GigaOM » contact management

Xobni raises $10M ahead of mystery product launch

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:31:20 +0000

Contact management startup Xobni has raised a $10 million round of funding, according to an SEC filing. That brings total funding to $42 million, according to Crunchbase.

Xobni allows users to integrate Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and other services with their Outlook inboxes. But it looks like the company will have something new coming up…

When asked for comment, a Xobni spokesperson sent the following statement:

“We’ve signed a commercial agreement, and as part of that agreement, the partnering company invested money in Xobni. The nature of the agreement will become more obvious as we roll out products.”

Ok! So we’ll look forward to this major partner being announced at some point. In the meantime, Xobni released contact management tools for Gmail, iOS and Android. Xobni also hired away WebOS app development chief Michael Rizkalla.

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Xobni launches Smartr contact management for Gmail and Android

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:01:58 +0000

There is no shortage of ways to get in touch with people these days – from Outlook to iPhone and Twitter to LinkedIn — nor any lack of options when it comes to sharing their details or notes on your relationship history. Are you suffering from an excess of communication channels and the general chaos that comes from having dozens of conversations going across them?

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 Battle for Unified Communications Heats Up

David Card — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:02:18 +0000

Last week, a flurry of announcements about IM, chat and group messaging services preceded the coming showdown at SXSW next week. Startups like GroupMe and Yobongo will try to make their name there, just like Foursquare and Twitter did in years past. Synchronous communications (such as mobile group chat) are the latest battleground in the war over unified communications, but no matter how clever and fun those apps are, they’re not the real contenders. Rather, technology platform players like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are fighting to see what company supplies a user’s communications control panel — and a scrappy Skype can’t be ignored either.

The winner will gain an application that its users access constantly. A unified communications hub offers potential customer lock-in through habit and the effort required to switch both to and from the service. Om wrote that by controlling a user’s synchronous interactions –- sharing experiences that replicate reality –- Google could fix its social media flops and beat Facebook. A unified communications hub could be the launchpad to do just that.

A successful communications control panel will integrate three key components:

Universal communications channels. It should handle communications both real-time and asynchronous, one to one and multi-party, and across different channels: voice, email, text, video. IMs should convert to SMS messages if the receiver is away from his computer or smartphone. Email and messaging from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are good at this already.
Contact management. Besides just storing contacts and their various addresses, a universal communications hub increasingly needs to manage groups. It’s even better if that doesn’t require a user to work too hard. Facebook is attempting to get users to tag group members rather than make lists and Google’s Gmail prioritization learns from behavior. Location-based services and social graphs about a user’s relationships and preferences will play a big role here.
Presence management. People need better control over managing their availability. With chat and IM, you’re either available to all or not, and you have to manually screen your phone calls. Integrating contact groups and presence, a person could make himself available in real time for family in the evening, but available to co-workers only via email.

See what’s not working, and how the contenders stack up, at my weekly column.

Image courtesy of: flickr user goodold

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What Facebook Messages Is Really After

David Card — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:00:26 +0000

Facebook Messages isn’t about replacing email. What the social network is really trying to establish with its recently unveiled unified communications hub is presence management, and this new &quot;modern messaging system&quot; is more concerned with intimacy and immediacy, as opposed to formality, flexibility and history.

What Facebook Messages Is Really After

David Card — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:13:17 +0000

It’s not email. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said as much at last week’s introduction of Facebook Messages. He called the new service “a modern messaging system,” and half-jokingly said the next generation of users would gradually shift away from email. But as I detail over at GigaOM Pro, what Facebook is really trying to establish with its unified communications hub is presence management (subscription required). That’s why Facebook Messages feels at least as much like IM as it does email.

Facebook Messages focuses on intimacy and immediacy at the expense of formality, flexibility and history. This approach isn’t just aimed at consumer rather than professional usage. It de-emphasizes important consumer communications like billing, newsletters, one-to-many emailing, and forwarding. In other words, it’s more important in the long run for Facebook to be its users’ launchpad for personal communications than it is for the feature to be the management tool for all communications.

The Real Objective: Presence Management

By presence management, I mean the tools and platforms a person uses to announce his availability to other people (and, potentially, to bots and services). A powerful, unified presence manager would also enable the user to express how he’d like to communicate, and to manipulate that “how” and “when” availability to different types of contacts. If Facebook establishes Messages as a user’s primary tool to manage presence across multiple communications vehicles, it would be an incredibly sticky app, with huge customer lock-in potential.

How Should Competitors React?

Email’s not going away, for many reasons. Even teenagers want their online shopping receipts, and likely won’t route newsletters to their Friends inbox.

Microsoft appreciates the difference between corporate and consumer email, and has integrated IM with both. It should continue to build collaboration into Outlook, bridges between Outlook and Hotmail, and make sure its Messenger presence infrastructure interoperates with Facebook’s.

Gmail is an extensible apps platform, and a Gmail address is a hub domain for non-communications apps. Google’s aggressiveness in voice communications might give it an advantage over Facebook in mobile presence management.

Read the full post here.

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Defining Your Social Network Contact Management Strategy

Georgina Laidlaw — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:00:32 +0000

The way people talk, we’d be forgiven for thinking that social networking is one big popularity contest. The idea often seems to be to amass as many contacts as possible, regardless of whether we’ve ever met, or even heard of them before.

What’s that? Is that really the point of social networking?

Not for everyone. A study from earlier this year highlighted the importance of contact hubs — well-connected, influential individuals — over contact volume on social networking sites. And even though the pundits might advocate “authenticity” and “holistic personal branding”, many of us still simply want to use particular social network tools for specific purposes or agendas. Most of the web workers I know are selective about the people they connect with via social networks, and take different approaches to accepting contacts on different networks.

Let’s look a little more closely at the factors that can influence whether you accept a connection on any given social network.

Security

Each social network reveals something different about us as users. It’s not just a question of the information we post; it’s also a question of the network’s expectation of exposure, as evinced by their profile forms and service culture. Compare the type — and level — of detail invited by Facebook with the limited profile possibilities available at Twitter, and you’ll see what I mean.

Default security restrictions can have a big influence on who we’re willing to accept as a contact.

Self-Expression

The opportunities for self-expression, and the ways in which you want to express yourself on different social networks will likely influence the people you accept as contacts on each. I don’t accept business contacts on certain networks that I treat as strictly personal social networking opportunities.

Audience Expectation

The flip side of self-expression is your audience’s expectation of the information you’ll publish on a given network — or through a given account. A number of people I follow on Twitter have secondary, topic-specific Twitter accounts that attract a different following than their primary accounts. You may prefer to accept followers who have certain expectations of you on particular networks.

Your Social Strategy

Your social strategy — whether it’s formalized in a written document or based purely on gut instinct — will also affect who you accept as a follower or friend, and who you won’t. You probably wouldn’t accept as a contact a person you didn’t like, but you may well accept a person you don’t know — depending on the network.

It’s true: for many of us, social networks are tools, and different rules apply than in the real world. So what’s your contact management strategy?

Defining Your Contact Management Strategy

What’s your social network contact management strategy?

This week I found myself pondering this question as a bunch of updates appeared in my feed from one social network for which I had no strong policy: LinkedIn.

Don’t get me wrong: the updates were inoffensive enough. But the thing was, I just didn’t care for them. I didn’t care about this person, primarily because I didn’t know them. It seemed that my contact strategy for this social network needed refining.

I spoke to a couple of friends about their experiences — and approaches to contact management — on LinkedIn. They both cited as their deciding factor in accepting a contact whether or not they knew that person. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t accept their contact.

This raises important questions about the potential for social networks to expose us to new people and information. But it also reflects the security settings, and the nature of LinkedIn. It’s a professional network, so it’s conceivable that you’d want to accept contacts from people you hadn’t met, and I’d had good experiences doing just that. But , LinkedIn also contains a fair amount of my personal information.

For the moment, I was just uninterested in personal updates, but this raised the larger question: Should I be accepting as contacts people I didn’t know? I started taking a closer look at the information I’d published to the site. I also tried to identify specifically what I wanted to get out of this social network.

Balancing these two considerations — exposure and objectives — is important if we’re to arrive at an acceptable, satisfying contact management strategy.

In fact, those two points reflect the tug-of-war that each social network — online and offline — faces. In any human relationship we have to give in order to receive. The question is: how much do you want to give, and from whom do you want to receive?

How do you work out who to accept — and decline — as contacts in your social networking efforts?

