GigaOM » Xobni

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

WebOS app development chief flees to Xobni

Ryan Kim — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:00:09 +0000

You might have heard that Hewlett-Packard is still trying to sort out what it wants to do long term with its webOS mobile operating system. There’s been rumors of a massive shutdown and talk of salvaging the old Palm-designed OS or selling it off. But it’s clear the uncertainty is not a way to retain talent.

The latest sign is the departure of Michael Rizkalla, the former senior director of webOS application development at HP, who just started at Xobni, where he will be its senior director of mobile applications, according to his LinkedIn profile. Xobni tries to make inboxes and addresses books smarter on Outlook and BlackBerry through its software and recently introduced apps for Gmail and Android. Rizkalla exit follows the retirement of Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Shane Robinson and the departure of Richard Kerris, vice president, Worldwide Developer Relations for webOS. Palm also saw a number of executives leave after it was bought by HP last year.

The departure of Rizkalla highlights the bigger problem for HP. Even as it debates the future of webOS, the fact that it’s potentially on the chopping block has to be sending plenty of signals to the entire team. HP has already confirmed it would be pursuing layoffs of the webOS team, reported to be more than 500 people. The question is what happens to the rest. Do you wait for HP to shut you down or hope for a reprieve? Why not just take matters into your own hands.

At Palm and HP, Rizkalla was responsible for shipping some of the core apps on webOS and previously led the development of webOS 2.0. Now, it looks like he’ll be heading up engineering for Xobni’s mobile products. How many other talented people leave the webOS team before any decision to keep it or discard it becomes moot?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Xobni’s Gadgets Bring Third-Party Collaboration Tools to Outlook

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:00:37 +0000

Xobni, a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that automatically displays additional information about email contacts, has announced that it is making available “gadgets,” third-party additions to Xobni that will allow well-known collaboration tools as Yammer, Chatter, Dropbox, Evernote and Salesforce to become an integral part of the Outlook interface.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Xobni Comes to Gmail. What Took so Long?

Simon Mackie — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:00:47 +0000

Xobni, the maker of a popular add-on for Microsoft Outlook that provides details about user contacts and faster search, is finally bringing its tool to Gmail and Google Apps.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Haydn Shaughnessy — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:35:14 +0000

The enterprise collaboration space has entered an exciting new phase of collaboration. New software and applications are coming to market, as are new concepts for how to work and communicate in the knowledge age. From consumer-grade apps like those from Box.net and Huddle to software from long-established players like Microsoft and Oracle, these tools are taking collaboration technology past the traditional IT decision-making process and changing the way we approach the workday. Additional companies in this report include Skype, Huddle, Jive, Moxie and Yammer. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

5 Alternatives to Social CRM Service Etacts

Simon Mackie — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:00:19 +0000

Yesterday, Om reported that Etacts is to be shut down. While that’s bad news for users of the social CRM service, fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives available. While none of them provides an exact like-for-like replacement for Etacts, here is a selection of the more useful social CRM tools that have been reviewed by the WWD team:

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

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

Xobni Gets Huddle Integration

Simon Mackie — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:05:35 +0000

A new version of Xobni, a popular search and relationship management add-on for Microsoft Outlook, is being released today, including integration with Huddle, a cloud-based collaboration suite. Huddle data will appear in Xobni’s sidebar, providing users with visibility of project workflows, the most recent communications between team members and ready access to the latest versions of uploaded files in their inboxes. An auto-identification feature will also provide users with insight into contacts that share a Huddle workspace with them.

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)

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

Xobni Co-founder Adam Smith Leaves

Om Malik — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 03:49:40 +0000

Adam Smith, co-founder of San Francisco-based Xobni, is hanging up his hat and leaving the company. He’s giving up his position as the chief technology officer to Peter Monaco, formerly of TellMe. Smith didn’t say what his plans were. The company has raised $30 million in VC funds from Khosla Ventures and others such as RRE Ventures, First Round Capital and Cisco.

I met Adam about four years ago. He and co-founder Matt Brezina had just started their company and we quickly found that we shared a lot in common — mostly around the notion of using the email inbox as a social networking utility. Over the years, I got to spend a lot time with the young co-founders and about two years ago, I was asked by MIT Technology Review to write a profile of Smith for their 2008 “Under 35 Young Innovator” series. During the reporting process, I got to know the then 23-year-old Smith really well. I also learned about his early attempts at entrepreneurship, his (mis)adventures at MIT and of course, how he met Brezina.

None of that made it into the final story and neither did the rest of the fun stuff. I also learned that at age 13, he already had plans to work for Microsoft and eventually start his own company. Not willing to wait, he started a shareware company called Viratech when he was 13. The two products from that company — Time Manager and EBMailer — both cost $20 each and sold really well for 10 years. Smith, who graduated from MIT with a computer science degree with emphasis on machine learning and large-scale systems, has become one of my favorite entrepreneurs.

I know whatever he does next will be amazing. And to think he’s only 25!

Xobni Unveils BlackBerry App

Doriano "Paisano" Carta — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:00:58 +0000

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.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated