Today, we are pleased to announce that Xobni Mobile is now available in BlackBerry App World! You can find our application for download directly from the BlackBerry App World application. Having Xobni in App World 2.0, our users now get the benefit of really easy carrier billing in addition to Credit Card or Paypal.

When we launched our first mobile product in March of this year, we set out to make it the best address book you’ll ever use (PC or Mobile). Too often we were finding ourselves in the situation where we needed to call or email someone quickly, but didn’t have their contact information available to us on our mobile phones.  So, with Xobni Mobile, we aimed for effortless address book management, contacts ranked by importance, lightning fast search and automatically created profiles with information from LinkedIn or Facebook.

The response so far has been fantastic.  Users have told us they love it – and the press seems to as well.  See what the folks at CNET, Berryfication, and PC Magazine have to say about Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry.  And of course, we loved the fact that the folks at CrackBerry have and love Xobni on their phones every day.

Having all your Xobni Contacts from Outlook with you via Xobni One, wherever you go, at any time, is essential to many of our users. That, combined with fast search, complete profiles and contact information directly accessible from your BlackBerry compose screen, we believe makes this a great app for any mobile user.

You can visit our page in AppWorld, and if you love it once you’ve used it, we’d love for you to post a review!  To learn more about Xobni for BlackBerry, go to: http://www.xobni.com/mobile.

Thanks for using Xobni, and thanks to our existing Xobni users, alpha-testers and our supportive blogging community to ensure we deliver a great application to BlackBerry users!

The Xobni Mobile Team

If you’re going to be at the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, we’d love for you to swing by our offices the evening of September 29 for the 2010 CrackBerry Awards.

Our friends at BlackBerry Partners Fund have partnered with us to host these awards (more info on awards here).  In addition to the ceremony, we’ll provide some great spins, drinks and merriment for all.  Space is limited, so you might want to sign up soon.  We’ll have a standby list, which we’ll definitely be diving into, so don’t give up hope if it’s full.

To register, go here.

Not only did we get 4 out of 5 “stars” review from PC Magazine, but Dan Costa (one of the kings of reviewers in our world, @dancosta) calls Xobni is “a must-have Outlook plug-in.” Certainly we think we are a must-have, but it’s nice to hear others think so, too!

Because we love this feedback so much, we’ve created a “testimonials” page with user and media/blogger quotes, as well as recent tweets about Xobni.  So, if you’re a happy Xobni user and want to spread the good word to your colleagues/friends, this might be a good page to share with them (that is if your recommendation isn’t quite enough to get them to download).  ;)

Xobni understands that first and foremost, your email experience must be fast, reliable, and stable.  Since the release of Xobni for Outlook 1.9.3, we have been focusing on improving Xobni’s core components and working with customers to make many of the highest priority bug fixes.

Xobni for Outlook 1.9.4 (build 11981) is now available and includes a number of improvements in stability and performance, as well as bug fixes, including:

Performance

• Many Xobni users would go off to lunch and then come back and feel that Outlook/Xobni was slow.  Xobni was running a number of background indexes and now pauses them as soon as you return so there is no slowdown when you’re working.
• The “precompute all profiles” stage of indexing will take less time.

General

• Your custom Outlook signatures are now shown when generating “Schedule Time With,” fun facts, and invitation emails.
• A number of crashes were diagnosed and fixed (thanks to those who are in the Product Improvement Program)

Phone Numbers

• Improved the automatic phone number extraction to recognize more international numbers

Conversations and Attachments

• Conversations are now grouped more reliably instead of occasionally being split into multiple conversations.
• Attachment indexing is now more thorough; some instances of missed attachments were fixed.

AutoSuggest

• Many improvements to the display & reliability of the Xobni AutoSuggest window
• Restart of Outlook 2010 is no longer required to disable Xobni AutoSuggest

Search

• Names with foreign characters can now be searched for in mixed case

Thanks to everyone on our community forums, our alpha users, and those who filed support cases with “Inspector X” files to help us track down issues and make the email experience more productive for everyone.  Now download Xobni and get back to work

Note: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. All of your data (Xobni profile merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.
If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks for using Xobni!

Download the Latest Xobni Now

Some would say it’s not a good idea to have media/bloggers on your beta list, but thanks to a pretty solid beta product and the fab BlackBerry blogging community, it ended up working out pretty well for us.  (Note:  We didn’t realize bloggers were on our beta list until the coverage came out.  Thanks to BerryReview, BlackBerryCool, CrackBerry, PocketBerry and RIMarkable for taking part and sharing Xobni love with your readers).

We started working on the latest release of Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry with one goal in mind – to make a product that people love even better. And thanks to all of our valued beta testers, we think we’ve done just that.  Primary focus was on performance and adding the top requested features by users.  Improved version includes

• Search speed improvements
• Performance improvements for BlackBerry local data integration (Thanks Frederic!)
• Performance improvements for scrolling in the search results
• Better integration with Blackberry Address book
• Trials and gift code activation
• Phone number source and email snippet from Xobni One/Outlook
• Xobni one status dialog and purchase flow
• LinkedIn Sign-in integration for additional data access (in Options)
• Icon fix for Storm (Thanks @Gordietm and @rezn)
• Contact update improvements
• Better image integration with LinkedIn and Facebook (Thanks, Saleh!)
• Fixes for recent message, phone and SMS data scanning

New users who want to give it a spin can go to http://bb.xobni.com for a free 14-day trial.  Existing users interested in upgrading, can either go to that link, or press “download” link on the About Xobni page in the app.

Thanks to the team, our beta testers who rock, and all of you who support Xobni!

See Yew, Xobni Mobile Engineer

It started as a discussion with Jim Winters, an accomplished artist in the Bay Area.  We told him a few things:

1) We were looking for a Seuss-ian feel to bring the sense of wonderment to our office (growing up in the 60′s/70′s/80′s leaves us all with a soft spot for Dr. Seuss).

2) We wanted to have a little fun with some popular Internet clichés and sensations over the years – i.e. “series of tubes” (Thank you former Senator Ted Stevens, formerly head of committee to regulate the Internet).

3) We also wanted to integrate the industrial office elements (exposed pipes, pilars, etc.) into the mural itself.

To put the finishing touch on the mural, we created a video to play on the flat panel… This turned our creative piece of art into a moving, working productivity machine.  See the connection to Xobni?

And that’s not all!  We had more walls to play with and thought it could be creative to theme all of our conference rooms with popular, but cliched form of email spam.  We carried over the Dr. Seuss theme, with each room focusing on the three top internet scams that have plagued the “intertubes.”  These pieces are appropriately titled “Cheap Meds,” “Mail Order Brides,” and “Money Laundering.”  The beauty of these pieces is that we’re creating videos to go on each monitor that also brings these pieces to life and ultimately the scam is captured by the email machine.

CrackBerry did a great post today about their bloggers’ favorite BlackBerry apps.  It was cool to get an inside look at what these BlackBerry die-hards carry around with them, but even cooler to learn that XOBNI was a top app for 6 out of the 9 surveyed.  Woot!  We love building good products that people use every day, and it gives us the warm and fuzzies when we get recognition like this from our users.

Aside from Xobni, they have some great selections in here that we wanted to share with you.  Below is a breakdown of the “chosen ones” from CrackBerry bloggers.  Thanks, CrackBerry!

by Brian Kobashikawa

Xobni has “gone retro” and is now officially in the boxed software business. As such, our product and marketing teams were thrust into the world of package design: a world inhabited by point-of-service displays, office store lighting, bleeds, crops, process colors, and really really large graphics. Our group sits comfortably in the land of desktop software and web applications, so we reoriented ourselves and began to think about Xobni from a new perspective. We grounded ourselves in our core design principles and got out the pens and paper.

1. Define (and redefine) your target audience. Visitors to the Xobni website probably learned about Xobni  from a friend or a co-worker, an article they read or they may have searched “outlook plugin” into their friendly web search engine. By the time these customers get to us, they already have a bit of backstory – not to mention, validation. However, the prospective customer in one of the big box stores may be  in an entirely different mindset. They may have decided to purchase Microsoft Outlook 2010, and start browsing for other software that may be relevant. Or, maybe they’re just making the store rounds after buying their fancy Twilight DVD. Either way, we had to assume that the audience knew nothing about Xobni. So, the first priority was to explicitly call out the connection between Xobni and Outlook, and cultivate our message from there.

2. Distill the message down to the core. On a website, we could (at least in theory) wax rhapsodic about Xobni’s features across multiple pages, product videos, and case studies. With a box, we had limited physical real estate: specifically, four 5×7” rectangles. This led to an extensive exercise with our marketing group to reduce, pare down, and focus the copy on the bare minimum. It also led us to question how we should present ourselves: should we visually communicate our product with symbols and concepts, or through concrete product shots? For the box cover, we opted for the former approach, as it helped us communicate the core message more effectively.

3. Rethink progressive disclosure in the physical world. With those four 5×7” rectangles, we needed to establish a simple visual hierarchy. Presumably, customers will see the front cover first. If they picked up the box, they might turn it around. And if they were really interested, they may open the box flap to see more inside.

So, we decided to have the front cover focus more on the “why and how” – why this product exists, and how it works for you (“Take control of your inbox” is front and center). The inner flap, in the meantime, focused on the “what” – what does the product look like, and what does it do for you. As such, the inner flap reveals screenshots of the product (mostly placed on the far right side, ensuring that they’ll be seen by the customer with minimal “unfolding” on their part.)

4. Help the customer with the product research. In a giant office supplies store, with a Xobni box in hand, the customer has little immediate access to review websites (such as Lifehacker or CNET) to help offer recommendations or guidance for their purchase. They can’t easily talk to their friends or co-workers who might have used Xobni before. The customer is largely alone.

So, as a newer company with an esoteric product name, we wanted to quickly establish credibility. We bubbled up  reviews and ratings we had received (from such publications as The Wall Street Journal and CNET) on the front and back covers. And as Fortune Magazine points out, we’re very likely “the first to have testimonial “tweets” printed on the outside (of the box) from customers.

5. You can only publish once. Make sure to review, review, review. The great thing about downloadable software is that it’s highly iterative, and relatively easy to correct little mistakes. With a physical box and CD-ROM disc, we had to be much more diligent in checking every detail. The extra time required for all these details was essential: to review trademarks and typos, quotes, system requirements, legal, and all the other minutiae.

Getting a proof from the printer not only helps check for accurate colors, bleeds, and typography, but also follows up on all the points above. Even before that, we printed out and folded some “paper prototypes” of earlier mockups  to solicit feedback from senior management – as well as randoms on the street. Holding the physical (albeit fake) product in ones hand can help reveal more insights and spur more conversations.

All in all, “the box project” resurfaced some really important, yet fundamental, design principles for us here at Xobni – and gave our designers a new fun way to think about our world – even if just for a little while. It was fun while it lasted, but we’re happy to be back to our iterative, fast-paced work online!

This week, Xobni entered new territory – The retail store.  Yes, Xobni, an online software company (with over 5 million downloads in 2 years) has actually gone to the effort to design a box, put our software on discs, and navigate the retail distribution channels to offer Xobni Plus for Outlook in retail stores across the country such as Fry’s and Office Max – as well as on Amazon.com.  It seems rather retro, but we discovered big opportunity…

The idea of putting Xobni in a box was initially met with resistance and doubt, but after a little digging, we saw big opportunity for sales and brand awareness.  From our research, we learned a few things – People of all ages, genders and demographics are shopping in stores.  Many of us do it.  And some people like to feel, hold, and see before they purchase.

We conducted a Harris survey (June, 2010; 2174 responses) which showed that 80% of respondents who plan to purchase software in the next 12 months said they were at least somewhat likely to buy software from brick-and-mortar retail stores (40% said they were extremely likely or very likely).  Being in-store also builds brand awareness and validation.  Something about being on a shelf makes it automatically more trustworthy to some.  According to our survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they are more likely to buy software if they’ve seen it in stores.  So while we are confident that being in retail stores will be a rewarding distribution channel for us, we also think it will have an impact on our online software sales.

In addition to the fact that some people are still buying some software in stores and the brand building benefits, it also didn’t hurt that millions will be flocking to stores starting this month to purchase Microsoft Office 2010.  As you probably know if you are reading this blog, Xobni is a great add-in for Outlook, and makes sense for us to have a presence right next to it in stores for consumers to easily purchase.

It’s been an interesting road… a fast-moving, agile online software company stepping into the notoriously slow offline world.  And a note to our environmentally conscious friends: We’re one of you.   All the packaging materials are made from sustainably grown forests.

We’ll be posting another blog post later this week about the adjustment our awesome in-house designers had to make when learning the ins and outs of designing a box that sits on shelves!

Filed under: Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2010/06/16/xobni-%e2%80%93-coming-to-a-store-near-you/feed/ 3 xobniblog box2 box2 - love again http://blog.xobni.com/2010/06/11/xobni-featured-on-googles-developer-blog/ http://blog.xobni.com/2010/06/11/xobni-featured-on-googles-developer-blog/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:27:17 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1899 ]]> by Terra

Today, Google posted a guest blog post from Jeff (Xobni CEO) on their Apps Developer Blog for our work porting Gmail contextual gadget development into Outlook. Jeff covers off on the trials and tribulations of working in Outlook, and how we’ve harnessed our Outlook ninja to help Gmail gadget developers get their gadgets into the world’s biggest email platform – with no additional work.

In Jeff’s words from the post:

“…The first step was to get Google on board.  We weren’t sure what to expect from them when we explained our plan. The first response we got from the Google team was puzzlement. Why and how would we do this? In a short amount of time, Google’s mood progressed from quiet to excited (phew).  So we set up the war room in the office, cleared our calendars and weekends for the foreseeable future and started cranking away.”

“The result: Developers can now write one application for Gmail contextual gadgets and will soon deploy not just to the millions of Gmail users, but also to the millions of Outlook users: the same code available in both worlds. Thanks to Google’s simple but powerful platform (and the hard work of Xobni’s engineers), you just write your gadgets for Gmail and they are ready to be used in Outlook as well.”

Want to give your gadget a spin in Outlook? You can get the build here (note: the product is in “Developer Preview now”). We expect to put our first gadgets live in Outlook in the coming weeks.

• Name: Sue Rothberg

• Position & Company: Principal, Sue Rothberg Productions, a Boston-based video production company specializing in a documentary-style storytelling approach for clients.

• Xobni user since: the Beta days (over a year ago)

• Product she uses: Xobni for Outlook

• Favorite feature: “the way Xobni indexes all my emails with sub categories such as attachments, network of other people, etc. What used to be a very time consuming task of searching for an email is now a breeze.”

• Product request: Xobni for the soon-to-be-released Outlook for Mac

Taking care of email to get to the real work

As she runs her own video production company, email is not the core component of Sue’s business (that status might be better granted to, say, producing video), but the time she spends in Outlook is still vital for client relations and putting the pieces in place for her work to get done.  We originally set out to help people spend less time searching their inboxes, so hearing accolades such as the following gets us PSYCHED.  Sue said of Xobni for Outlook: “I would say it is one of the best applications ever invented…and I am not kidding.  I have been an Outlook user for the better part of 10 years, and Xobni has made the application easier to use, more robust, and most importantly, it has made me more efficient.”  Awesome.

File deleted?  Not a problem if it lives on in your inbox

Sue’s Xobni to the Rescue story: “Once I had deleted an image, but when I searched, Xobni found the attachment within an email. There have been many other times where it saved me by finding something that was deleted or by getting to an email address very quickly so I could locate a file that had been exchanged…this application is a must for anyone who is an Outlook power user.”

Many thanks to Sue for sharing her Xobni experience.  Have a Xobni story you’d like to share?  Want to be featured in One User Per Week?  Let us know in the comments!

Four years ago, Xobni was still an idea, and I was 21 years old. The company and I have come a long way since the early days in my dorm room at MIT. Now Xobni has been downloaded over five million times, the company has raised over $30M, and at 25, I can finally rent a car without additional fees!

Founders’ roles change almost daily in a fast growing startup. For me, I was able to move off the engineering critical path when we convinced Frank Cort to join Xobni and lead our engineering team. Based on his great work, we promoted Frank to VP of Engineering last year.

In the last four years, the engineering team has accomplished remarkable things. Initially we were told that what we wanted to do in Outlook couldn’t be done. Later we were told that what we had in mind for the BlackBerry wasn’t technically feasible. And even people inside the company were dubious when we announced the time frame to port Google’s brand new contextual Gmail gadget platform to Outlook. It quickly became part of the culture to build things where others had failed; we thrive on hitting high notes nobody thought possible.

And it is in this spirit, I am excited to pass the flag to Peter Monaco.

In our quest to find the best and brightest CTO, Peter stuck out as the sure winner. Let me just highlight a few the things that impressed us. Peter earned his undergrad degree in CS from Dartmouth College, and his Masters in Computer Language Processing from Cambridge. After time at the world-famous Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Peter co-founded Nuance (NUAN) in 1994, and helped take it public in 2000. It is still the leader in voice recognition today. He was later vice president of application engineering at recognized technical leader Tellme, which was acquired by Microsoft for a reputed $800M in 2007.

The reference checks we made on Peter were remarkable. Everyone we spoke with about Peter raved about him. We heard over and over again, “one of the best in the business.” In fact, we felt challenged to find someone to say something bad about him, so we poked around for the grumpiest engineers from his former teams. But, alas, all we got was “about the only manager in my career I would work for again.” Just amazing.

I am pumped to have Peter join Frank to lead technology and engineering at Xobni, and I look forward to collaborating with them on our plans for world domination. And while I will remain actively involved in helping Xobni, I have decided this is a good time for me to give up my day-to-day role at Xobni and pass the reigns to Peter and Frank. I am keeping my seat on the board of directors and I will be actively involved as an advisor wherever the team needs me.

