”ll see a additional options such as your correspondence history with that particular contact in phone calls as well as emails. It also shows all of their accounts from the most popular social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook:

The thing I like most about Xobni is the way that it finds just about every contact you’ve ever communicated with. It improves the feeble search capabilities of Microsoft Outlook and the BlackBerry email client by automatically aggregating all of your contacts from emails and call logs — a huge time-saver. I’ve gotten so spoiled by this feature that whenever I use a system without Xobni installed I miss it.

Xobni One is a premium subscription service that adds more features and capabilities if you want to use Xobni Mobile together with Xobni for Microsoft Outlook. The plans available are either $3.99/month or $39.99/year. One of its most useful features is the way it automatically ranks your contacts according to the ones you communicate with the most. It’s another time-saver.

Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry costs $9.99 if you buy it without a Xobni One plan. If you get Xobni Mobile and Xobni One together, then the app costs $6.99 if you choose the $3.99/month plan, or it’s free if you opt for the $39.99/year plan.

I’ve been using Xobni for a few years now so I’ve seen it evolve over time. Releasing a mobile version of the useful product makes a great deal of sense and is perhaps overdue. It’s also interesting to see that the company released an app for the BlackBerry before the iPhone — I am sure that one is coming soon, though.

Let us know what you think of Xobni Mobile below.

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Getting started is straightforward: Download and install the plugin (versions available for both Windows and Mac) and give it your Gmail account credentials (which are only stored locally on your machine, as it’s not a web app). It uses IMAP to connect to your Gmail and Google Apps accounts; once connected, it trawls through your emails looking for contacts and attachments. As soon as it’s finished indexing your emails, you’re ready to go.

MailBrowser sits as a sidebar in your browser that you can expand or collapse as needed, and sports two main tabs: “Contacts” and “Files.” By default, it opens on the “Contacts” tab, displaying an alphabetized list. If, like me, your list of contacts is long and unwieldy, the built-in search functionality is useful. Clicking on a contact’s name gives you a more detailed view, with a photo (if available), URLs, a bio and any recent conversations. You can add tags and notes, “star” important contacts and create Google Calendar events for a contact right from the interface.

The “Files” tab displays a list of files you’ve received, with rich previews available, enabling you to skim through them quickly to find the files you need. The search functionality also works well with attachments.

MailBrowser is currently in beta so you may find some gremlins (I had some problems importing mail from one of my older Gmail accounts, for example), but it’s nonetheless a useful plugin that adds better contact management capabilities to the Google mail service. While it doesn’t yet have the power of tools like Xobni and Gist, it’s a great platform to build on, and Webyog’s Rohit Nadhani says that there are plans for many more Xobni-like features in MailBrowser, including social media integration, integration with enterprise apps (like Salesforce) and the ability to sort contacts by importance.

Have you tried MailBrowser? let us know what you think of it, and how it compares to tools like Xobni and Gist, below.

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The other new feature that most people might have missed in a previous update (I know I did) is the ability to access each contact’s Twitter account information. This was also a very popular request from Xobni’s userbase who’ve previously been able to access their contacts’ Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Adding Twitter and SalesForce connectivity to your address book makes a great deal of sense.

Here’s an example of what the Xobni panel displays next to your email message. Not only will you see the usual information such as phone numbers, email addresses and threaded email conversations, but now you can actually view that contact’s Twitter stream (once you connect the right Twitter account, based on the email address used). Notice how you can actually send a tweet right from Xobni as well as unfollow the contact and view their Twitter profile for even more information.

Personally, I love this hot trend of infusing intelligence into our otherwise under-utilized address books. Services such as Xobni, Gist and the one that started it all, Plaxo, are providing tremendous value by allowing us to get more from our contacts. It’s baffling to me that Google has not done much with contacts in Gmail. Things will become even more interesting when (not if) Google finally adds social networking power to its address book.

Do you use Xobni?

