Xobni: A New Outlook For Email

Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is changing the way the millions of Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Mail users can interact with their email. The plug-in (soon available for other email clients) creates an information profile for each person you interact with, and provides relevant historical information such as contact information, previous threaded conversations, attachments you have exchanged, related people, email usage statistics (sent/received, rank relative to other contacts), and information from the web. This wealth of information is neatly displayed in a sidebar that is fast and intuitive to navigate and search.

As someone who uses his email for not only communication but also contact information, contact management and file storing, this simplistic software is an incredible value-add.

For anyone who needs to constantly maintain business relationships or client accounts (listen up entrepreneurs!), the historical data on interactivity is a major plus. You can search through your contacts, which are all automatically ranked by Xobni, to find ones that are important but have recently fallen off your radar. Quickly shoot them an email or Skype them right from the sidebar, and boom!--you've kept up another relationship. But contact management doesn't stop there. Xobni shows you where a person falls in your "social graph" by displaying your mutual connections. The extraction of attached files also makes it really easy to find documents that have been bounced back and forth as opposed to painfully digging through loads of emails. Overall, I think that the company's newly hired CEO Jeff Bonforte put it best: "It makes email, in general, work the way your brain does.” Xobni provides context to everything you look at in your inbox, making it easy to navigate, interpret and manage. This appealing approach to email management was co-founded by young moguls Adam Smith and Matt Brezina, who have raised just under $4.5 million from a slew of investors including Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Atomico Investments and Khosla Ventures. The service just launched Public Beta two days ago. Microsoft reportedly put in a bid for the company somewhere in the $20 million range, but Xobni didn't bite (a good move from both sides in my opinion). Although the business model is still somewhat undefined, it is my prediction that Xobni will be worth a lot more than $20 million if it integrates with all of the major email and enterprise software applications and offers premium upgrades. I can't help but scream "Salesforce!" when I look at the screenshots.