I’m more confident and more excited than ever about Xobni’s future. We’re in great financial shape, have solid revenue, strong leadership, and, most importantly, have a kick-butt engineering team to build the best products in email search and relationship management. For me, I need a little rest and will start dabbling around on some new ideas.

Thanks to all of our loyal customers and the amazing Xobni team for your support.

All the best,
Adam

(English post below)

Heute möchte ich Ihnen mit großer Freude die Freischaltung von Xobni auf deutsch bekanntgeben. Xobni, die Randleiste mit der Sie schnell und einfach Ihren Posteingang durchsuchen und Kontaktdaten auffinden können, steht nun auf deutsch zur Verfügung!

Rund 50% der Xobni Nutzer leben außerhalb der USA, ein großer Teil davon in Deutschland. Daher haben wir uns entschlossen, als ersten Schritt zu einer internationalen Expansion, unsere Präsenz im deutschsprachigen Raum durch eine deutsche Version zu untermauern. Unsere Produkte stehen damit ab sofort auf den deutschsprachigen Märkten (Deutschland, Österreich und Schweiz) zur Verfügung.

Natürlich wären wir nicht in der Lage, ein überzeugendes Produkt ohne die enge Integration von XING zu liefern, dem auf den deutschsprachigen Märkten beliebtesten Business-Netzwerk.

Ab heute stehen den Xobni Nutzern folgende Dienste zur Verfügung:

• Unter www.xobni.de (Deutsche website) steht die neueste Version von Xobni für Outlook 1.9.3 zum downloaden bereit.
• Eine komplett deutsche Installation (auf einem deutschen Betriebssystem), ist ab sofort möglich.
• 90% von Xobni, einschließlich des Intro-Videos und alle wichtigen Aspekte der Benutzeroberfläche ist ins Deutsche übersetzt
• XING wurde integriert und ist die Standard-Erweiterung in deutscher Sprache, zeigt Profil-Informationen an, Details und das Foto in der Randleiste von Xobni. Derzeitige Nutzer der Englischen Version von Xobni können Xing in den Optionen> Integration> Anpassen-Menü integrieren.
• Wechseln Sie zwischen deutscher und englischer Sprache jederzeit mit unserer Xobni “Optionen” Menü

Der Randleiste sind noch nicht vollständig übersetzt, und Einige Passagen auf unsere Website. Wir arbeiten jedoch daran und werden unseren Nutzern in absehbarer Zeit auch einen deutschsprachigen Support zur Verfügung stellen.

Wir wünschen allen unseren Nutzern viel Spaß beim Ausprobieren von der neuen deutschsprachigen Xobni, und integrierung von XING in Outlook!

Wir haben bereits sehr positive Reaktionen auf unsere Xobni für Blackberry (noch in englischer Sprache) und Xobni One, mit deren Hilfe unsere Nutzer den Xobni-Service auch unterwegs nutzen können.

Für Unternehmen Anfragen, können Kunden auch die Möglichkeit unseren deutschen Wiederverkäufer zu nutzen.

Viel Spaß!

English post:

Today I am pleased to announce the release of Xobni for Outlook auf Deutsch. The Outlook sidebar that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy is now available in German!

Roughly 50% of Xobni customers reside outside of the US. In the past, they had access to the one and only English Xobni for Outlook. No more. Our premier effort to expand Xobni globally and support a growing International user base begins today with the German-speaking markets (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).

Of course, we have also super-charged Xobni for Outlook with XING photos and business profiles. XING is the most popular business network for German speakers, and has lately been the #1 requested Xobni extension.

So please visit xobni.de (German page) or xobni.com to download Xobni for Outlook 1.9.3 (build 11166), which includes these new features (since Xobni 1.9.2):

• A fully German installation process (if on a German OS), and option to choose the German or English interface
• 90% of Xobni, including the intro video and all major aspects of the interface, has been translated into German.
• XING will appear by default for the German version of Xobni, showing job titles, photos, detailed profile information, as well as an “Add” button for people not yet in your XING network. Those using the English version of Xobni will need to “enable” Xing in the Options > Integration > Customize menu.
• Switch between German and English at any time via the Xobni Options menu.
• Other Outlook 2010-related bug fixes (ribbon menus appearing more consistently and improved AutoSuggest stability)

We do not yet provide customer support in German, but we will continue to improve upon this and deliver our German users the best experience possible.

Please join me in trying out Xobni auf Deutsch and we hope you’ll enjoy the new experience and tight integration of XING in Outlook.

Of course, our German users will also appreciate being able to use Xobni for Blackberry (although still in English) and Xobni One to complete their entire Xobni experience and have access to their contacts wherever they go.

For any Enterprise inquiries customers will also be able to leverage our German Resellers.

Enjoy!

Update May 21st: Build 11108 was replaced with build 11166 to fix a LinkedIn image issue.

Today, Google announced a brand new developer platform for Gmail called Gmail contextual gadgets. This powerful platform essentially allows developers to build web gadgets that display alongside email messages. If you are a Gmail user, you may have seen these gadgets in the form of YouTube videos, Yelp listings, Flickr previews, or Picasa previews directly below a message that contained links to those services. We can’t wait to build a full-featured Xobni gadget for Gmail, but we’ll save that for later; I’m here to talk about something very big that Xobni is giving developers today…

Bringing Gmail contextual gadgets to Microsoft Outlook

We know better than most the challenges of developing in Outlook. Since our early days, partners and customers have approached us with ideas and hopes for developing in Xobni (hence, Outlook), but didn’t have the resources to build and support a standard Outlook add-in. To address this, a Xobni extension platform has been on the drawing board for a long time. But when we saw the simplicity and power of Google’s new contextual gadget platform, we knew we had to bring it to Outlook immediately. Gmail’s new contextual gadgets platform provides a great alternative for developers looking to reach Outlook’s 600 million users, particularly for developers with more web development skills than desktop software experience.

Today we are releasing a Xobni for Outlook Developer Preview that will allow any developer to test their Gmail contextual gadget in Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Initially, only developers will have access to use and test Xobni’s new platform. Once deployed to users, these new gadgets will appear in Outlook via a horizontal bar at the bottom of messages, which easily expands or contracts, as needed. This is in concert with the current Xobni sidebar in Outlook, that offers lightning-fast search for information and contacts in email. Over the next few weeks, we will work closely with developers to finalize the details for distribution, monetization and placement of these gadgets.

So what’s the next step?

If you’re a developer, check out the docs on Google Code, then hop on over to http://www.xobni.com/developer, and dig right in.

On Monday morning we released an update (view release notes) for Xobni for BlackBerry. This is an exciting release for us because we got to spend some quality alone time with Xobni Rank. For those of you don’t know, Xobni Rank is our way of prioritizing your contacts. The simple explanation is that we prioritize them based on your communication habits but trust me, there is much more involved. This area truly excites us here at Xobni so keep an eye out as we continue to refine Xobni Rank.

We added/improved the product in 4 key ways to address feedback from our customers as well as our Enterprise partners. In summary, in this release, we:

• Improved Xobni Rank helping you get to the most important contacts fastest.
• Added seamless deployment and activation via BlackBerry Enterprise Server for our Enterprise customers
• Added support for downloading the client via Opera Mini and Bolt
• Lastly, we gave you more control over your contacts. You can now create new contacts, edit titles, companies, and the rest of your contacts profile information.

Thank you to all of our users for their fantastic feedback and endless desire to help us make the product better. Don’t forget to submit feedback and report bugs via “Contact Xobni” in the menu of the Xobni app.

Download the 1.0.63.1 release now by going to ‘bb.xobni.com/download’ on your BlackBerry browser.

• Name: Sarah Craddock

• Position: Residence Hall Director

• Company: University of Northern Colorado

• Xobni user since: 2007

• Product she uses: Xobni for Outlook

• Favorite feature: Files Exchanged

• Email philosophy: “Inbox zero, whenever I can”

Between carrying out closing procedures for the academic year and gearing up for the summer schedule of conferences and other events, Sarah had tackled one of the busiest weeks of the year at her job as a university Residence Hall Director just before I caught up with her.  The amount of activity Sarah is responsible for managing naturally leads to a flurry of time-sensitive email–and a great opportunity for Xobni for Outlook to have a big impact on her efficiency.

“What’s that thing on the side of your screen?”: Sarah has first-hand experience of the “over-the-shoulder” factor of Xobni’s sidebar in Outlook.  Coworkers walking by are accustomed to the standard colors and UI of Outlook, but when Xobni’s presence grabs their attention, they often stop and ask Sarah questions about the plugin.

Rising in Xobni Rank: Once she had shared Xobni with her coworkers*, their discovery of Fun Facts, including Xobni Rank, brought out the competitive spirit in some of them.  Developing strategies to get to the top of someone’s contact list has become a running joke in her office.  The winning tactic?  Of course, working closely with someone tends to lead to them becoming a highly ranked contact for you, but there was a quick and dirty method of making use of company listservs alluded to as well…

It was interesting to hear how Xobni works for Sarah in her position within Higher Education (especially since it was quite different from the experience of my first OUPW interviewee in Higher Ed).  If you’re interested in sharing how you use Xobni as part of the One User Per Week blog series, let me know in the comments, and I’ll be in touch.

______________________________________

*Oftentimes, Sarah uses our in-product invite system to share Xobni with others.  We love it so much when people do this that we give away one Xobni Plus license a week for a user who sends invites through the product.  Try it out: just click the heart button at the bottom of the Xobni sidebar, and Xobni will suggest Outlook users to invite from your contacts.

Last week we participated in making a video titled “Choose The Cloud.” For us this video is about how the software world is changing for enterprise customers. We teamed up with other startups who share the vision of building products that meet the needs of the end customer. It is a vision of quickly iterating on the needs of customers. It is a vision of enterprise customers taking the software they use at home to work. It is a vision of enterprise customers choosing what software works best for them. And it is a vision that all these changes happen in minutes, not months.

In the last year Xobni launched Xobni Plus – our first premium offering, Xobni Enterprise – a customizable and controllable version of Xobni for the enterprise, SalesForce.com & Sharepoint extensions, a BlackBerry app, our own cloud service Xobni One – a service that connects Xobni profiles across the web, and more. We want to continue to create products and services for our customers at this same pace, and through the same process of intense interaction and focus on the end consumer.

So join us, Box.net, Get Satisfaction, PBworks, SlideRocket, Socialtext, SugarCRM & Zuora in sharing this vision. Share this with your contacts by tweeting here.

• Name: Joe Troyen-Schwartz

• Position: Business Analyst

• Company: Opera Solutions, a technology-powered consulting firm

• Heard about Xobni through: Matt Mak, an Analytics specialist at Opera

• Product he uses: Xobni for Outlook

• Favorite feature: Attachments Exchanged

• Product request: Xobni for Gmail

I’m excited to feature Joe in OUPW this week, not only because he’s an enthusiastic Xobni devotee, but also because he exemplifies a user type that has yet to make an appearance on our blog: the recent (well, within 2 years) college grad.  Although frustration with enterprise software is widespread, using stodgy business software can be especially painful for those of us who have gone through school accustomed to using all the cool tech tools we choose.  The functionality Xobni brings to Outlook makes the office software behave in a way much more like what Joe and other Millenials have come to expect from the technology we use.  It certainly seems to resonate with Joe–here’s what he had to say about Xobni:

Detangling the inbox jungle: “Xobni organizes the jungle that is my mailbox into meaningful views.  Groups all conversations by contact, and then allows me to slice and dice from there- by conversation, attachments, links, or just superpowerful search.”

Attachments in a flash: “I don’t even save files on my hard drive anymore.  Seriously, it feels like cheating.”

Email invincibility: “Today my Outlook wasn’t working so I had to spend the day without Xobni.  I felt mortal.”

It’s always awesome to hear Xobni having such a dramatic impact on an Outlook user.  It’s particularly reaffirming that workers at Opera are adopting Xobni, as the consulting firm is known for leveraging the best tech tools for both internal and client use.

If you want to participate in OUPW and get your name in lights on the Xobni blog (and a free t-shirt!), let me know in the comments.

For my One User Per Week chat this week, I spoke with Ralph “Stew” Goss, a loyal Xobni user since learning about our Outlook product back when Bill Gates demoed it during his keynote at the MS Office Developers Conference:

Since February, Stew has been wearing many hats as an Application Specialist, Programmer, and IT wizard at the Portland, ME office of Redlon & Johnson, one of the nation’s leading wholesale distributors of industrial products.  Ever the evangelist, Stew told me one of his early moves there was to introduce his new Outlook-using coworkers to Xobni.  A highly technical data buff himself, Stew likes to share his appreciation for the power of Xobni’s approach to email search.  When he installs the software on new users’ machines, two of his favorite features to show off are Xobni’s attachment-finding speed and how you can zero in on a particular email by person, rather than typing in a keyword and choosing amongst every instance of that word in your email corpus.

Around the world with Xobni Analytics

At a previous organization, Stew worked in international customer service, frequently providing support on projects centered as far away as Korea and China.  With this extreme time zone difference came various logistical challenges, including an email schedule that caused his Outlook inbox to fill up during sleeping hours.  Rather than being daunted by this asynchronous flow of correspondence, Stew realized he had just the tool to manage it intelligently: Xobni Analytics!  When he read an email from a particular contact, he would take note of his or her sending patterns to get a sense of what time the contact was most likely to open his response.  Instead of constantly adding and subtracting hours to account for time zones, Stew said he could use the graphs* in Xobni Analytics to gauge the response time required and manage his work flow: if it was likely the middle of the night at his contact’s home base, “I knew I could wait until the end of the day to respond.”  This way, Stew could figure out which contacts would be apt to see his response first, and prioritize his emails accordingly.

Please sir, may I have some more Actions?

Stew was overall very satisfied by his experience with Xobni, but when pressed for constructive criticism, he did come forth with the suggestion that we could perhaps take better advantage of the “Actions” tab in the Xobni extensions panel.  Currently the actions available to users there are “Schedule time with…” (which auto-generates an email to set up a meeting with your contact with your availability as represented in your Outlook calendar) and “Email…” (which…well, opens a compose window so you can email that contact), and there is some unused space underneath the options shown there.  It’s interesting to think of ways we could capitalize on that spare real estate–keep an eye on that tab to see how that area develops, and if there are more actions you’d like to see available in the Xobni sidebar, do let us know.

In addition to his day job as a Xobni evangel–err, Application Specialist, Stew also runs GuruTech, a business that specializes in creating scripted products and doing custom work in Second Life.  Thanks Stew, for the great conversation.

If you’re interested in being featured in our One User Per Week blog series just comment on this post, and I’ll get in touch with you.  Phone calls are about 30 minutes long, generally pain-free, and have even been described by participants with words such as “enlightening,” “interesting,” “useful,” …and some even go so far as to say “fun.”

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*Even if you don’t actively use Xobni Analytics in the sidebar tab or popout window, it’s working for you every time you perform a search.  Your contacts’ Xobni Ranks dictate the order in which they appear in search results in the Xobni sidebar and in which they are AutoSuggested to you in the compose window (if you’re using Xobni Plus).

This week is a big one for us, as we launch the Xobni for Outlook 2010 campaign to go with the product launch/review posted last week.  For all of you in the Seattle/Redmond area, you will see the sky graced, the buses flanked, the radio waves singing and the sign spinners shaking with nothing but Xobni love.  Now Xobni and Outlook 2010 are together again.  At last.

Why did we launch this product with such fanfare?  The answer is easy.  Microsoft employees are some of Xobni’s best customers as they live and die in Outlook email.  We wanted to ensure they knew they could reunite with Xobni, now that it’s compatible with the Outlook 2010 software.

For all you folks in the Northwest, we have created a little fun… Take photos of the Xobni’s you see in the public; the plane, the bus, the sign spinners and post them to the Facebook Xobni Fan page – We will be randomly giving away t-shirts to some of the people who submit a photo.

There are also some great new features for Outlook 2003 and 2007, so take a look at this post for all the detail!

And don’t forget to download the latest version today!

We’ve been cranking on the some terrific updates to the BlackBerry product, and we’re excited to share them with you.

In the first release we focused on the Xobni Automatic address book – finding all the email addresses and phone numbers that exist in your inbox and in your BlackBerry address book. Not to worry, we didn’t forget that sometimes systems need human intervention. Thus our latest feature; the ability to edit and merge contacts.

We’re going to keep cranking and you can expect more rapid fire releases in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

Remember the massive effort undertaken to make sure that the world’s technology was ready for Y2K? The BBC reported that the work done in preparation for Y2K cost over $300 billion. Most of that work was considered a success if it remained completely invisible.

At Xobni, we’ve had our own little Y2K in recent weeks (minus the $300 billion price tag) and we call it “Y2K+10.” When Microsoft announced that Outlook 2010 would be available to consumers in June, we were excited to integrate with the updated platform. Since then, a select group of us have been heads-down (others were slightly pre-occupied). Integrating with the new 64-bit flavor of Outlook accounted for a hefty portion of the effort, though users of all versions of Outlook + Xobni will now benefit from that groundwork.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Xobni now fully supports Outlook 2010 – a full six weeks prior to the expected consumer launch of the brand-new version of Outlook. In addition, Xobni 1.9.2 is also fully compatible with the free Outlook 2010 beta that is currently available to the public.

While most of our focus has been on making Xobni work seamlessly with Outlook 2010 (in fact this has been the #1 feature request recently), we have also incorporated Xobni into the new Outlook ribbon for 2010-only functionality. In addition, there are a few features, detailed below, that will be attractive to Xobni users with Outlook 2003 and 2007 as well.

So please download Xobni 1.9.2 (build 10908) and enjoy the “invisible” features today.

Update: CNET’s Download.com has given Xobni five out of five stars! See the full review.
Update 2: Build 10605 has been replaced with build 10908 to fix an “Xobni not loading” issue that some were experiencing.