Image by stock.xchng user stu360.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

gwabbit Offers Free Version of Its Blackberry App

Scott Blitstein — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:00:20 +0000

gwabbit is a handy application that automatically identifies and parses contact information from your emails to help ease the process of creating new entries in your contact list. I’ve written about the Outlook version as well as the paid BlackBerry edition in the past and was impressed by the offering.

The team at gwabbit recently released a free version of the BlackBerry app. It offers the same functionality as the paid version, except that it automatically notifies the folks whose addresses you’ve grabbed via email. I’m not usually a huge fan of this sort of thing, but it could be useful to let people know you’re trying to keep in touch with them. Personally, I think I would spend the $9.99 annually and spring for the paid version. The time savings make it a no-brainer, as does the knowledge that you’re not bugging your friends, clients and contacts.

You can download gwabbit (both free and paid editions) at the BlackBerry App World.

Would gwabbit Free help you keep your contacts in order?

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Bring Your Contacts Together and Keep Them Safe

Meryl K Evans — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:00:48 +0000

Gmail. LinkedIn. Facebook. Your phone’s address book. Your contacts may live in many places online, yet there’s always the possibility one of these places will disappear or crash, taking your information with it for good. Or perhaps you simply decide to close your account with the network.

You should consider importing the contacts from these networks into your main address book app. We use these services to connect with people, update our statuses and play with whatever features they contain, but we don’t always remember that these resources have contacts that belong in our primary address book.

Another consideration is having a secondary resource for backing up your primary address book. With most services able to import and export files as a CSV or vCard file, it has turned into a fairly easy process. For the least tedious approach, try to find a secondary resource that you can keep in sync with your primary resource — for example, Plaxo can sync your address book with Mac OS X, Yahoo!, Google and several other apps. Otherwise, you’ll have to import and export your contacts on a regular basis.

After selecting the apps for your primary and secondary sources, here are the steps to take to make sure that you have all your contacts in primary resource and backing it up to the secondary resource.

Determine what kind of files your address books can import and export.
Export address books from your social networks into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file based on Step 1. Remember where you save the files.
Import the addresses books from Step 2 into your primary resource. Repeat until you’ve put all of your contacts into your primary address resource.
Sync your primary and secondary resources. If they don’t have a sync wizard, go to Step 5. If they have a sync wizard, make sure you synchronize them on a scheduled basis if it’s not automated. You’re done.
Export the address book from your primary resource into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file.
Import the primary resource file into your secondary address book as your backup. Repeat on a scheduled basis, unless you find a way to automate it.

You might want to consider a solution that can sync with your phone — if that’s not already your primary source. That’s what I like about Google Contacts and Calendar — they sync with my favorite PC app, I can access them anywhere and they also sync with my phone. Read our contact management and application articles for ideas and apps to consider.

How do you manage all of your contacts?

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gwabbit Brings Its Contact Capture to the BlackBerry

Scott Blitstein — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:00:16 +0000

Having complete and accurate contact information for the folks you communicate with is an important, but often neglected, practice. Oftentimes, the details we need are included in our email communication, but the process of capturing that information is difficult or time-consuming.

Automatic text parsing of emails to make this process easier is becoming more common, though. On the desktop side of things we have the gwabbit for Outlook application we looked at back in March, which got mixed reviews from us. In my testing I thought it worked well, while Simon preferred Anagram, which offers similar functionality.

Not being a regular Outlook user, though, gwabbit offered little long-term value for me, and I imagine quite a few of us use web-based tools for our CRM needs.

The folks behind gwabbit are hoping to ease our pain by bringing their offering to the mobile platform, beginning with gwabbit for Blackberry, which they announced today at WES 2009.

gwabbit for BlackBerry brings the same single-click identifying process to your mobile where you can then use the inherent sync capabilities of the device to get this information into your contact manager of choice.

The application will be available from Blackberry App World on May 25 and will cost $9.95 annually.

How do you capture you contact info?

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Minding Your Networking Manners with Socialminder

Aliza Sherman — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:53:50 +0000

In the old days of networking, we were told things like 1) bring your business cards with you wherever you go; 2) make notes on the back of the business cards you collect at networking events so you can remember something about the person when you follow up; 3) remember to follow up with people you meet to nurture your network; 4) an easy way to touch base with someone in your network is to clip out an article that you think might interest them and mail it to them.

What’s the 2009 version of networking? How about 1) remember your moo cards and keep your .vcf (vCard file) updated; 2) snap a photo with your iPhone and tag the image, share contact info with Sharecard for iPhone and don’t forget to find and link to them on LinkedIn; 3) use Socialminder to keep tabs on your networking; 4) email a link to an article you read online that you think they might be interested in or better yet, share it via your social network status updates.

What’s Socialminder, you ask? Socialminder is a new Web-based application that is exploring the ins and outs of maintaining a healthy, vibrant and fruitful social network. I found out about Socialminder from several well-connected friends via an email. I immediately joined because they were people who I trust.

I found out later from Socialminder founder John Adler that those invitations were initially a “forced” feature that they have since made optional after some user complaints. One of the Golden Rules of social media sites should be “Thou Shalt Not Force Members to Invite Friends,” and Adler admits his company is going through a great deal of learning as they move their application out of beta. They’re open to feedback and have changed a number of features in the last few weeks.

Adler emphasizes that he subscribes to the “pay it ahead” theory of networking, helping people in your network or letting them know what you are doing rather than asking for something from them right out of the gate. Socialminder gives you the tools to do all three things. It is up to you to use it wisely.

When you sign up for Socialminder, the application scours both your LinkedIn account and your Gmail account (you have to put in your access information to trigger this). Then the application looks for correlations between who you are LinkedIn to and who you’ve emailed. Once it finishes it’s machinations, it begins sending you a regular email message that lists the top five LinkedIn contacts who you haven’t contacted in a very long time – the neglected ones.

Another feature Socialminder recently modified was what they included in those “action reports.” Initially, they listed the names, email addresses and then several “news” links – links to results in a news feed based on keywords the system gleaned from each person’s LinkedIn account. Those links, unfortunately, were too random so they didn’t seem like a meaningful way to contact someone, especially someone who you haven’t been in touch with for a while. Now those news links are gone which has streamlined the action report, but I’m still looking for a quick and easy link to each person’s listing on my Socialminder page so I can optimize the information about that contact.

For example, perhaps it just isn’t the right time to contact that person, and I want to push it back for a while. Or maybe I recently spoke to them by phone, met them in person or emailed them from a different account (Socialminder currently works with Gmail but they hope to roll out integration with other email programs soon). You can make note of these things in your Socialminder account, however, that link isn’t obvious in the action report email. Yet.

I really like the concept of Socialminder and am sure their interface and features will improve over time and as more people use the service. At press time, they had a couple thousand members and had put a temporary hold on new members for a brief time to work out many user-identified issues and the usual growing pains-related kinks. The hold is now lifted.

My favorite thing about Socialminder is the email action report, a friendly regular nudge to think about my network and be more proactive about staying in touch with people I know. Having handy links to instantly email my contacts is a motivator to connect, even if just to say hello.

Socialminder shows the last emails you exchanged with each contact where they’ve found a match. That’s also helpful for those times you can’t remember the last time you were in touch and what you discussed. You can also draft a message to each contact from the Socialminder site complete with some message prompts.

The app limits you to being able to interact with only the 5 most neglected contacts when you sign up. To upgrade to the free full version, Socialminder asks you to select 10 Linkedin contacts of your choice from your contact list compiled in your account and invite them to use Socialminder. I opted to do this to access contact activity reporting deeper into my 300+ Linkedin connections.

Socialminder has other functionality such as the ability to increase or decrease the frequency you want to contact someone, and the ability to change the keywords from what the system pulled to words that genuinely relate to the person. Red bars on the left side of your contacts mean you should consider getting back in touch since it has been quite a while. Contacts in jeopardy of being neglected are identified with yellow bars and green means you’ve been a good little networker and your contacts are up to date.

I’m not really looking forward to the Hotmail or Yahoo mail integration because those are my secondary and tertiary accounts. Those who really know me use my main Gmail account so I’m glad Socialminder started with Gmail. I think Socialminder is going to be one of those Web apps that become an integral part of my work. I’m more likely to adopt anything that helps me manage something in a more streamlined way.

Are you using Socialminder or something like it? How do YOU manage being in touch the people in your network?

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