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The iPhone does have Spotlight search already built-in, but Spotlight has a limitation. It can only search what is stored on your phone. For an email account, this means that it can only search a couple hundred messages, not the account’s entire archives. And how often is the email you are searching for one of the most recent two hundred? In my case, the answer is rarely.

reMail works by connecting to your Gmail or other IMAP-enabled email account. It downloads the entire archives of the account onto your phone, making it searchable in the app. reMail suggests leaving your phone on a WiFi connection overnight to download mail the first time. I was impressed it recognized my Google Apps email address as a Gmail account and connected to it without a problem via the app’s Gmail protocol. In my experience, other applications can’t always do that (including Google’s own). reMail currently only supports usage with one email account.

Unlike Spotlight, which only searches headers and titles, an email’s entire content is searchable in reMail. The app also allows for more advanced searches than Spotlight does. For instance, exclusion searches are possible, as well as “OR” searches, and searches limited to terms in only an email’s header or body (header:term, for instance). Auto-complete suggestions are made as you type your search.

Once an email has been located, it can be replied to or forwarded using the app’s email client.

One aspect of reMail is its greatest asset and its greatest weakness at the same time. Because the app downloads the entire archives of an email account onto the iPhone for archiving, searches are faster than using similar tools such as Gmail’s search, especially if you don’t have a 3G connection. Searches can even be done offline, when roaming, or when on an airplane, to reference material.

But at the same time, large email archives take up storage room on an iPhone that the user may wish to devote to other things. My relatively small archive of 6800 messages took up 26.9MB. reMail says that as a rule of thumb to estimate it will use 5MB of storage for every 1000 emails, which is fairly in line with my usage.

Xobni includes advanced email search as part of a suite of features that integrates search of contacts, calendar items and tasks, and integration of social media profiles with contact listings. Could this be the future of reMail on the iPhone? I’d say that’s unlikely, given Spotlight and Apple’s history of rejecting apps that duplicate functionality it already provides.

reMail is a powerful search tool. If you need to frequently search your email archives for reference material and have the storage space to devote to it, reMail might be a time-saving tool for you. But if your archives are massive it may leave you pinched for space on your iPhone.

How often do you search your email archives? Is power search capability worth giving up iPhone storage space?

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We’ve previouslycovered the impressive Microsoft Outlook add-on Xobni. The company behind it has just released a new premium edition of the product called, appropriately enough, Xobni Plus, available for a one-time fee of $29.95. There are a number of productivity-boosting features that are exclusive to the new edition.

Social Inbox

Xobni Plus reveals a great deal about your contacts, and provides instant access to their profiles on some of the most popular social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. This can really come in handy when trying to connect with a new colleague, partner or customer.

I like how these services are integrated with the Xobni interface; with one click you can either add them as a contact on the service or go to the site for more information. The exciting part is that Xobni is continuing to add more popular services, such as Skype.

Another feature that I like is the integrated Google search box; it’s very useful for instant access to a Google search for that particular contact.

I must admit that it’s impressive how many useful features Xobni was able to cram into such tiny screen real estate without making it look too cluttered.

SmartMail

Xobni Plus includes some interesting new options that give Microsoft Outlook some much-needed smarts. For example, right out of the gate you’ll notice the much-improved autocompletion feature while filling out the “to” field for a new email message. Outlook is extremely feeble-minded when it comes to filling that address out, seemingly only supplying the most recent of most-used email addresses. Xobni Plus provides a boatload of names to choose from thanks to its powerful new search engine, which indexes all contacts, including those only found in the “cc:” field. Another useful time-saver is the way it can find an email address just by typing a part of an address, such as the company name.

These are all features that Outlook should have built in by now. Over the course of a few days, these seemingly small time-savers made a big difference to my productivity.

Search and Rescue

Also available in the Plus edition is a souped-up search feature. You can not only search for contacts but also any keyword or phrases in the subject and message body. There’s also an advanced search query builder for ultra-detailed searches.

There’s also the very handy ability to search and filter within threaded conversations and within each contact’s network, which would allow you to look for that colleague of one of your contacts that you have forgotten the name of, for example.

The Bottom Line

Here are some other benefits that come with the Plus edition:

• One year of tech support
• No ads
• Multiple .PST file search

The free version of Xobni is very useful and might be sufficient for many people’s needs. However, for power email users, Xobni Plus offers more than enough features to warrant the one-time expense of $29.95 (with a charge of $9.95 for each additional computer you want to use it on).

If you’re a Xobni user, will you be upgrading to Plus?

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