(All features mentioned below are new since version 1.9.1 build 10169):

Outlook 2010 Compatibility

• All features available in previous versions are now working and optimized for Outlook 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit) public beta version and later.
• New Quick-Access in the Ribbon (see illustration)
  - Search from Ribbon when Xobni sidebar is collapsed
  - Show/Hide Xobni sidebar with one click
  - Xobni menu always available
• If multiple Outlook windows are open, clicking “Show/Hide Xobni” will move the Xobni sidebar to your current Outlook window.

Non-Administrator Install

• Many users who are not “administrators” on their computers can now install Xobni.

Other Enhancements

• Fewer conflicts experienced with other add-ins (Trend Micro Anti-Spam, for example)
• Xobni AutoSuggestions can be deleted from the compose screen. Simply highlight the suggested email address you’d like to delete and hit the “delete” key. If you email that address again in the future, the suggestion will return after the next Xobni index process takes place.
• Twitter profile images now show in business card area if a Twitter name is already chosen (see illustration).

More Minor Changes

• Users of Xobni One who have more than one copy of Outlook will now see profile photos transfer from one Xobni sidebar to the other.
• Photos of people appear in the Network tab instead of small grey or orange icons.
• The Network section has been moved below the Files Exchanged section.
• Task bar is now to the left of the Xobni bar in Outlook 2010
• Xobni shows the recipient of the currently-selected email if the email is from you, no matter what folder it’s in. This is helpful for users that keep their sent mail outside of the default Sent Items folder.

Known Issues

• In Outlook 2010, the minimized Xobni is slightly wider than in Outlook 2007
• When the Xobni installer completes and runs Outlook for the first time, the message “Windows Desktop Search is not available” may appear at the bottom of Outlook. Restarting Outlook solves this permanently (details).

Please continue to let us know how we can keep improving your productivity through the Xobni Community, and thank you to everyone who participated in the topics that helped inform today’s update.

General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.
If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks for using Xobni!

Download the Latest Xobni Now

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Koni Konigsberg, Director of Operations at ROW Adventures, for this week’s One User Per Week interview.  After years of trip leading for the adventure travel company, Koni moved to the full-time position he currently holds, in which he coordinates the day-to-day operations of the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho*-based outfit.  Being Director if Operations involves a much-increased volume of admin work–including, inevitably, a ton of emailing.

Organizing email contacts, in and out of the water

Koni manages a group of full-time employees and seasonal trip leaders that tops out between 40 and 50 people.  Since a large number of the guides is on the road and in the water for rafting trips during the summer, he relies on email to coordinate this staff and ROW’s clients, to the point which he reports, like many of our users: “I live in Outlook.”  In the past, his method of organizing his email was to keep an individual Outlook folder for each employee and distributor he contacted, which required a lot of continuous maintenance on his part.  Xobni has totally changed his email habits since he discovered it a couple of years ago when Lifehacker gave away invites to our limited beta.  He now keeps only three folders: “Distributors,” “Guides,” and “Employees.”   Many Xobni users have reported doing away with Outlook folders altogether.

Keeping track of transients

While having a highly active group of guides clearly has its advantages for leading trips, it can be difficult to keep in touch with members of his staff in the off season, when they are often off on non-ROW-related adventures.  Yearly activities like sending birthday cards (and equally thrilling W-2 forms) used to be tricky when a guide changed email addresses and his manually-entered snail mail address from the Outlook address book was lost.  However, Koni has found that Xobni makes wintertime contact with his guides much easier, since by merging individual profiles as their contact info changes, he can keep an uninterrupted record of all of the communication he has had with them.  He’s also come to appreciate the Facebook friendships he was initially hesitant to accept from his guides, since he can see the cool stuff they’ve been up to in off season while he’s finding their contact info in Outlook.

Feature request: integration of companies’ social media profiles

Koni had a few interesting feature requests, including one in particular that struck a chord with me, since it applies to growing a company’s following across social media.  While he enjoys seeing the Twitter and Facebook streams of his individual Xobni contacts, he finds he’s often also interested in the social media action of his contact’s company, rather than just personal info.  Koni suggested that Xobni offer an option to set a contact’s profile to show her company’s Twitter and/or Facebook fan page stream, and perhaps the ability to toggle between the individual and company profiles.  I’d love to see this kind of functionality be added to the product.

It was great talking to Koni about his experience with Xobni.  If you’re interested in hearing more about ROW Adventures, check out their Facebook fan page.  And, as always, if you’re interested in being interviewed for One User Per Week (and gaining eternal Internet glory, as well as a free Xobni t-shirt), comment on this post and let me know.

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*If you’re looking for a beautiful, slightly-off-the-beaten-path spot to visit in the U.S., you could do a lot worse than Coeur d’Alene.  “Barbara Walters called the city ‘a little slice of Heaven’ and included it in her list of most fascinating places to visit.”

Now that the public has had access to Xobni for BlackBerry for a few weeks, I thought it would be an opportune moment to feature a user of the new mobile app in our One User Per Week blog series.  I asked Tyler, who heads up our alpha forum, to put out an interview request to those who had been testers, and I was surprised that I recognized the name of the first respondent: Nan Palmero, the winner of last year’s holiday letter-writing contest.  Eager to learn more about Nan and hear a seasoned Xobni for Outlook user’s thoughts on Xobni for BlackBerry, I gave him a call this morning.

Many email accounts, many contacts

Nan’s day job is “Chief Inspiration Officer” at Sales By 5, a position in which, as the name suggests, he performs many typical duties of a CIO, including evaluating new technology for the company (not coincidentally, everyone there uses Xobni for Outlook), as well as internal and external team building, crafting marketing messages for clients, and a variety of other roles.  As though playing the part of inspiring all of the employees within his organization as well as clients doesn’t keep him (and his BlackBerry) busy enough, Nan also works as a contributing writer for BlackBerry Cool, a leading blog within the BB community.  With unique email accounts from these two positions, as well as a personal Gmail account, all feeding into his BlackBerry, staying on top of saving contact information in the phone is a real pain point for him.  While the BlackBerry itself only keeps email from the last 60 days, Nan observed that Xobni’s ability to bring in contact info from all historical email allows users to “do a deep dive and find the contact that was otherwise lost.”

Dodge awkward phone calls with Xobni for BlackBerry!

I asked Nan if there had been any instances during his use of Xobni for BlackBerry when it really came through for him in a notable way, and he did indeed have a story to share.  Recently he needed to arrange a lunch with an acquaintance with whom he knew he had exchanged emails in the past and whose contact info he could have sworn he had saved.  When he went to email her, her address was not autopopulating, and Nan feared that he would have to call her up and do the ol’ “I know we’ve emailed each other before, but I can’t…seem…to find…your address…” call.  Instead, Nan remembered that Xobni could pull up her email address instantly, even though he hadn’t saved it, and bam!–lunch scheduled, via email, and the world saw one fewer awkward phone call.

It was especially cool to hear Nan’s perspective on the BlackBerry app development process, as he is a BlackBerry power user as well as an alpha tester of Xobni for BB.  We really appreciate the support we get from him and all enthusiastic Xobni users–in fact, we count on it in order for our products to succeed.  If you’re interested in participating in a One User Per Week interview, leave a comment on this post, and I’ll be in touch.

Well, today, I am pleased to announce: hiatus ended.  The One User Per Week blog series is being revived—and version 2.0 will include such enhanced features as a consistent schedule, posts addressing new Xobni products in addition to our Outlook sidebar, and a new author (err, that’s a feature alteration, rather than an enhancement ).  I’m excited to take over the reins and get an in-depth understanding of how individuals make use of Xobni.  And so, without further adieu, let’s jump right into One User Per Week: The New Class.

Mason Carpenter, Professor at Univ. of Wisconsin School of Business

My phone call last week with Mason Carpenter, Professor of Management and Human Resources at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, was a great jump-restart to One User Per Week.  We’ve never featured someone who works in higher education before, so I was eager to hear about how Xobni is getting put to use in a university setting, and Mason is an engaged Xobni evangelist, so it was great to hear about how he’s been spreading the word about Xobni, as well as how he sees it fitting in as a tool in the online social networking landscape.

The hunt for the “Ultimate Aggregator”

Mason is very interested in social networking and in particular, tools that incorporate social media into business.  He has a bold dream that one day he’ll encounter the “Ultimate Aggregator”, in which all of the information he is looking for about an individual is just there.  That dream is something that our company and Mason have in common, so it was pretty wonderful to hear him say that currently Xobni “is the closest thing I have to one-stop shopping.”  We’re working hard on becoming the Ultimate Address Book, so that “the closest thing I have to” will be omitted in future utterances of that statement.

Attachment magic: “It’s just there.”

The volume of email Mason manages working at an educational institution (over 100 non-junk email messages daily) qualifies him for the dually elite and painful categorization we refer to as Email Power User.  So while he initially was attracted to our Outlook sidebar, which he heard about through a friend at McKinsey & Co., for its social media integration, he has found Xobni’s search capabilities invaluable for hunting through his historical email.  He noted that he has become especially dependent on Xobni’s ability to find attachments: Mason, like most Outlook users, used to take for granted that finding an old attachment exchanged with a contact would be a pain.  With Xobni, he reported, “it’s just there.”  Again, that’s exactly our goal—you shouldn’t have to think about the right syntax to construct your search to get the information you need, it should just be there.

For recruiters, Xobni profile = instant snapshot of a candidate’s web presence

When I spoke with him, Mason was looking forward to a talk he’s giving in April to 100+ HR professionals who work in MBA recruiting.  He was excited about the prospect of sharing Xobni with this group, since, in addition to the major productivity boost Xobni provides its users in general, its social network integration makes Xobni specifically valuable for recruiters, in that it can instantly get them a snapshot of a candidate’s web presence.  By now, most of us know that recruiters often evaluate candidates’ online footprints to weed through the tremendous volume of applicants they encounter daily, and Mason confirmed for me that a basic Google search** is one of the top tools for this group of professionals.

One trouble with getting info about a candidate this way is that sorting through the search results to find ones that pertain to the specific person you’re looking for (particularly in the case of more common names) can wind up being a pretty time-consuming task.  Spending 5 minutes to enter a candidate’s name into a search engine (and maybe Facebook, LinkedIn, & Twitter) manually and then comb through to find relevant results might not seem like that much time, but apply that process to 20, 50, 100 candidates and suddenly you’re talking about serious time.   It was exhilarating to explore this use case with Mason because he had some really good insight into how using Xobni could improve this process for recruiters.  We’ve gained a lot of traction in the HR community already, and I’m excited to hear about how Mason’s presentation of Xobni will be received in his talk next month.

It was a pleasure to chat with Mason, and I’m looking forward to talking to more users for future OUPW posts.  If you’re interested in having your Xobni experience featured on the blog, please let me know by commenting on this post (be sure to leave your email…which will not be visible to anyone but our blog admins), and I’ll get in touch with you.

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*In our defense, we’ve had a lot to be distracted by during that time, including the release of Xobni Plus, Xobni Enterprise, and most recently, Xobni for BlackBerry and Xobni One.  But enough excuses—I’m willing to bet that we’ll be able to release some hot new products and maintain this blog series at the same time going forward.

**As a side note, if you haven’t noticed before, we have a Google search bar integrated into our Outlook client, should you want more info from the web than what’s already presented in the Xobni profile you’re viewing,:

Here at Xobni we are always inspired to read articles about the collision between email, social networking and productivity as this is the heart of what we do.  With so many new channels to communicate and broadcast our latest updates, moods and whereabouts, one has to wonder if email will become the telegraph of today.

It is always refreshing to see articles like Opinion: E-mail is dead. Long live e-mail! by Preston Gralla that reinforce what we have always believed here at Xobni – Relationships and contacts are of critical importance to all of our lives, and much of that information is found in email.  Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter help complete the picture – but email is and continues to be at the center.

If you find yourself in Las Vegas this week for CTIA (or other extra-curriculars), please stop by and see us.  Our friends at RIM have given us a home at the conference by asking us to demo our newly launched app for the BlackBerry in their booth.

RIM’s booth is 3506.  You can find us there selling our wares – with sore feet and smiles.  :)

So… we knew what we were doing was cool stuff, but we were thrilled that you do too!  The attention received around the world for the launch of our first mobile product last week was awesome.  From coverage in business outlets (Wall Street Journal, New York Times) to product reviews on top tech sites (CNET and CIO Magazine) and lots of love from mobile and BlackBerry blogs (CrackBerry, BlackBerry Cool, BerryReview), we feel we got a good start on getting the word out about our BlackBerry product and the Xobni One service, and are thrilled with the business received as a result!

Please allow us a tad bit of chest-beating…

• “If you use a PC, Microsoft Outlook and a BlackBerry, Xobni offers a smart solution for automatically organizing all of your contacts into one place and allows for your contacts to be stored somewhere other than just in Outlook or just on your mobile device.” – Wall Street Journal, Katie Boehret
• “If you’re one of the many BlackBerry-toting hot shots who fret about the fastest, least laborious way to get their work contacts onto their phones, I have an answer for you. Or rather, Xobni does…” – Jessica Dolcourt, CNET
• “In my opinion Xobni is one of the few “absolutely must have” apps for BlackBerry.” – CrackBerry.com, Adam Zeis
• “It’s a pretty exciting app. It works well and it saved me on several occasions when trying to reach people.” – Katie Boehret, Wall Street Journal (video)
• “You may never use your BlackBerry contacts application, or address book, in the same way again. I know I won’t. As long as the new Xobni for BlackBerry application is available, that is.” – CIO Magazine/IDG Sites – Al Sacco
• “Instead of a traditional alphabetical list (the alphabet is so uncool these days), Xobni for BlackBerry scours through your emails, text messages, phone calls, and other communication to create a new contact list in order of importance.” – FastCompany, Dan Nosowitz
• “With advancements like this from companies like Xobni, it’s comforting to know that the technology to merge address books and create rich profiles for my contacts is finally coming of age.” – ZDNet, Sam Diaz
• “Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. And when you leave your job, your contacts stay with you.” – TechCrunch, Eric Shoenfeld
• “If you’ve ever found yourself scrabbling back through your BlackBerry inbox for the address of someone you know for a fact you emailed once in 2008, then the newly-launched Xobni for BlackBerry may be just what you need.” –  Recombu, Kate Solomon (UK)
• “The new software will give BlackBerry users the ability to better manage and maintain their address book information by taking advantage of the program’s automatic indexing, profiling and ranking capabilities,” – V3, Dan Worth (UK)

As much as we love this media attention, we love even more to see the product going to work for our consumers!  We’ve already been able to improve the product based on your feedback, so keep it coming… As we’ve mentioned before, this cloud work is nontrivial stuff, and we’re really excited that we got such a great response – with the media and with our users.

Some of you may have noticed that it was about this time last year when we first announced that we would be building Xobni for the BlackBerry (given that we had just added the BlackBerry Partners Fund as an investor, I guess it made sense). We planned to release our BlackBerry product at the end of Summer 2009 (let’s say generously September 2009). In fact, we were ready with a BlackBerry product in September 2009, as planned. Most of the key features you see today were there, and it even had a simple back-end that allowed it to bring data from your Outlook Xobni to your BlackBerry…but we didn’t like it. So we made that ever painful decision not to launch, and went back to the drawing board to fill in the missing parts.

What emerged, the missing piece that we needed to make the BlackBerry product work as we knew it should, comes to you today as a new service called Xobni One.

We named it Xobni One because at the core the service takes information from any number of sources and gets them to behave like one. To be clear, Xobni One is not “sync,” as we are not adding and deleting contact data. We keep all data sets, fuse those data sets together for comprehensiveness, and surface the most relevant data at the top. Because volume of contacts is mostly the enemy of today’s address books, they break down unless they are maintained aggressively. Xobni maintains itself through the continuous flow of new information in your inbox, social networks, and now your text and calls.

Let’s consider a specific, but simple example. I might be connected to a personal Gmail account (jeff@gmail.com) on my BlackBerry and an Exchange account with Outlook (jbonforte@xobni.com) at work. Xobni One makes all the people and relationships from both accounts available in both places. So when my sister sent me an email from her new job to my personal Gmail account last week, Xobni for BlackBerry noticed the new email address automatically. Xobni One kicked in and appended the new email subject almost instantly to her profile in my Outlook account (and used the data to slightly change her relationship rank with me). The old email addresses didn’t delete. Even if it is not active, email addresses and phone numbers are an important point of reference to our past communication and related relationships.

My example above might make you wonder about privacy. After all, I just gave an example that crossing information between a work and personal account. But Xobni One is not moving the email message bodies between accounts. We are just moving the relationships, selected contact information and their ranking. The people are portable. The email stays put. Security and privacy are fundamental to us – after all, we have big enterprise customers, too!

The long term power of Xobni One will not be evident to customers from day one. This is partly by design. It is a scalable, powerful system that can today handle relatively simple, yet meaningful tasks of fusing Xobni profile data from your BlackBerry with data from Outlook (or even Outlook to Outlook). But Xobni One is capable of doing much more complicated tasks that we will show in the future. We know people want Xobni for webmail and other smart phones. Xobni One makes these much easier for us to build. We know people want to use Xobni with teams. Xobni One can do that, too.

From the company’s very founding four years ago in a dorm room at MIT, we assumed a future where Xobni would serve customers no matter the app, device or OS. Xobni One is our most significant step in that direction. And by no means is Xobni One the end of our love for Outlook. We will continue to make Xobni for Outlook the best addition on the planet for Outlook and the hundreds of millions people who spend almost 40% of their day there. But today we are excited to give you a glimpse of the future of Xobni and the products we are building.

As always, special thanks to all the amazing support from our customers, and to the great team at Xobni who make all these products come to life.

I am very excited to announce the release of Xobni for BlackBerry. It makes managing your address book a thing of the past – You will never need to “Add a Contact” again. Early feedback from our alpha users is that they have stopped using their native address books completely and use only Xobni for BlackBerry.

The power of Xobni for BlackBerry is found in exposing connections you never knew you had as well as in the depth of the profiles that are created. All profiles are created automatically and are as complete as the information we have to complete them – including recent emails, phone calls, SMS messages, upcoming and past meetings, and the network for each of your contacts. You can even view information and images from your contacts using the LinkedIn and Facebook. Everything you need is a single click away, so you can immediately contact anyone the way you want.

With Xobni Rank, we learn who you communicate with most often and order your address book by that – you always have the most important people at the top. Search for “Mike” and even if there are 20 Mikes in your Xobni address book, the most important one rises instantly.

We built our first mobile application on the BlackBerry platform because we could deeply integrate within the native OS to provide an impactful and seamless experience for our users. If you’re composing a message using the native BlackBerry compose screen, you can access all of your Xobni contacts with a flick up of your trackpad/ball. We love being able to improve our customers’ existing work-flow instead of forcing them to change it.

The icing on the cake is Xobni One. Xobni One leverages our new cloud-based service to connect Xobni for Outlook and Xobni for BlackBerry, giving you all your Xobni contacts on your phone, where you need them most. A separate post on the magic of Xobni One is coming soon.

This is the stuff that excites me – Creating great products that solve real problems!

Note: To connect to Outlook, Xobni One requires Xobni for Outlook 1.9.1 (build 10169 or later). This is an optional download for other Xobni users, and contains the following new features since version 1.9.0:

• Xobni One will update automatically when the computer is left idle (after the regular Xobni index process)
• New “Update Xobni One” menu item (see screenshot)
• Ability to delete Xobni One data from the server at any time in the Xobni Options window (under the “indexing” tab)
• Nearly unlimited phone numbers and fax numbers can be added for an existing Xobni profile (though still only the top two will show in the Xobni sidebar)
• When two Xobni profiles are merged, their phone numbers merge as well
• Numbers from Outlook Contacts are shown in the Xobni profile “edit” screen to help show the source of those numbers

Learn More about Xobni for BlackBerry

At Xobni, we’ve dedicated ourselves to helping you work smarter, not harder, by developing powerful email products to reduce the time you spend digging around your inbox so you can focus on…well, whatever it is you were actually hired to do (we assume it wasn’t to search unsuccessfully in Outlook ).

In the years we’ve spent in this space, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of knowledge about email and workplace productivity in general, and rather than sit on what we know, we want to share it with you, our valuable users.  To that end, we’re excited to announce our first-ever Live Twitter Q&A, during which we’ll spend a concentrated hour fielding as many of your questions as we can.  We hope you’ll join us for our inaugural Work Smart Wednesday:

Xobni Live Twitter Q&A
Work Smart Wednesday, March 3rd
11:30AM-12:30PM PST

It’s easy to join the conversation: Direct your questions to @xobni and end them with the hashtag #WorkSmarter between 11:30AM and 12:30PM PST this Wednesday.  Questions tweeted using Xobni’s Twitter extension will receive priority, so if you can, post your questions from Xobni.

If you’re not available then, write your question on Twitter or as a comment on this blog post (please tag with #WorkSmarter and keep it <140 characters) ahead of time, and we’ll answer as many of those as time permits during the Q&A as well.

Example:

• BillGates: @xobni I want to impress my coworkers with my taste in Outlook tools–what’s the easiest way to invite them to use Xobni? #WorkSmarter

• Xobni: To @BillGates Open up the Xobni Options menu and click “Invite Users”. Select your invitees there & get a chance to win Xobni Plus for free!

Of course, we’re always listening to you on Twitter (you should take a moment to follow us if you haven’t already), but we’re especially excited to dedicate this entire hour just to answering your top questions.  Get your questions ready, and we’ll see you there!

Linkedin For Dummies by Joel Elad
Xobni is a great tool for heavy email users, and even becomes more powerful if you use Xobni’s LinkedIn integration. LinkedIn For Dummies is a how-to book on how to get the most out of LinkedIn. Xobni is definitely a great way to get the most out of LinkedIn. Joel includes download instructions, features, and a lot more about Xobni in his book.

Upstarts!: How GenY Entrepreneuers are Rocking the World of Business by Donna Fenn.
In her book Donna talks about the features of Xobni’s Outlook product, but also tells the business story of how Xobni was founded, funded, and how it flourished.

Human Computer Interaction: New trends by Julie A. Jacko.
There are several academic books that reference Xobni and the new paradigms we introduced to email. It is quite an honor to be mentioned in academic work.

And finally, Xobni is featured in the New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek: Expanded and Updated by Tim Ferris. Here is a quote from the book:

“It [Xobni] offers many features, but the most relevant to this chapter is its ability to indentify “hotspots,” or periods of time when you receive the bulk of e-mail from your most important contacts. These “hotspots” are batching times that will enable you to keep critical contacts (clients, bosses, etc.) smiling even while you reduce checking e-mail to 1-3 times per day.”

We talk about many of Xobni’s features here on our blog, but we don’t often talk about the analytics engine that sits beneath the software. Tim has latched on to one way he suggests that his readers can use Xobni’s analytics features to work smarter, not harder.

We thought being in this many books was pretty cool, so we wanted to share. We’re honored.

(All features mentioned below are new since version 1.8.5 build 9142):

Improved Outlook 2010 Beta Compatibility

• The Xobni sidebar displays more reliably and consistently for various view configurations of Outlook 2010 beta (32-bit). Of course, we will fully support all versions of Outlook 2010 when Microsoft releases them for sale to the public.
• Installer screen is now more informative when installing Xobni into Outlook 2010 (screenshot)

Note: If you have a 64-bit operating system, and would like to test Outlook 2010 beta + Xobni today, simply install the popular 32-bit version of Outlook 2010 beta and then install Xobni.

Brand New “Out of Box” Experience

• If you install Xobni for the first time, you’ll see a new video display inside the sidebar (no more video pop-up). We’re really proud of it! See it in full size here.
• If you’d like to share fun facts with your contacts, we now open a message for you to customize instead of sending the email right away.

Improved Invitations (the Heart Button)

(Just click the heart button at the bottom of Xobni to see these improvements)

• Brand-new interface for inviting contacts to join Xobni, including photos and improved suggestions (based on Xobni Rank and whether they’ve sent you mail using Outlook)
• Users will also randomly receive the chance to win Xobni Plus when they invite others.

Twitter

• If signed in to the Twitter Extension, more data is shown about each Twitter name to help you choose the right one for your Xobni contacts — just hover over each name to see more information (you only need to do this once per contact).
• Twitter feeds are checked more often (every two minutes)

Better Automatic Phone Number Extraction

• Better recognition of phone numbers and fax numbers
• Filtering out more conference call numbers and bridge lines

Productivity Enhancements



• This may be a big time savings for many of our users: Now you can right-click on an email anywhere in Xobni to open that message in a new Outlook window (instead of clicking through to see it in detail in Xobni first).
• Support for the “shift-delete”, “shift-insert,” and “control-insert” keyboard shortcuts for cut, paste, and copy in the Xobni search bar
• The “Copy Email” command now copies the date of the email and everyone in the to: line.
• Photos and job titles for your highest-ranked contacts are fetched as soon as you install Xobni (instead of waiting till you access their Xobni profiles)
• Other minor bug fixes and performance improvements

Whew! Please continue to let us know how we can keep improving your productivity through the Xobni Community, and thank you to everyone who participated in the topics that helped inform today’s update.


General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks for using Xobni!

Download the Latest Xobni Now


Filed under: Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, outlook2010, releaseupdate ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2010/02/09/xobni-1-9-improved-outlook-2010-beta-compatibility-a-new-way-to-win-xobni-plus-and-more/feed/ 13 xobniblog New Xobni Invitations Xobni Twitter Improvements Xobni Productivity Update http://blog.xobni.com/2010/02/09/share-the-xobni-love/ http://blog.xobni.com/2010/02/09/share-the-xobni-love/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:31:18 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1472 ]]> Valentine’s Day is upon us and we’re doing a giveaway to those we love most – our customers.  <blush>

Tweet about your love for Xobni and enter to be one of the 14 winners to receive two Xobni Plus licenses – one for you and one for your Valentine (or anyone you think would love Xobni as much as you do).

To enter, simply go to this page and click the “post to twitter” button.  Winners will be randomly selected this week, finishing up on the big day of love.


Filed under: Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2010/02/09/share-the-xobni-love/feed/ 3 xobniblog xobni_valentinecard http://blog.xobni.com/2010/02/04/blackberry-update/ http://blog.xobni.com/2010/02/04/blackberry-update/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:26:49 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1384 ]]>

Hey there friends and fans of BlackBerry!

We just wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with the Xobni for Blackberry product as well as some exciting news. We really appreciate the excitement and anticipation for the product and can’t wait to share it with you!

So what’s the good news? The good news is that we’re in alpha and really close to having a truly compelling Xobni for BlackBerry product. We need your help! We’ve got the product built and we’re all using it internally (and loving it).

To help move this process along, we’re looking for some of our most passionate Xobni friends to dive in and take it for a spin.

If you’re up for the alpha, please send us an email. Don’t forget to put BlackBerry alpha in the subject field and then tell us what model BlackBerry you have and whether or not you use Xobni for Outlook.

While we may not be able to include everyone in the alpha, we’ll sure try.

Disclaimer: IT IS an alpha. We’ve done a pretty good job buttoning up our product but we certainly expect some bumps in the road as we scale, so make sure you can tolerate some (hopefully small) hiccups if you want to participate. Thanks in advance for your help! We’re committed to reinventing the address book for smartphones and are one step closer today.


Filed under: Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2010/02/04/blackberry-update/feed/ 5 xobniblog Xobni for BlackBerry http://blog.xobni.com/2010/01/14/our-new-digs/ http://blog.xobni.com/2010/01/14/our-new-digs/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:55:51 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1340 ]]>

A few weeks ago we took up camp in Twitter’s old office space on Bryant Street in San Francisco.  We loved the location of our last office, but we moved into that space with 4 people in 2007 and found ourselves bursting at the seams when we finally left with nearly 30 team members crammed into that space.

Now we are at 539 Bryant, and we love it!

In addition to the awesome views, sprawling space, and great lighting, we’re also hoping some of Twitter’s good karma will rub off on us. 

As we were packing our desks, Adam (cofounder) and I took some time to reflect on the offices of Xobni over the past four years.

“Office” #1



Adam started Xobni in his dorm room at MIT back in 2006.  As you can imagine, he clocked lots of hours trying to understand the wealth of data hidden in email.  A few months later I got a call from Adam. After some persuasion on Adam’s part I moved from the University of Maryland, where I dropped out of grad school, to focus on turning this email project into a business.  I moved into MIT’s East Campus dorm with Adam.   We lived and worked in that 12 foot by 12 foot space.

“Office” #2



With school on hold* for both of us, and the dorm room getting a bit crowded, we rented an apartment near Harvard Square and were able to fully commit to this business we now called Xobni.  And that we did.  We worked all waking hours, usually until 5 or 6am when we’d rush to bed at daybreak, hoping to fall asleep before the sun would start to convince us otherwise.  It was a crazy time.

“Office” #3


When our summer lease ran out, we temporarily moved into the apartment of fellow Y Combinator startup founder, and now Xobni employee, Bryan Kennedy.  Again, back in a cramped space, but this time with about $100k of angel funding in the bank.  We began to contemplate our future.   It wasn’t long before we realized we needed to be in the Valley if we wanted to give Xobni the greatest chance for success.  We made the decision over a weekend and on Monday we started the 3,000 mile drive to California.

“Office” #4



Office #4 was a “deluxe apartment in the sky” at The Crystal Towers in San Francisco.  This “office” still has probably the best view of any office I’ll ever have.  The place was so great that many other Y Combinator startups moved into the building.  It became known as the “Y Scraper.”

Now that we were in San Francisco and closer to the action, it wasn’t long until we raised our first big round of funding, $4M bucks.  Finally with cash in the bank we decided we could do two things: hire employees and get a real office.

The employees came first.  Greg and Gabor.  They both moved into the Y Scraper.  They worked out of our apartment with us.

Office #5 (no quotes this time!)



Finally in June of 2007, over a year after starting the company and after working out of 4 different “offices” we moved into our first legitimate office** at 211 Sutter Street, one block from Union Square.  This is where we launched Xobni to the world.  Everything feels like it’s been on fast-forward since then.

Office 6



Four million downloads and many employees later, here we sit at 539 Bryant Street in a space that will be able to hold us for at least the next year or two.  (Note: we are growing fast – check out these current positions we are hiring for.)   Looking back, there’s not one move that we regret.   It has been a lot of fun and we and even a bit nostalgic to think about the places we’ve called Xobni’s home.

* We never went back. 

** One that wasn’t our primary residence (though we did sleep our fair share of nights in the office).

Photo credits (new office): Mitch Aidelbaum


Posted in Press, Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2010/01/14/our-new-digs/feed/ 10 xobniblog IMG_7077 IMG_8210 IMG_7148 office with Zoe Dorm Room 2 Harvard Sq 4 2 Taylor Apt Sutter Street IMG_7148 http://blog.xobni.com/2010/01/09/xobni-ces/ http://blog.xobni.com/2010/01/09/xobni-ces/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:18:44 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1337 ]]> Our friends at RIM kindly invited us to show our upcoming BlackBerry app and integration at the BlackBerry booth (South Hall #30851) at CES this week.  While talking for hours on end day after day about the same thing can get exhausting, talking to our users and being reminded of the need for Xobni on mobile devices has been rejuvenating and encouraging.

We’ve also received some love from mobile/BlackBerry media and bloggers.  Inside BlackBerry posted a demo of the product, CrackBerry did a great roundup of the day, and LAPTOP Magazine listed us as a candidate for the CES Readers Choice Awards in the smart phone apps category.  Vote for us, please!

If you find yourself lost in the madness that is CES this week/end, find your way to us.  We’d love to see you.  And if you happen to practice reflexology, we promise to give you extra Xobni love.




Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2010/01/09/xobni-ces/feed/ 2 xobniblog blackberry booth http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/xobni_1-8-5_major_improvements_links_exchanged/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/xobni_1-8-5_major_improvements_links_exchanged/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:30:48 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1226 ]]> As a few have heard via TechCrunch, or while test-driving the Xobni Salesforce Extension, a new improved version of Xobni has been in the works. Xobni 1.8.5 (build 9142) is packed with useful improvements for everyone, including a brand-new feature that is free to existing Xobni Plus members. Download it now or read more about the latest enhancements.



(All features mentioned below are new since version 1.8.3 build 8997):

Links Exchanged (Xobni Plus feature)

• Instantly see a list of links you have exchanged with a contact, ordered by date. Easily filter the list by URL.
• Right-click any link in Xobni to preview and access the original message that contained it.
• Links contained in any Xobni message search are now shown separately, for easy scanning.

Laptop-Friendly Tabbed Interface

• New tabbed interface makes better use of your limited screen space and allows for more resizing and flexibility within Xobni
• View a familiar summary of your communication with a contact, or switch tabs to show only one type of data (thanks to alpha testers for their feedback with this).
• Filter the items in any tab with a quick search (Xobni Plus users have access to more advanced options)
• More compact “business card” area
• Extensions (such as Twitter and Facebook) can be resized to show more information. The LinkedIn, Hoover’s, and Salesforce extensions have been redesigned to take advantage of this as well (To get the Salesforce extension, please follow the instructions here).
• Fans of the original panel-style interface can still switch back in the Xobni options.

Improved Phone Number Extraction and Display

• Xobni is now smarter about finding the right phone number for your contacts in their emails.
• A new “i” icon appears next to phone numbers that are automatically extracted from emails by Xobni. Clicking this will show you the text that the number came from. Numbers from your Outlook Contacts, or numbers that you edited yourself, do not have this icon.
• Phone numbers are de-duplicated, and Outlook Contacts numbers are given higher prominence (thanks to cassianofonseca, Fred Greco, and Rob)

Productivity Enhancements – Saving You More Time

• Click the folder icon when viewing a message to jump to that folder in Outlook (thanks James, Nick, and others for the idea). Please note that the message itself will not be selected in Outlook.
• Enhanced drag-and-drop support for messages, conversations, and attachments. Drag any email, email thread, or attachment to any other window.
• Drag messages to folders to add a copy of that message to the target folder.
• Right-click any message to copy it and paste it into a new message as an attachment instead of as text.

Other Features & Fixes

• New “share” button in the Xobni Statistics tab allows an easy way to show someone what time of day they most email you. “Hey, look what a night person you are!”
• Direct Messages are now available in the Twitter extension (just click the “D” button when available)
• Email addresses sent to you in message bodies are now indexed and available in people search. This is especially helpful when trying to see if you know anyone at a given company — just type their domain name into Xobni’s search and you might be surprised at whom you already know!
• Bug fix: Adding LinkedIn contacts that were more than three levels away from you works more reliably (thanks Daniel)
• Other minor bug fixes and performance improvements

General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. If you’re already using Xobni 1.8, it is recommended that you re-index your mail to see all Links Exchanged. Simply select “Index Outlook Mail” from the Xobni menu to complete the index. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks again for your feedback and thank you for using Xobni!


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, majorrelease, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/xobni_1-8-5_major_improvements_links_exchanged/feed/ 5 xobniblog Xobni 1.8.5 Screenshot http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-love/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-love/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:36:19 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1229 ]]> Well, the day came and went before we even had time to boast about it, so we’ll do it now.  Yesterday, Microsoft named us the Startup of the Day.  Yip yip!

Our love affair with Microsoft goes way back.  It started when we created a product that makes Outlook infinitely better, then spiked when Bill Gates demoed Xobni last year at Microsoft Office’s Developer’s Conference.  We were recently chosen to be part of BizSpark 100, and are very excited about being the Startup of the Day (yesterday).

To read the BizSpark interview with Jeff (our CEO), click here.


Posted in Press, Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-love/feed/ 0 terrablu http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/get-your-xobni-on-this-holiday-season-giveaways/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/get-your-xobni-on-this-holiday-season-giveaways/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:40:11 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1206 ]]> It’s been a big year: 3 million downloads, Xobni Plus, Xobni Enterprise, Xobni for Salesforce & Xobni Mobile soon.  While we’re very proud of our accomplishments so far, we have a lot we want to do, and know that we wouldn’t be where we are without our loyal fans and users.

As a small token of our appreciation, we’ll be giving away Xobni Plus to 25 people who tweet and/or post to their public Facebook wall: “All I want for Christmas is Xobni! http://xobni.com/holiday” (Of course, you can replace “Christmas” with a holiday of your choice.)  We’ll choose the winners randomly from the posts we see by searching on Twitter and Facebook.

And for those of you limited in your choice of software, or the ability to buy Xobni Plus due to your employer’s well-intended policies, we have come up with a fun (and hopefully productive) way for you to get Xobni Plus at work.  Click here http://xobni.com/holiday to see a quirky, ad-libs-like letter for you to download or cut/paste/email to your IT person of choice.  It briefly explains the benefits of Xobni for professionals and the new Xobni Enterprise that will allow you to start using Xobni’s full functionality at your company.  We’ll also be offering a discount on Xobni Enterprise for companies who mention your letter.  And if that’s not enough, we’ll be giving away an Amazon Kindle to the person who uploads to most creative letter to Scribd, so have fun!

Cheers!


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/get-your-xobni-on-this-holiday-season-giveaways/feed/ 0 terrablu xobnigift http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/first-round-gives-susan-boyle-a-run-for-her-money/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/first-round-gives-susan-boyle-a-run-for-her-money/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:35:55 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1197 ]]> If we ever doubted we had the best investors in the world (we didn’t), this sealed the deal.  First Round Capital just released their annual holiday card, which is a compilation of First Round portfolio companies singing “Building Big Dreams” (Les Misérables).  This is turning into a nice tradition from First Round, and we look forward to participating in years to come.  (Last year’s theme was dancing, inspired by WhereTheHellIsMatt, and Rob Hayes is simply spectacular.)

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/10/first-round-gives-susan-boyle-a-run-for-her-money/feed/ 0 terrablu http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/09/adams-advice/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/09/adams-advice/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:59:37 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1184 ]]> Our very own Adam Smith spoke at MIT (his alma mater) in November where he gave a great overview of Xobni’s history, and advice for future entrepreneurs.  Besides just looking cool on stage, he covered a range of topics based on his experience building Xobni, including learnings on hiring pace, how to be nimble and execute well, and where to live and raise your startup.  He also shared his top reading suggestions for entrepreneurs.  While we like to think you’ll watch the full 28-minute talk, just in case you don’t, the top 3 reading suggestions are Founders at Work; High Stakes, No Prisoners; Paul Graham’s Essays.

Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/12/09/adams-advice/feed/ 1 terrablu http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/18/xobni-and-the-outlook-social-connector/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/18/xobni-and-the-outlook-social-connector/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:50:34 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1172 ]]> As some of you may have seen, Microsoft announced today that they are integrating some social networking features into Outlook 2010. Our favorite tweet of the day was, “Dear Microsoft, we already have Xobni.” (via @_aishaf)

This wasn’t a surprise to us. We have a close working relationship with the Outlook team at Microsoft, and have since the early days of Xobni. And they’ve been watching us too. Bill Gates himself called Xobni “the future of social networking” at the Microsoft Office Developer Conference last year.



In addition, we’ve been selected as part of Microsoft’s BizSpark One program, an invite-only program to help accelerate the growth of high potential startups chosen by Microsoft. We have shown that bringing in social elements into the inbox is very powerful, so this announcement seems like an obvious step by Microsoft to bring Outlook up to speed – kind of.

After 3 years of your feedback (thank you, beloved users) and 3 million downloads, Xobni already provides all of the social stuff you will be able to do with Microsoft Social Connector – and much much more. And even more importantly, we aren’t going to stop innovating. We will mention that the product they are scheduled to launch next year doesn’t have improved search functionality (key Xobni feature), won’t allow users to interact with social networking sites, no automatic phone number extraction, no shared network information, no Xobni Rank, which brings the most important emails and people to the top and many more Xobni features you’ve come to love.

We are also bringing Xobni’s innovation to new areas. There is a lot of excitement out there for our upcoming Blackberry product. We want to get this in your hands as soon as possible. And just yesterday we launched our Salesforce Extension. We are getting a lot of visitors at our Dreamforce booth sharing their excitement for Xobni’s Salesforce Extension.

Microsoft is a massive company that has to serve 500+ million Outlook users with each new
release. Our nimble 30-person startup is happy focusing on those Outlook users that live in email and need a companion like Xobni to make their work day more bearable. We’re excited that Microsoft will bring more awareness to the possibilities of turning email on its side – and making it about relationships again. We’ve been at it for over three years, and there is a lot more to come.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/18/xobni-and-the-outlook-social-connector/feed/ 12 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/18/on-a-roll-dreamforce-pdc/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/18/on-a-roll-dreamforce-pdc/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:13:58 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1169 ]]> We’re on a roll over here at Xobni, and we ain’t stopping anytime soon.

Two weeks ago, we announced our first enterprise product and got a great response from IT administrators at Enterprise 2.0.  Last week,  Jeff demoed our coming BlackBerry app on stage at the BlackBerry Developer’s Conference with David Yach.  And this week we have more cool things cooking:

1)      Yesterday we announced our availability of our Salesforce extension (well, actually M.G. at TechCrunch beat us to it when also reporting on UI improvements).  And it’s not only available to business users, it’s available to all Xobni users interested in getting Salesforce data in Outlook.  This marks our third revenue stream (behind Xobni Plus and Xobni Enterprise) in a matter of a couple months.  As M.G. reported, “revenue streams can be addicting.”    If you’re at Dreamforce and want to see it, check us out at booth 1308.

2)      Also announced yesterday was that we were selected by Microsoft to join their new BizSpark One program, an invitation-only program designed to accelerate the growth of high potential startups through a One-on-One relationship with Microsoft Corp.  We’ve had a close working relationship with Microsoft for a while now, and are honored to have been chosen with such an elite group of companies.

3)      Lastly, we set out to make an impression at Microsoft’s PDC conference this week by having Xobni ambassadors handing out Xobni-branded t-shirts… and giving away prizes (like $1000 cash, Amazon Kindle, etc.) to the lucky people who are wearing them.  Here’s a video highlighting the promotion.

Gotta love startup land – where things move a million miles a minute, even when working with the big dawgs.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/18/on-a-roll-dreamforce-pdc/feed/ 1 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/17/xobni-for-outlook-releases-free-preview-of-salesforce-extension-now-available-to-everyone/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/17/xobni-for-outlook-releases-free-preview-of-salesforce-extension-now-available-to-everyone/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:22:25 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1151 ]]> It’s no accident that we hand-crafted our own Xobni Extension for Salesforce. We’ve been listening to our users asking us to help them squeeze every ounce of productivity out of Outlook. Today we’re taking a huge step in that direction by opening our Salesforce Extension up to everyone.

Last week we mentioned that our Enterprise customers were going to get access to our Salesforce Extension, and this week the offering gets even more exciting. We’re offering a free preview of our Salesforce Extension to all of our users.



After the preview period, we’ll be offering the Extension to of all of our users for a reasonable price. By then we think you’ll see the value in viewing your Salesforce Account, Opportunity, Activity, and Cases information for a given contact right inside of Xobni.

Similar to our other Xobni Extensions, when you click on an email in Outlook, Xobni automatically fetches related Salesforce information. For example, if I click on an email from Mr. Wyatt Turlock I’ll be shown Wyatt’s account information and account activity using the Salesforce API. It’s just that easy. For those of you that live in Outlook and Salesforce, we have just made your life much easier. Please thank us by using our new Salesforce Extension Preview, and then provide feedback so we can take our new extension to the next level.

Please note: Users of this Extension will need an API-enabled Salesforce account. Please contact your Salesforce Administrator to make sure you have this feature enabled in Salesforce.

Get started now and try out our Salesforce Extension.

Please let us know what you think here.
Read the full Press release here.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/17/xobni-for-outlook-releases-free-preview-of-salesforce-extension-now-available-to-everyone/feed/ 2 xobniblog Xobni Salesforce Extension for Outlook http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/10/bug-fix-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8997/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/10/bug-fix-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8997/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:43:31 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1134 ]]>

Working together with our dedicated and helpful users, we have uncovered and fixed two issues in Xobni 1.8.

Xobni 1.8.3 build 8997 is a minor bug fix release and is recommended for anyone experiencing the issues below. It is available now at http://www.xobni.com/download/latest, and includes the following changes since builds 8559 and 8734:

1) Crash Fixes for Some Plug-in Conflicts

If you have been experiencing any crashing in Outlook after installing Xobni, please try this build. We have focused on resolving conflicts with other Outlook plug-ins, including Symantec Enterprise Vault. Thanks to “Gemster,” Mike Maccana, Ralf Vissers and many others for helping us identify and test this fix via our support community.

2) First-run startup screen now only happens on first run

For a handful of new Xobni 1.8 users, a “Welcome to Xobni 1.8; now with Xobni Plus!” screen was appearing every time they started Outlook. Wow, that was annoying… and completely unintentional. This is fixed. Thanks to Jay Johnson and others for reporting this issue.

General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. If you’re already using Xobni 1.8, no new mail indexing will be required. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks again for your feedback and thank you for using Xobni!


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/10/bug-fix-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8997/feed/ 3 xobniblog 1.8 Updated http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/09/on-stage-at-blackberry-developer%e2%80%99s-conference-with-rim%e2%80%99s-cto-david-yach/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/09/on-stage-at-blackberry-developer%e2%80%99s-conference-with-rim%e2%80%99s-cto-david-yach/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:17:07 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1106 ]]> A few months ago, we showed the very beginnings of a Xobni application for BlackBerry at a mobile meet-up in San Francisco. While we weren’t expecting it to get broad attention given the closed environment, we were pleased that there was so much enthusiasm for the product.

Since then, we’ve been making great progress. However, the more we work with RIM, the more ideas we collectively come up with to make Xobni Mobile more useful to BlackBerry users. Expanded functionality has caused the development time line to extend. We are anxious to get Xobni Mobile in the hands of users soon. We didn’t plan on speaking again about our BlackBerry product until it was on the market, but then we were asked by RIM to demonstrate Xobni. They asked for an example of a compelling integration with the BlackBerry to show at their biggest developer conference, and we just couldn’t resist.

More details about Xobni Mobile

Update: Watch the video of Xobni’s demonstration at the BlackBerry Developer Conference Keynote.

At Xobni, we think that you should have access to every person that you need to reach, when you need to reach them. Surprisingly, there’s not an easy or quick way to do this on our phones now. Unlike a static address book of the people you have deliberately put in your Outlook contacts and/or mobile phonebook, Xobni for mobile will be more like your automatic address book made up of all the thousands of people you may have communicated with over the years. Our data tells us that the typical user has 5-10X the number of contacts in their email inbox versus their Outlook address book. If you put all of those contacts into your address book it would be, well, a bit overwhelming – imagine scrolling through 5,000 contacts! Enter Xobni Mobile…




Our coming mobile product will give you access to your whole automatic address book and maintain the integrity of your key daily contacts by not inundating you with details that you don’t need. We do this with Xobni Rank – a list of contacts, in ranked order, depending on the freshness and depth of your relationship.

Anyone that carries a smartphone knows the frustration of wanting to call or email someone you have communicated with but not having quick and easy access to their contact data because it is buried somewhere in an email. Our application helps you quickly find anyone you’ve ever communicated with, along with context to your relationship, in ranked order. For example, most people know more than one Mike. Xobni Rank delivers every Mike you know in ranked order based on how often and how recently you communicated with him. So, the Mike Zander, whom you just spoke with yesterday and email one time per week will be listed above the Mike Andler, who was CC’d in an email once by your coworker. Cool, eh? Manually typing in contact information is so 2008!

We’re thrilled to have been on stage today with our friends (and investors) at RIM demonstrating our partnership and product – and look forward to bringing Xobni to mobile devices early next year. To be notified when the product is available, please sign up here , and stay tuned.


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: blackberry, mobile ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/09/on-stage-at-blackberry-developer%e2%80%99s-conference-with-rim%e2%80%99s-cto-david-yach/feed/ 5 xobniblog bb_screenshot_profile_withdevice bb_screenshot_searchresults_screen http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/03/music-to-enterprise-ears/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/03/music-to-enterprise-ears/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:37:13 +0000 terrablu http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1099 ]]> As the new kids on the block, we don’t want to break too many rules in the enterprise world, but we did get a little creative at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this morning.  Our offices are in the financial district, and we get to hear a beautiful violinist playing from time to time as we walk about our neighborhood.  So, we decked her out in a Xobni t-shirt and asked her to play for our new friends outside Moscone and bring a little startup flavor to this great conference.

Feel free to come by and say hello (booth #26) if you are at the conference.




Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/03/music-to-enterprise-ears/feed/ 1 terrablu Violinist http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/03/thanks-enterprise/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/03/thanks-enterprise/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:32:17 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1097 ]]> If you ever had to switch schools when you were younger, you probably remember what it was like on the first day…. wondering if the kids would accept you, what the teachers would be like, and if the school food would be as disgusting as your last school’s cafeteria food.  Well, that’s a little how we felt about entering into the enterprise world after spending 2 years focusing 100% of our efforts going direct to consumer.

We had a good feeling that the kids would like us because the enterprise community had been recruiting us for quite some time – and the vast majority of our users use Xobni in the workplace – but we wanted to make sure we approached this opportunity in the right way.  We posted a link in a somewhat hidden area of our site asking companies interested in deploying Xobni to their employees to get in touch with us.  We were absolutely overwhelmed with the response.  We immediately began having conversations with a slew of IT administrators at companies of all sizes and soon had a product for them to test.  So after hundreds of conversations with IT administrators, systems integrators and CIOs and hard work by our product, business and engineering teams, we pulled the cover off Xobni Enterprise yesterday.

We were met with great interest from the media and the enterprise – now we are following up with all the interest.  We appreciate the warm welcome, and think this is a big step in our mission of bringing email happiness to all 500+ million Outlook users.

A snapshot of coverage from yesterday:

IDG (CIO, Computerworld, NetworkWorld, InfoWorld, The Industry Standard) – Xobni CEO Talks About CIO’s, Gmail, and Getting Things Done

CNET – Personal Services Get Business Flavor:  Xobni and SugarSync

eWEEK – Xobni Enterprise Launches as Salve for Corporate Microsoft Outlook

ReadWriteWeb – Xobni Goes Enterprise 2.0

VentureBeat - Xobni launches an enterprise version of its improved email inbox

IT Pro (UK) – Xobni moves to enterprise with new release

V3.co.uk – Xobni adds enterprise appeal

OfficeDeveloper.NET – Xobni Sets Its Sights on the Enterprise

Seattle Post-Intelligencer/The Microsoft Blog – Popular Outlook Add-On Makes Move for Enterprise


Posted in Press, Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/03/thanks-enterprise/feed/ 1 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/02/introducing-xobni-enterprise-including-salesforce-com-sharepoint-ldap-more/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/02/introducing-xobni-enterprise-including-salesforce-com-sharepoint-ldap-more/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00:41 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1067 ]]> As we’ve grown (3 million downloads and counting!), we’ve been hearing more and more from IT managers about their interest in deploying Xobni to their employees. We’ve managed to excite executives from all over the globe and they want to see their companies become more productive using Xobni. We’ve taken all the feedback in and have an exciting announcement today.

We’re announcing Xobni Enterprise, our second revenue-generating product in three months. Xobni Enterprise consists of a web-based admin portal that allows IT administrators to easily control, customize and deploy Xobni across their organization. We’ve also updated our Xobni Extension platform to give our enterprise customers the ability to easily create and integrate high-value services and applications into the Xobni client. The first two enterprise extensions are for Salesforce.com CRM and Microsoft SharePoint, and you can expect many more to come. We can’t wait to see what compelling extensions our customers build, surely things we’d never even considered.

See the official press release here.


Xobni Enterprise Admin Portal

Imagine, for example, a Xobni user who wants to email a customer of theirs, but currently flips back and forth between Salesforce CRM and Outlook in order to get it done. No longer necessary. In addition to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Hoovers tabs, we’ll have a Saleforce extension that allows you to immediately see all the relevant information on the Contact or Account without leaving your inbox. IT administrators can also easily incorporate company profile information via LDAP into Xobni with just a couple clicks. We hope that by opening these extensions to development will create a rich ecosystem that supports our effort in making the inbox a more productive, useful and happy place


Xobni Client (portion of) showing Salesforce and Sharepoint extensions.

So, you won’t see us sporting business suits anytime soon, but we are growing up, folks. If you like Xobni, tell your favorite IT manager to check out our new baby today –

Sign-up here to learn more about Xobni Enterprise


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/11/02/introducing-xobni-enterprise-including-salesforce-com-sharepoint-ldap-more/feed/ 13 xobniblog Xobni Admin Portal Client_w_extensions_2 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/21/xobni-to-be-compatible-with-windows-7-and-outlook-2010-at-public-availability/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/21/xobni-to-be-compatible-with-windows-7-and-outlook-2010-at-public-availability/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:25:29 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1052 ]]> As part of Microsoft’s BizSpark 100 (a program designed to help startups thrive with early access to key resources), we’ve had the opportunity get an early peek behind the curtain of the soon-to-be-released Windows 7 operating system and the Outlook 2010 software scheduled for distribution next year. This early access gave us a chance to bang around on the product to ensure optimal compatibility for our users before it hits the market.

Given our focus on offering relationship management and productivity tools for the 500 million professionals using Outlook around the world, we began work right away to ensure we continue to offer the best possible experience for Outlook users, no matter what version of Outlook or Windows professionals are using. Both the free product and Xobni Plus ($29.95) will be compatible with the upcoming versions of Windows and Outlook.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/21/xobni-to-be-compatible-with-windows-7-and-outlook-2010-at-public-availability/feed/ 8 xobniblog Windows 7 Image http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/20/xobni-launches-affiliate-program/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/20/xobni-launches-affiliate-program/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:28:39 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1047 ]]> Due to the high demand from online publishers wanting to help us promote our products, Xobni has partnered with Commission Junction to launch the Xobni Affiliate Program. We are excited to be able to reward our publisher partners, aka affiliates, that have been sending new users our way.

If you love Xobni and sell software, have a website, or blog, the Xobni Affiliate Program might something for you to consider. Our program works like most traditional affiliate programs, in that we pay publishers for every successful sale of Xobni Plus. The commission earned is 20% for the sale of each Xobni Plus license. Before signing up, affiliates must submit an application Sign Up Here. The application is quickly reviewed and once approved, affiliates begin earning money.

We provide our affiliates with media assets along with relevant information about Xobni products to assist with the promotions. In addition, through our partnership with Commission Junction, affiliates have access to tracking, performance, earnings, and program information. We will add additional Xobni premium products to our affiliate program as we launch them. There is no cost to join the program so if you are interested in earning money on your website traffic, check out this link to learn more.

That’s it. Take a read through the fine print and see if you qualify to become a Xobni Affiliate Partner. We’d love to have you. And if you have any thoughts regarding the new program, shoot us an email at affiliates@xobni.com.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/20/xobni-launches-affiliate-program/feed/ 0 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/12/with-regards-to-valediction/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/12/with-regards-to-valediction/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:40:58 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=955 ]]> Over here at Xobni we’re always interested in anything email – so we were naturally pretty intrigued to find this cool survey from our friends at lifehacker.com. They asked readers “How do you end your emails.” I’m personally a bit surprised that “regards” beat out “best” by so much!



Source: Lifehacker.com





Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/10/12/with-regards-to-valediction/feed/ 2 xobniblog image001 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/09/30/xobni-now-featuring-twitter/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/09/30/xobni-now-featuring-twitter/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:01:52 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=1018 ]]> Tonight we’re launching a feature we’ve wanted to launch for a while and one which we’ve been using internally with much glee. Twitter is now integrated with Xobni. When you click on an Outlook email message from a contact, that contact’s Xobni profile will now contain their recent tweets. You can reply, retweet, follow, view that contact’s Twitter profile, or even post a new tweet. This feature will be a powerful addition to the existing integrations we have with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoover’s, Skype, and Yahoo! Mail. The integration of web and email data about your contacts makes for a powerful 360-degree view of your relationships.


How To Get Twitter in Xobni
Existing Xobni and Xobni Plus users must download the new version of Xobni for the Twitter extension to appear. This is a free update for everyone, and your Xobni Plus status will be retained once the update is installed.

Functionality
• See a list of recent tweets for every contact– right inside Outlook
• Reply to a tweet
• ReTweet
• Follow or unfollow a contact on Twitter
• Post a new Twitter status update from within Outlook

The Twitter extension will appear on the far right side of the extensions section in Xobni profiles. You can view this extension by clicking on the Twitter icon. Xobni will use the contact’s name to search for possible twitter accounts. Select the account that matches, or you can manually enter the Twitter name for the contact you are viewing. Once you select or enter a person’s Twitter name, every time you view a contact’s Xobni profile you’ll see their most recent tweets. From any screen inside the extension you’ll be able to login to your own Twitter account which will allow you to reply to tweets or post your own Twitter updates instantly inside of Outlook.

We are constantly looking for new ways to complete Xobni profiles with more information about your relationship with your contacts – whether that information is from your inbox or from the web. We hope you enjoy the latest step in making this vision complete.

Detailed list of features and changes in Xobni 1.8.3 (build 8559 and 8734) since build 8135:

Search Improvements

• Search speed increased dramatically (2-5 times faster depending on the search type)
• Directly access the advanced search builder by clicking on the big magnifying glass icon (previous builds required you to type text first) (thanks to Joe Myrick for the suggestion)
• Attachment results moved above tasks and calendar items

Extension Updates

• New Twitter extension
• Reorder or hide individual extension tabs (accessible through arrow button to the right of the tabs) (thanks to Hans van Leeuwen for the suggestion)

Other Changes

• Windows 7 compatibility fully tested and now added to our list of supported system configurations
• Xobni menu ordering changed slightly to be the same when accessed from top of Outlook or bottom of Xobni
• More detailed Xobni Plus data is shown to Xobni users in search results and AutoSuggest

Bug Fixes

• AutoSuggest menu displays more consistently
• Outlook keyboard shortcuts are passed through to Outlook more consistently when Xobni is being used
• Fixed occasional Outlook hang when sending mail (available since build 8175)
• Fixed occasional Outlook slow shutdown (available since build 8175)
• Many other minor bug fixes & stability improvements

Note: builds 8559 and 8734 are identical. The different build numbers are used for internal purposes.


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/09/30/xobni-now-featuring-twitter/feed/ 6 xobniblog xobni and twitter - terra http://blog.xobni.com/2009/09/22/an-international-take-on/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/09/22/an-international-take-on/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:02:05 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=673 ]]>

While English speakers call “@” the “at” symbol, other nations are far more clever.

“Send : The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe provides this entertaining list of what the ”at symbol” is called in other nations.

• Czech (Czech Republic): Závinaĉ, which means a herring wrapped around a pickle.
• Danish: Snabel-a, “elephant’s trunk,”
• Dutch: Apestaartje, “little monkey’s tail,” though sometimes apeklootje, a rude word for another part of the monkey’s anatomy.
• Hebrew: Shablul or Shablool, “snail” or Shtrudl, “strudel.”
• Hugarian: Kukac, “worm or maggot.”
• Italian: Chiocciola, “Snail.”
• Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan): Xiao Lao Shu, “little mouse,” or Lao Shu Hao, “mouse sign.”
• Russian: Sobachka, “doggie.”
• Thai: Ai tua yiukyiu, “wiggling worm.”

Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/09/22/an-international-take-on/feed/ 7 xobniblog elephant-trunk2 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/31/zen-and-the-art-of-inbox-maintenance/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/31/zen-and-the-art-of-inbox-maintenance/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:40:10 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=421 ]]>
Email can lead to fits of unholy rage.

Everyone has a torrent of email to parse through and sometimes it feels impossible to keep up.

The method for dealing with this headache is unique to each email user. For the 30 people in your office, there might be 30 different ways that people organize (or don’t organize) their email inbox.

I see inbox organization as akin to how clean people keep their desks. For instance, I can tolerate a certain level of clutter, but I reach a breaking point when I simply have to clean my desk or I will become overwhelmed and perhaps even a little disgusted with myself.

By contrast, I have worked with absolute neat freaks, who always filed papers in drawers, aligned their stapler and mouse pad and never left a stray pencil on their desk. And then there was the guy in the back corner who sat at a workstation teetering on the brink of disaster; piles of papers, books and discarded snacks stacked so high that I feared for his well-being.

A days worth of Googling reveals that email users can be bucketed into three general types. Of course, these three “types” form a spectrum and people can fall anywhere on the line. You might not see yourself as staying completely true to any one of these “types”, but instead feel like you are somewhere in between.

To File or Not to File: A Profile of Three Emailers

The Zealot: They use folders and labels religiously. An endless list of folders lines the left side of their inbox. Sometimes there are folders within folders. The Zealot often uses color codes, flags and stars to create a sense of order. These people are generally very organized in other aspects of their lives and find meaning in religiously filing emails by category, project, administrative task or client.
 
The Monk: The Monk uses only three folders. That’s it. The goal is an “empty” inbox, which provides the Monk a sense of calm. Inbox Nirvana. This method is popular and it pops up quite often on blogs, productivity websites, etc. I’ve seen it referred to as, “The Trusted Trio”, by Gina Trapani on lifehacker.com. The Trusted Trio is: A Follow-Up or To-Do Folder; an Archive Folder; and a Hold Folder. Trapani suggests that users should either respond to an email in under two minutes or, if it requires a lengthier response, place it in the Follow-Up folder to tend to later. All the emails that you might need to reference in the future are placed in the Archive Folder. Finally, the Hold Folder is for those emails that you might need in the next couple of days, such as correspondence on your upcoming meeting or the invitation to a dinner that you’ll attend in two days.

There are several variations on this method, but the general concept remains the same.

The Non-Believer: And, then there are those who do nothing. The way they organize their inbox is by not organizing it. They simply go through their emails, delete, respond, or mark as unread in order to respond at a later time. This person often keeps an archive of prior years. The Non-Believer relies on search tools to retrieve information and relevant emails. As recently as a couple of years ago, the Non-Believer got a bad rap. Their method was viewed as lazy, disorganized, even negligent. All this has changed. The advent of new technology (such as Xobni), allows the Non-Believers to more easily justify their existence. They posit, “Why waste time filing and organizing, when Xobni can find whatever information I need in seconds?”

I would argue that the Non-Believer raises an excellent point.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/31/zen-and-the-art-of-inbox-maintenance/feed/ 4 xobniblog 1189107_mail_in_a_box 12065642501242564915sarxos_closed_simple_yellow_foldersvgmed11 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/24/email-addiction-survey/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/24/email-addiction-survey/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:50:13 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=858 ]]> Business email is part of everyone’s life these days. We wanted to dig deeper into this phenomenon and learn a bit more about how people are using email. The findings we found from AOL were interesting, so we decided to share them with you (most recent data was from 2008). Enjoy!

According to AOL’s Fourth Annual Email Addiction Survey reported in 2008:

• 46% of email users said they’re hooked on email (up from 15% the previous year).
• 51% check their email four or more times a day (up from 45% the previous year).
• 24% of email users don’t use a salutation.
• 74% said they excuse errors when emails are sent from a mobile device like a BlackBerry or iPhone.
• 62% of at-work email users said they check their work email over a typical weekend.
• 19% check email five or more times in a weekend.
• 28% said they feel obligated to check work email while on vacation, and 19% choose vacation spots with email access.

Percentage of people checking email from the following places:

• In bed in their pajamas: 67%
• From the bathroom: 59%
• While driving: 50%
• In a bar or club: 39%
• In a business meeting: 38%
• During happy hour: 34%
• While on a date: 25%
• From church: 15%

And, finally, the most email addicted cities are:

1.   New York
2.   Houston
3.   Chicago
4.   Detroit
5.   San Francisco
6.   Sacramento
7.   Orlando
8.   Minneapolis-St. Paul
9.   Denver
10. Phoenix


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/24/email-addiction-survey/feed/ 4 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/19/free-minor-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8135/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/19/free-minor-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8135/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:05:14 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=983 ]]>

Thank you for making the latest version of Xobni and Xobni Plus a huge success.  We’ve been listening closely to your feedback via the Xobni Community on Get Satisfaction and Xobni Support. Today an update is available that fixes a handful of issues reported by our loyal and extremely helpful users.

Xobni 1.8.3 build 8135 is a minor update and is available now at http://www.xobni.com/download.

Changes between this release and the original Xobni 1.8 release:

Search Improvements

• Accented and international characters can now be found via search  (thanks to our community for reporting this).
• Search now correctly finds phrases with upper-case characters
• New icon for emails in search results that were sent by you ( vs )
• Dashes in attachment names show up more reliably in search results
• Journal entries no longer appearing as half-indexed mail items; removed completely

AutoSuggest Improvements (AutoSuggest is a Xobni Plus feature)

• AutoSuggest has been greatly improved all around, especially with regards to filling in the proper name/email when a name is selected for some Exchange configurations
• Deletion of Outlook’ email suggestions in AutoSuggest is now possible (just use the “delete” key after using the down arrow to select the Outlook suggestion you’d like to delete).

Contacts Improvements

• Outlook Contacts’ names are used in the Xobni profile more reliably
• If there are two phone numbers in Outlook Contacts, both show up in Xobni (instead of just one)

Other Improvements

• Xobni displays better with various DPI monitor settings
• People with IMAP-only Outlook configurations will not see “locked” messages as often when using the free version of Xobni (reported in the Xobni Community)
• The “heavy” email indexing process is smarter about waiting until you are not using your computer to begin
• Certain key commands for other programs now re-enabled and not blocked by Xobni
• Improved Xobni Plus account access and activation from the Options menu
• Assorted performance improvements and minor bug fixes

After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed.  If you’re already using Xobni 1.8, no new mail indexing will be required.  All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software and you will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Existing users will not be automatically updated to this build, as we are working on even more fixes for an “auto-update” release in the near future.

Thanks again for your feedback and thank you for using Xobni!


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/19/free-minor-update-available-for-xobni-and-xobni-plus-1-8-3-build-8135/feed/ 5 xobniblog Xobni 1.8 Updated sent mail received icon http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/17/information-overload/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/17/information-overload/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:24:16 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=851 ]]>

As difficult as it is to remember what my personal life was like before the Internet and cell phone, I really have no idea how businesses operated prior to the Digital Age.

In today’s workplace, technology is essential to productivity.

It also provides a lot of distractions.

According to business research company Basex, distractions at the workplace are costing the United States $900 billion per year. An article in the New York Times discusses the loss of productivity due to too many emails, cell phone calls and text messages. The article sites a Basex study which found that 28% of a typical information worker’s day is spent on interruptions by things that aren’t important-such as unnecessary emails-and the time it takes to get back on track.

Workers have a lot to deal with these days. RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits, found that the typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times. This is in addition to visiting 40 websites each day.

With so much going on in our workspace, how are we expected to remain focused and productive? And, it’s only going to get worse. According to the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, estimated worldwide email traffic will rise from 294 billion per day in 2010 to 419 billion per day in 2012.

Tech companies recognize the problem. In 2008, Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M. formed the Information Overload Research Group, a nonprofit organization. The group studies and drives awareness towards the topic of information overload.

Ideally, technology can be used to combat overload. Tools such as Xobni organize information to make it a little less overwhelming.

A more simple piece of technology is Gmail Labs’ “Email Addict,” which allows users to take a break from email and chat for 15 minutes by blocking the user’s screen. A message pops up that reads, “Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack. We’ll be back in 15 minutes!”

A 15-minute reprieve from information overload certainly isn’t going to solve all of your problems, but it might just provide a nice break. And, don’t forget, you can always use the OFF button.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/17/information-overload/feed/ 1 xobniblog 4836672_e7250a908f_m http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/12/in-good-company%e2%80%a6xobni-wins-a-%e2%80%9cbasey%e2%80%9d/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/12/in-good-company%e2%80%a6xobni-wins-a-%e2%80%9cbasey%e2%80%9d/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:20:31 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=952 ]]> It’s always a great feeling when your work is recognized, and surpassing 2 million downloads definitely gives us the warm & fuzzies. To stoke the fire even more, today at the first-ever Information Overload Awareness Day, Xobni received a Basex Excellence Award (aka the “Basey” award).

We received this recognition from Basex for providing leading service that is allowing people to be more productive by improving inbox management and reducing information and relationship overload. As Jonathan Spira, Basex CEO and chief analyst, shared last month, “tools such as Xobni have the potential to increase an individual’s efficiency and effectiveness by organizing information in a more natural manner.”

Basex Excellence Awards are given to leaders in the information technology world. The award recognizes companies who have made noteworthy contributions to the industry through outstanding products and service offerings. We’re thrilled that Xobni has been recognized and joins some good company as a Basey award winner (other recipients include Microsoft, IBM, Open Text, Xerox, among others).

For those of you wondering what’s next for Xobni, we’ll soon be announcing the availability of Xobni for BlackBerry (more details here ). And of course we’re going to continue to improve upon the current versions of Xobni. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Xobni Plus, there is a free 14-day trial (no credit card information required). Here is a video that demonstrates many of the new powerful search features that are included: http://www.xobni.com/press/videos


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/12/in-good-company%e2%80%a6xobni-wins-a-%e2%80%9cbasey%e2%80%9d/feed/ 1 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/11/xobni-presenting-at-information-overload-awareness-day-10-free-tickets/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/11/xobni-presenting-at-information-overload-awareness-day-10-free-tickets/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:40:37 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=949 ]]> Tomorrow at 11am EST (8am PST) the inaugural Information Overload Awareness Day event will be taking place. This event is hosted by research firm Basex and Xobni is being featured as a visionary vendor. This is an online event that will be attended by over 500 people interested in identifying and solving the problem of information overload in the workplace. Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina will be speaking at 2.15pm EST (11.15pm PST) as part of the visionary vendors panel and will be discussing how Xobni combats the challenges of information and relationship overload.

Free Passes
Basex has provided us 10 free passes ($50 value each) for us to share with our users. Simply use the code ‘MattGuest’ when registering for the event. You can register for the event here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/379835097 These 10 free passes will be provided on a first come, first serve basis.

If you are interested learning more about this event and the problem of information overload please visit the Information Overload Awareness Day website here. The full agenda, including speakers from companies like Microsoft, Xerox, Dow Jones and of course Xobni can be found here.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/11/xobni-presenting-at-information-overload-awareness-day-10-free-tickets/feed/ 2 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/03/james-brown-sales-one-user-per-week/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/03/james-brown-sales-one-user-per-week/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:19:14 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=617 ]]> I keep on meeting cool people doing these One User Per Week interviews. James was no exception.

First, James lives in the UK. Xobni has a lot of international users, with the UK holding first place outside the USA. After I managed to add some more Skype credit to my Skype iPhone app, I was able to call over to England and have a nice chat with James.


James does sales for a large media company. He specifically sells into the British Government. He described his job as “pretty basic sales, lots of contacts, lots of emails, and lots of relationships to manage.”

The Ideal Xobni User

James sounds like an ideal Xobni user – and it ends up he is more than just that. James is the Xobni Champion within his company. He was the first to discover Xobni and now he has over 40 people in his 80 person office hooked on Xobni. The one bad thing is that all of his coworkers act as if he works for Xobni. He hears all of their feature requests and bug reports. As a company, we can’t thank people like James enough for what they’ve helped us do.

Compliments, Bugs, and Feature Requests

Just like most user calls, James had both compliments, a few bugs, and lots of feature requests. James had one compliment that I made sure to write down word for word, he said “Xobni opened up my archive of email, I can easily reach back and pluck and email from 2 years ago.” When asked, James admits to having over 40,000 emails in his inbox. He has accumulated those emails over 4 years, and if he doesn’t have to file or delete emails, he doesn’t. With Xobni he doesn’t have to. James described his historical emails as his greatest asset within his job, and Xobni makes that asset accessible.

James did have some requests: he wants to delete whole profiles from Xobni – some people he just simply doesn’t need to communicate with ever again, and he’d rather them just not show up in search results. James also found it hard to reset a Facebook profile for a contact after he had already selected wrong Facebook profile for a contact. Xobni allows this, but we need to make it more obvious.

A Great Efficiency Tip From James

James gave me a good tip that I could share with other Xobni emailers out there. He said that Xobni’s fast search and conversation view has changed his behavior. He now writes emails to himself, and uses the subject line of the email to “tag” the email with relevant keywords. This way he can always go back and find an old note by looking at his own Xobni profile and filtering the subject lines in the conversation view. Nice tip!

Sharing The Xobni Love

Finally, James told me of one other common instance when Xobni shines. James will be on a call with a customer, and they’ll be discussing some previous conversation or contract. James can hear the customer typing away on their keyboard – looking through folders in Outlook, attempting to use Outlook’s prehistoric search function, and scrolling through months of email. James is calm and collected on the other side of the phone line – armed with Xobni. He simply says “I have that conversation right here – would you like me to resend it to you?” And more often than he can count he also offers another helpful suggestion “If you haven’t heard of Xobni for Outlook, you should download it. Xobni is the word “inbox” spelled backwards, and it will make your job much easier.”


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/08/03/james-brown-sales-one-user-per-week/feed/ 0 xobniblog jamesbrown http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/29/get-to-the-point/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/29/get-to-the-point/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:15:31 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=433 ]]>

Writing Effective Emails

They’re lurking in every office. You may sit next to one. You may be one. They are the people who write overly formal, overly complicated and sometimes painfully long emails.

They just can’t help it.

Even inter-office emails on topics as mundane as the kickball game on Wednesday carry an air of formality appropriate for the Elizabethan Era. You expect to see a family crest embossed in wax below their electronic signature.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am an ardent supporter of the use of proper grammar and punctuation in emails. It aggravates me to no end when people write only in lower-case letters or stream of consciousness. However, I do believe that the best emails are the most concise emails and that there is room for a certain level of informality when emailing at work.

I have done a good deal of research on the art of writing concise and effective emails. Below are links to the most useful tips that I’ve found.

Some general rules of thumb: use a good subject line; stay on point; and keep it brief.

This piece by Leo Babauta from WebWorkerDaily provides seven general rules for keeping emails concise:

• Use the minimum amount of sentences.
• State what you want right away.
• Write about only one thing.
• Leave out the humor and emotions.
• Use “if…then” statements.
• Review for ambiguity, clarity.
• Revise for conciseness.

On the Harvard Business Publishing website, David Silverman offers “4 Tips for Writing Better Emails.”

• Make clear what you would like the recipient to do.
• State the purpose of your email up front.
• Do not presume that the recipient has any pre-exisiting knowledge of a topic or necessarily remebers things that were stated in previously sent emails.
• Do not forward long email chains to get a point across.

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker.com believes that emailing is a two-way street and recipients can do their part to break the bad emailing habits of their colleagues.

• Edit poorly written subject lines of a received email when sending a reply.
• Lead by example by sending organized emails that separate different thoughts or questions ito ensure that all points are adequately addressed by the reader.
• “Get outside the inbox.”  There are times when walking down the hall to discuss something with a colleague or picking up the phone to talk to a client can save tons of time and might even eliminate misunderstandings.

And, in case it weren’t complicated enough, don’t forget that many people are using wireless devices these days. Here’s a good piece from the Microsoft Small Business Center on email etiquette for the wire-adverse.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/29/get-to-the-point/feed/ 2 xobniblog pulling-email-hill http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/23/xobni-plus-people-are-talking/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/23/xobni-plus-people-are-talking/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:56:41 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=748 ]]>

Xobni Plus has arrived. It’s an upgraded version of Xobni and provides valuable features such as better, faster search, and Xobni Rank ™-powered AutoSuggest. I absolutely love the new features.

But, why take my word for it?

People are buzzing about Xobni Plus. I hit the web and found some great stuff on Xobni’s amazing new features and some really wonderful real world examples of when Xobni Plus saves valuable time.

“The idea is to do searches on top of searches to find that proverbial e-mail needle in the inbox haystack.” Clint Boulton, eWeek.com

Boulton described his experience when he returned to his Outlook inbox after a four-month hiatus from his job. Sounds like a nightmare, right? Luckily, Xobni Plus helped make his life a little easier.

He was able to utilize the Advanced Search feature to dig up old emails:

“Clicking Advanced immediately gave me the options to search From, To and Has Attachments. Clicking the + button next to the Has Attachments option added search filters for CC’d, All, With, Date, Body, Subject, Type and Folder fields. Narrowing the search to find e-mails with the word “Google” using these filters is a big leap in efficiency, which is what the tool is all about.”

The powers of Advanced Search were just beginning. Clint was able to easily pinpoint the email he needed by specifying the recipient of the email and the fact that it had an attachment.

As a journalist, Clint is sent mass emails that have hundreds of recipients. Using the Advance Search feature, he was able to only search emails from people with whom he had had direct email contact. This filters out much of the “junk” when searching for something important.

You can read the rest of Boulton’s article here.

“The ability to dig out ancient and obscure emails in seconds floored me the first time I used it,” Tim Slavin, reachcustomersonline.com

Slavin, a web designer and coder, had a great experience using Xobni Plus with his overflowing inbox. Xobni Plus searched his archived emails, as well as more current ones, which is a huge advantage to someone like Slavin who archives his email regularly.

Read the rest of Slavin’s article here.

“Xobni Plus includes some interesting new options that give Microsoft Outlook some much-needed smarts.” Doriano Carta, Web Worker Daily.

Carta enjoyed the Xobni Rank™-powered AutoSuggest feature, which auto-completes contacts in the “To” field, providing a drop-down list of ALL contacts, including those who have been included in the “cc” field or people who have written you, but you never wrote back (which is ignored by Outlook search).

Xobni Rank ™ then ranks those people and puts the most relevant contacts at the top of the list.

Read the rest of Carta’s comments here.

Finally, I took at look at what people are saying in the Twitter-sphere:

“Been using XOBNI Premium for a few days and I must say it is worth it .. i can locate emails in a flash with its advanced search strings.” @timbauer

“Upgraded to Xobni Plus, faster, better search and contact auto-complete. Price point of $30 makes sense as well for such a great product.” @seanmullaney

“Two days using @Xobni Plus and I’m actually hating my Outlook inbox a lot less again (Sending mail is better too!)” @refinch

“enjoy the use of @xobni plus… fast search and easy access to your contacts’ social media profiles” @mkhawaja

“Really liking some of the enhanced features of Xobni Plus. Finally controlling my inbox instead of it controlling me.” @HighTechDad


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/23/xobni-plus-people-are-talking/feed/ 3 xobniblog Picture 2 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/20/handy-tips-from-the-people-who-brought-you-outlook/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/20/handy-tips-from-the-people-who-brought-you-outlook/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:56:10 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=478 ]]> The good people at Microsoft have created their very own Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog.

There are many useful tips/tricks for using Outlook, as well as announcements on software updates and other news. It’s worth checking out. There’s some great stuff on there, including how-to’s and other time-saving tips to enhance email productivity.

I’ve summarized a couple of the articles below. More detailed information can be found on the blog.


1) Keyboard Shortcuts  

Keyboard shortcuts can save you time and provide some sweet relief from your mouse-induced carpel tunnel. The author lists some of her favorite keyboard shortcuts, and offers tips on using a color coding system (automated by Outlook) to organize her inbox. An expanded list of keyboard shortcuts can be found here.

2) Preparing to be Away

This handy how-to outlines steps to take prior to leaving on vacation or an extended holiday. The author suggests using Outlook’s meeting scheduler to let your manager and peers know which days you will be away. Sending a simple meeting request, with “All day event” checked, will mark your vacation on your colleagues’ calendars. You can even provide them the name of the person to contact in your absence, or if you are feeling very generous, a number they can reach you at while you are away.

The next step is to prepare your oh-so-important “Out of Office” message.
Note: the following is only useful for Microsoft Exchange accounts. If you do not have Microsoft Exchange, use the instructions to send automatic responses found here on Microsoft’s website.

Using Microsoft Exchange, you can set your Out of Office message any time before you leave. You can access the Out of Office Assistant in the Tools menu. In your message you can indicate if you have no/limited contact to email or an alternate person to reach while you are away.

3) Message Templates

Outlook Message Templates can save you valuable time. Instead of re-writing the same email over and over, use a template! Many people send the same message multiple times a day. Whether it’s the answer to a commonly asked question from coworkers or customers, or a thank you note to a new client. Simply write a new email message with the appropriate information and formatting. Then, save as, “Outlook template (*.oft). Now, all you have to do is access your template and update it with information relevant to the recipient or situation. You access the templates in the folder where you chose to save the file, as opposed to through Outlook.

Hopefully, the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog will provide other valuable tips to save you time and increase your email productivity.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/20/handy-tips-from-the-people-who-brought-you-outlook/feed/ 1 xobniblog 800px-ctrl_z http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/14/announcing-xobni-plus-%e2%80%93-xobni%e2%80%99s-most-powerful-outlook-search-tool-ever/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/14/announcing-xobni-plus-%e2%80%93-xobni%e2%80%99s-most-powerful-outlook-search-tool-ever/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:59:09 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=694 ]]> When we ask Xobni users why they love Xobni they say a lot of really nice things, but a universal truth is that our users love Xobni search. Here’s just a sample of the comments we see on Twitter:

Thank god for #xobni I found a very important email that I thought I lost! @jasonmun

Xobni beats Outlook’s native search. Knocks it out of the park. @danieljohnsonjr

Xobni really kicks serious butt in outlook. just saved me at least an hour of pain searching for mail and figuring out file transfer history. @madguy000

I can’t live without Xobni anymore. It beats any desktop search for emails and their attachments. @paullaberge

Xobni is ingenious for fast searching through email archives – no sorting will beat search speed. Outlook doesn’t match in speed @improvedk

Today, we take Xobni search to a whole new level with Xobni Plus. The features of Xobni Plus, our first premium product, were created directly from the feedback of our users. You wanted phrase search – we made it. You wanted support for Boolean searches – done. You want to search appointments and tasks – you got it. You want to search Xobni’s massive address book in new places – watch this.



Xobni Plus users get these exclusive benefits:

• An advanced search query builder
• The ability to search within conversations and networks
• Support for phrases and Boolean queries
• Xobni Rank-powered AutoSuggest
• Advanced conversation and network filtering
• As well as our new top level premium technical support for one year


See a full feature comparison here.




Pricing and Availability
We’ve made the price tag on Xobni Plus super affordable so it’s accessible to as many users as possible.

Xobni Plus can be purchased for $29.95. This license gets you all of the power of Xobni Plus on one computer and premium technical support for a year. Individuals that want to use Xobni on multiple computers can purchase additional licenses for $9.95.

Companies and groups can buy packs of multiple licenses for a discount. For volume discounts, go here.

Our existing free service will continue to provide the same functionality with additional improvements listed below. Those using the current free version of Xobni can upgrade to Xobni Plus by downloading the new version here (all of your Xobni settings and configurations will be retained through the upgrade)

Improvements to Xobni’s Free Product
We also continued to invest in our free offering over the last quarter. The newest version of Xobni’s free offering can be downloaded here and includes the following improvements:

• 500,000 company profiles from Hoover’s
• New search UI – including photos for people results, attachment file name search, and new email search results
• New hover tip design for conversation and mail view
• Search performance enhancements
• From the new free version of Xobni users can start a 14-day free trial of Xobni Plus at any time

Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, majorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/14/announcing-xobni-plus-%e2%80%93-xobni%e2%80%99s-most-powerful-outlook-search-tool-ever/feed/ 31 xobniblog querybuilder_abstract_small autosuggest_abstract_small getxobniplus_button_small http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/09/delayed-delivery-sending-emails-on-your-own-schedule/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/09/delayed-delivery-sending-emails-on-your-own-schedule/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:58:50 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=632 ]]> It was 3 a.m. and I couldn’t sleep.

Totally random and mostly useless information was running through my head. Suddenly, out of this sea of nonsense sprung an important thought.

I had to send a very important email to a coworker the next day regarding a revised deadline. Remembering to send that email was now all that I could think about. Would I remember to send it tomorrow?

It then dawned on me that I could send the email that night using a handy tool in Outlook. Why worry about sending an email tomorrow when I could get it off my to-do list now? Utilizing the “Delay Delivery” feature in Outlook is a wonderful tool for insomniacs.

It works equally well for people who sleep at night and prefer to use the tool during the day.

This feature can be used in any number of situations. Perhaps you have more time to send emails first thing in the morning, but you prefer to reach out to the recipient later in the day. Or, you know that this particular person tends to respond to emails faster if they are sent at the end of the day.

You can utilize Xobni Statistics to track a recipient’s email habits.



Maybe you have coworkers who work half way across the world and you’d like an important email to be the first thing that they see when they get to work the next morning.

Follow the simple steps below to send an email at a future time or date. Please note, these instructions are for MS Outlook 2007.

 
-Launch MS Outlook.
• Create your email message.
• With the message still open, click on Options in the toolbar.
• Click, “Delay Delivery” on the right side of the toolbar.
• Check the box next to, “Do Not Deliver Before.”



• Set the time and date that you would like the message to be sent.
• Click Close.
• Send the message.
You should see the message in your Outbox until it is sent. You may never have realized it, but many people that email you may have been using this nifty trick for years without you even knowing it!

Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/09/delayed-delivery-sending-emails-on-your-own-schedule/feed/ 7 xobniblog bar-graph1 send-later-frame5 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/07/lisa-choi-partner-program-manager-one-user-per-week/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/07/lisa-choi-partner-program-manager-one-user-per-week/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:23:34 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=626 ]]> I met this week’s user in a non-traditional way. I was at a birthday party for my friend Sundeep here in San Francisco, and he introduces me to his friend Lisa. We started talking and Lisa asked what I did. I said I started a company called Xobni – and she cut me off before I could finish the sentence to cheer “I love Xobni!”

I think she gave me a hug – or a high five. Either way, I figured it’d be appropriate to invite Lisa to interview for One User Per Week.

Lisa works for Responsys, a cross-channel marketing automation system. They focus on enterprise online marketing, and specifically email marketing. Most of their customers are big companies like William Sonoma, Southwest Airlines & Salesforce.com

Partners, Partners, Partners

As a partner program manger Lisa is responsible for everything “partner” – managing product partners like web analytics firms, doing partner event marketing, partner evangelism, etc Lisa is often juggling a lot of different partners across her roles in business development, sales, referral relationships and more. She is often working with 25-30 partners at one time and with any given partner she could be working with dozens of different employees at the partner company.

Sounds overwhelming. And Lisa said it was, until she discovered Xobni.

Xobni for People People

Lisa is a people person and loves that Xobni surfaces the connections between people in her company, customers and prospects. A quick glance at the “Network” feed and Lisa knows who exactly is involved in a project.

A big part of Lisa’s job is building and maintaining relationships. She uses Xobni’s LinkedIn integration to find out where customers have worked before, where they went to school, and other factoids that will help her get a new relationship off on the right foot. She pointed out that Xobni has shown her that the personal world bleeds into the personal world – and she can use that personal information to her advantage in her job.

“Xobni Is My Lifeline”

My favorite thing I heard Lisa tell me harkens back to the rocket ship of a game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” Lisa described Xobni as her “lifeline.” When she is on a call and looking for something really fast Xobni helps her look prepared and organized to the partner she is talking to.

We built someone’s lifeline. That feels good. The Xobni team should be proud


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/07/lisa-choi-partner-program-manager-one-user-per-week/feed/ 0 xobniblog lisa_choi http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/01/re-fwd-your-subject-line-stinks-4-subject-line-tips/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/01/re-fwd-your-subject-line-stinks-4-subject-line-tips/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:09:26 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=459 ]]>

In a world of clogged inboxes and the wide-spread use of portable devices, conciseness and quality content are of the utmost importance when sending email.

An effective subject line is a great place to start.

Although I consider myself adept at communicating through the written word, I used to find myself struggling to come up with the perfect, oh-so-clever (or, at the very least, informative) subject line to send along with my emails. Instead, I ended up sending out drivel like, “Hello”, “Monday” or “Important”.

Below are 4 tips I’ve found to write effective subject lines.

Tip 1: Relevance is Key

Everyone has a philosophy on the subject line, but almost everyone seems to agree that a subject line should be more than an afterthought. I spoke with people in various industries and one of the main complaints about the subject line is that it tends to lose its relevance as it proceeds down the forward and reply chain. Or, the subject line never had any relevance.

For instance, Mitch, the production manager at a business publication, complained to me about receiving emails from PR reps and reporters with the subject line, “FW: Re: Thanks for the Interview!” Mitch doesn’t care about the interview or the PR’s flack’s gratitude, only the photo attachment that needs to be placed in the paper. If the sender has changed the subject line to, “Photo of Acme Co. CEO, Joe Schmoe” Mitch will save valuable time on deadline day when he needs to locate that attachment.

Tip 2: Make it Searchable

Searchability is one of the primary reasons to write a good subject line. It behooves not only the recipient of the email but also you, as the sender, when you get a reply to that message.

I spoke with Mike, who works in the design field and juggles multiple clients and projects. His greatest frustration is when a client or coworker sends an email with a generic subject line such as, “Issues” or “Contract”. This guy deals with a lot of issues every day relating to a lot of contracts with many different clients. Of course he could create folders or labels and sort the emails, but what if he hops on an important call and forgets to do so? Tracking down those issues then becomes more of a headache than dealing with the actual issues. If the subject line read, “McCullion Project-Issues with Drawing A3.54 Elevator Vestibule” it would save him and his client a great deal of time.

Tip 3: Say it in One Line

As more and more people rely on portable devices, emails are increasingly shrinking in length. Subject lines become even more important in this context since it saves people the trouble of opening up an individual email message. Many believe that even desktop emailers should rely exclusively on subject lines in certain situations. It saves everyone time and lets people off the hook in using social niceties, like greetings and salutations.

Emailers on the go would also argue that it’s nice to know as much about the issue (or lack thereof) simply by reading the subject line in order to facilitate prioritizing which emails to get to first. For instance, an email from your boss with the subject line, “Never Received Documents for Today’s Presentation. Send ASAP!” will most certainly take precedent over an email sent from your mom entitled, “NYTimes.com: Woody Allen’s Quest to Find New York’s Best Chicken Soup.” Similarly, your mom’s email might be bumped to the highest priority if the subject line reads, “Call home immediately. Emergency with Dad.”

Examples of good vs. bad one-line emails:

Bad: “Late”
Good: “Running 15 minutes late for 2:30 meeting.”

Bad: “Important”
Good:“Re-Send Tartofsky Memo as Attachment ASAP”

Bad: “Read This”
Good: “Article from WSJ on Budget Deficit that we Discussed”

Bad: “Coffee?”
Good: “Are you free to grab coffee next Tues. at 10 a.m.?”

Bad: “Meeting”
Good: “Meeting notes from Wednesday June 6, 2009″

Tip 4: Use Acronyms

Taking this to the next level involves using acronyms at the beginning or end of a subject line to help the recipient decipher the intention/importance of a message.

Katie, an event planner at a nonprofit organization, receives an onslaught of emails every day. Her organization has established some guidelines for sending emails that encourage staffers to use acronyms to help other staffers prioritize their inbox. These acronym are used widely today and are touted by efficiency experts.

Katie’s organization, for instance, uses “RRR”, which stands for “Read, Review, Respond”, at the beginning of a subject line, such as, “RRR: Proposal to Cooper Foundation.” This allows Katie to easily identify an email that needs attention, as opposed to an email that’s non-work related, but sent from a colleague, or a low-priority work email. If it’s non-work related, staffers are encourage to use “ZZZ”, such as “ZZZ: Peet’s Coffee coupons in the kitchen”. If it’s work-related, but more office-oriented, they write, Office Related Matter, “ORM: printer broken on 4th floor”.

Two widely-used acronyms are “EOM” or “End of Message”, which lets the reader know that the whole message is contained in the subject line, and “NRN” or “No Reply Needed”, which frees the recipient from any obligation to reply to the message.

Other widely-used acronyms are: AET: Answer Expected Today; AR: Action Required;
and RR: Reply requested.

If this all seems overly-complicated or a potential time-suck, just remember, the whole point in writing good subject lines is to save time. Think about the most important/actionable item in the email and stick it in the subject line. And, be sure to think about what will help you and the email recipient save valuable time when searching for an email if it gets buried in an inbox. A couple of extra moments spent on a subject line might save you a whole lot of time and frustration down the road.

And, if you are looking for some inspiration, take a look at Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, where he discusses the BBC’s brilliant use of precise communication in its headlines.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/07/01/re-fwd-your-subject-line-stinks-4-subject-line-tips/feed/ 0 xobniblog subject-line-23 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/26/xobni-facebook-feeds-dont-stop-til-you-get-enough/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/26/xobni-facebook-feeds-dont-stop-til-you-get-enough/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:51:30 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=584 ]]> I was pretty shocked to learn that Michael Jackson died yesterday. I was even more shocked by how I found out about it.

I was searching for Nicole’s email address in Outlook when I came across her status on my Xobni Facebook feed. There it was.

R.I.P., MJ.

I check the news every day, multiple times a day and yet, increasingly, email and social networking sites are becoming an equally important source of information. This is true of pop-culture updates and also more “important news”. (Although, Michael Jackson’s death is certainly important news to me!)

News travels fast these days and we have greater access to more information. Social networking sites have made this true of personal information, as well.

As the line between one’s professional life and personal life becomes increasingly blurred, the personal lives of professional contacts might just become another source of “news”.

Perhaps we’re already moving towards a culture in which we expect people who we know professionally to be aware of what was previously considered personal information.

Cultivating information through Xobni’s Facebook feed, we can learn things that might benefit us professionally. Xobni creates a link between Outlook and Facebook. This can reveal important personal information about your contacts.

Perhaps there’s a client who you haven’t reached out to in a while. Viewing their Facebook status through Xobni you might learn that they just had a baby or went on a trip to Africa. You’ve just unveiled personal information that provides something to discuss other than work when you send that long overdue email or pick up the phone and give your client a ring.

Utilizing this Xobni feature is a valuable tool for professionals living in an age of online social networking. And, if your professional contacts happen to keep tabs on celebrity gossip, their Facebook feeds might also provide a nice break during a hectic day.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/26/xobni-facebook-feeds-dont-stop-til-you-get-enough/feed/ 3 xobniblog avnet http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/24/hidden-patterns-enron-email-predicted-collapse/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/24/hidden-patterns-enron-email-predicted-collapse/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:36:27 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=567 ]]>
Remember Enron?

Scientists recently gleaned valuable information from emails sent by its employees in the 18 months prior to the company’s collapse. NewScientist reported that two researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology assessed 517,000 emails sent to approximately 15,000 employees at the now defunct energy company.

The study, which did not look at the content of emails, only the numbers sent and the patterns of senders and recipients, showed that the most significant changes in employee’s behavior occurred one month prior to the company’s collapse.

The data showed that “email cliques”, a group in which every member has had direct email access with another member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around November 1, 2001, one month prior to the company’s fall. This suggests that in stressful times, people talk more with people who they feel more comfortable with, and less with people who they don’t.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made Enron’s emails public in 2003, when it was conducting an investigation of the company. Such a large sample of emails had previously never been available due to privacy concerns and regulation. This provided scientists a unique opportunity.

This is not the first time that researchers looked to Enron for clues on email patterns and employee behavior.

Back in 2005, Gina Kolata of the New York Times reported on similar studies conducted by computer scientists at universities in the United States and Canada.

These studies used Enron emails to test theories on how email communication reflects group dynamics and hidden social structures within an organization. A scientist at Carnegie Mellon University offers that email communication can reveal informal organizations within a company that may underlie “unofficial” power structures that exist outside of the defined corporate hierarchy, similar to the “cliques” theory mentioned above.

It all sounds a bit like high school.

CNET News, in 2003, reported on a study by two scientists at Hewlett-Packard using emails from within that organization. They too discovered that there were informal communities within organizations that came about when people needed to communicate across departments or work together on projects.

Such studies suggest interesting patterns in leadership and power that are not necessarily defined by an organization. Identifying these leaders and organizations might be useful in improving communication and productivity. Or, it might signify shifts in stability or stress, such as in the case of Enron.

It is interesting to think about how human social patterns factor into the workplace and transfer to electronic communication. Shifts in employee interaction-including electronic interaction-can signify very important things.

Future email studies will most likely be few and far between, considering privacy regulations. However, companies might encourage their employees to assess their email patterns using analytics tools, which are built into software such as Xobni, to reveal the “cliques” that they are a part of.

Then, the company can elect a prom king.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/24/hidden-patterns-enron-email-predicted-collapse/feed/ 1 xobniblog 1008232_network_spheres http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/23/jake-hoban-project-manager-western-eci-one-user-per-week/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/23/jake-hoban-project-manager-western-eci-one-user-per-week/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:38:45 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=411 ]]> I had the chance to talk to another great Xobni user recently – Jake Hoban. Jake is a project manager at Western ECI, a land development company, specializing in civil engineering.



Jake discovered Xobni on Lifehacker.com and has been using Xobni for at least one year. Western ECI is a small company of only 10 employees, and 2 or 3 of their employees are using Xobni. Jake is a big fan of Xobni because he manages many small projects and deals with many different clients. Xobni makes his job easier.

Jake told me he gets between 20-60 emails each day. 50% of his email comes from people within his company and 50% are with people outside his company. I thought he’d tell me Xobni was more helpful managing external communications, but he said it honestly helped him a ton with both categories.

When Jake and I really got deep into the conversation, he admitted to me why he really likes Xobni. He told me that his company has a filing system for organizing emails into Outlook folders – but Jake gets lazy about staying on top of foldering all the email he gets. He is even worse about filing sent emails, which are often just as important. He said Xobni gives him all the benefits of being organized without having to work as hard. I admitted that is exactly what I love about Xobni, and is much of the reason we created it.

Jake also told me another cool anecdote. He said he sometimes uses Xobni for silly, non-important things, like looking up the picture of someone he’s never met before, but has exchanged tons of email. With one click he can pull up their LinkedIn profile or Facebook profile and learn all about them. For him it isn’t necessarily something that is important to his job, but he finds it fun. If Xobni can make email more fun for Jake, that makes me happy. That is why we have t-shirts that say “love email again.” It used to be fun to hear that AOL “you’ve got mail” notification. Then email become overwhelming and wasn’t cool anymore. We like to think Xobni can make email cool again. I know Jake feels we have.

Jake wasn’t all praises. He had his list of feature requests like all Xobni users seem to have. He wanted to do more powerful things with the contacts list Xobni creates. He wanted to be able to easily share contact information across his company and he wanted to see more advanced options in our search feature. Jake had a lot of good ideas, and he will be happy to know that a lot of what he wants will be coming to Xobni users soon.

We really like talking to our users. If you have 30 minutes to spare in your busy day, I’d like to talk to you about how you use Xobni for your job. I’ll write about our conversation here on the Xobni blog and we’ll send you a few Xobni tshirts to share with your co-workers. Submit a comment to our blog if you’d like to participate.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/23/jake-hoban-project-manager-western-eci-one-user-per-week/feed/ 3 xobniblog jake http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/10/one-user-per-week-michelle-deo/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/10/one-user-per-week-michelle-deo/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:32:26 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=406 ]]> I had a great call with Xobni user Michelle Deo today. Michelle is a professional organizer from Georgetown, Kentucky. As you can expect, a professional organizer would be pretty excited about Xobni.

As a professional organizer, Michelle helps families and companies organize the processes by which they run their lives and their businesses. This ranges from new organizing systems for their closets at home to filing systems and work-flow management systems for the office. You can read about Michelle’s business on her website RealNeat.com


While Michelle focuses on organizing people’s physical information, she uses xobni to organize her digital information.

Michelle gets a lot of personal and business email and loves that Xobni organizes her inbox around people. She enjoys the automatic contact information extraction, the photos of her contacts, and having all of the conversations and attachments from a contact in one place. Michelle has been using Xobni for 6 months, and regrets not finding it earlier!

I asked Michelle about a couple unique ways she uses Xobni. She had some pretty cool examples to share. Here are a few:

Michelle is a leader of a mothers’ group in Kentucky. The mothers’ group shares information about all things related to being a mom: what schools to send kids to, where to get clothes for the kids, recommendations on music teachers, etc Michelle said these interactions always happen through email, because when you are a busy mom with kids crying in the background, the phone just doesn’t cut it. Michelle likes that Xobni organizes all of the conversations and contacts she has from her mothers’ group, making it really easy to find exactly what she needs.

Another cool example of how Michelle uses Xobni came from her experience after the National Professional Organizers Conference. Just like we’ve all experienced after returning from a conference, Michelle got inundated with emails from new contacts after the event. Michelle told me she isn’t great at remembering people’s names, however, she never forgets a face. She used Xobni to manage all of her incoming email from the conference. Xobni put a face to every name. She would remember “oh yeah, Jim, I recognize him, I talked to him at the happy hour on Thursday”, “Carrie, right, she was the speaker on day two.” Without Xobni, and the pictures Xobni pulls from LinkedIn and Facebook, Michelle never would have known how she met each person that emailed her.

I really enjoyed speaking with Michelle. It was great to hear how a mother/small business owner/professional organizer uses Xobni. Michelle has told so many people about Xobni, if she wasn’t running her own business we’d hire her to work on our marketing team!


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/10/one-user-per-week-michelle-deo/feed/ 1 xobniblog photo_michelle http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/09/google-now-realizes-outlook-is-here-to-stay-xobni-welcomes-you/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/09/google-now-realizes-outlook-is-here-to-stay-xobni-welcomes-you/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:14:20 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=402 ]]> Here at Xobni, we’ve been saying it for a long time: Outlook is the biggest email client in the world both in terms of engagement and total users. In terms of engagement it has more time in front of a user than any other application (including the web browser) on a business user’s machine. We also realized that while Outlook is huge and entrenched there are some big gaps in what it does and what people would like it to do. Enter Xobni.

We have spent the last 3 years taming Outlook and bringing lightning fast search and people-centric information organization to our users. This is something our users know, but is particularly interesting today in light of the announcement from Google where they announced support of Outlook with Google Apps. What does this mean? It means any Google Apps premium user can now use Outlook to read and write their email. This also means Google Apps users can now use Xobni with their Outlook.

Now Google Apps users can take advantage of these great Xobni features:

• Lightning Fast Search
• Email conversation threading
• Pictures, status, and profile information from Facebook, Linkedin & Hoovers
• Automatic phone number extraction
• Attachment management
• Powerful email analytics
• And more…

We spent the afternoon testing Xobni with the new Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook and we are compatible. Now all of those Google Apps users out there that wanted to use Xobni, but couldn’t because their environment didn’t support Outlook, can now give Xobni a try. Welcome aboard!

Download Xobni for Free here


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/09/google-now-realizes-outlook-is-here-to-stay-xobni-welcomes-you/feed/ 5 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/02/more-details-about-xobni-for-the-blackberry/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/02/more-details-about-xobni-for-the-blackberry/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:15:48 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=370 ]]> A few weeks ago at RIM’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium, we confirmed our plans to make a mobile version of Xobni available later this summer. We appreciate the feedback & excitement from everyone and we’re looking forward to getting it into your hands (literally).

This morning, during Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s keynote address at JavaOne, Alan Brenner (RIM’s SVP of BlackBerry Platforms) showed off Xobni for the BlackBerry. Alan highlighted how this will not be just another stand-alone application on your BlackBerry; Xobni Mobile will be deeply integrated into your mobile experience.  For example, you will be able utilize the power of Xobni’s comprehensive people search directly from the completely familiar BlackBerry “Compose Email” screen.



Jonathan Schwartz and Alan Brenner on stage at JavaONE with Xobni Mobile

Why do you need another addressbook?  We have all been on the go, away from the office, desperate to email someone that we know we have been in touch with in the past.  Today you might be stuck fruitlessly hunting for their details (or calling a coworker to look up the information).  With Xobni Mobile, just start a new email message as you normally would, then select the Xobni bar and type in the first letter(s) of their first name, last name, or company name.  Instantly you’ll see results from everyone who has ever emailed you, ranked by importance to you (with profile photos & job titles too!).  Just select the desired person and their email address will be placed into the To/Cc/Bcc field of your choice.

Because Xobni scans all of your emails for contact information, Xobni’s people search often contains 10-30 times the number of contacts that are in a typical Contacts list, and requires no work to maintain.

More details will come further down the road, but we wanted to let you – our beloved Xobni users – know about the latest in our efforts to allow you to take Xobni with you everywhere, saving you precious time when it really counts.  For more updates, please sign up to be notified when Xobni mobile is available here.


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: blackberry, mobile ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/06/02/more-details-about-xobni-for-the-blackberry/feed/ 36 xobniblog xobni-blackberry-javaone http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/13/week-1-tom-kronenburg-one-user-per-week-series/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/13/week-1-tom-kronenburg-one-user-per-week-series/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 00:29:31 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=362 ]]> Last week I announced here on the Xobni blog, that we’d be doing a new weekly feature where I’d talk to a Xobni user to get to know our users better at a personal level, and learn about how they are using Xobni.

Today I was fortunate enough to talk with Tom Kronenburg on his cell phone from Utrecht, Netherlands. Xobni has tons of users in the Netherlands. I forgot to ask Tom, but I have a suspicion that the word “Xobni” means “Free Beer” in Dutch, so the Dutch people are naturally very excited about what we are working on.

Tom, pictured here, is a consultant at Capgemini and also the founder of a new startup. For those of you that don’t know, Capgemini is a 10,000 employee global company that offers organizational consulting, systems integration, and other IT services. Tom works in the organizational consulting business. Tom mostly consults to the public sector: schools, ministry of education, government loan offices, etc.

Tom is a self proclaimed early adopter and discovered Xobni on the blog Techcrunch.com 1.5 years ago. We were in private beta, but Tom emailed some other early Xobni users at his office, and one of them sent him an invite. He was one of our earliest users!
Tom deals with a lot of external clients, as well as other consultants within Capgemini. I was shocked by this number, but Tom sends and receives between 10 and 50 attachments each day! His job consists of creating reports and slide decks which he sends back and forth between other consultants and his clients. Xobni’s Files Exchanged feature is by far his most used feature, and saves him hours of searching each week.

Tom also loves xobni’s people search feature, so he can quicklyfind email addresses and telephone numbers for his contacts. Xobni’s profiles are a much quicker way for him to find this information that was previously buried within thousands of emails.

As part of my phone call, I spent some time learning about what Tom wants to see in future versions of Xobni. Because Tom uses the files exchanged feature so much, he’d like to see that improved. He’d love to see group collaboration feature built around this feature.

Also, Tom uses the LinkedIn extension a lot, but doesn’t use the Facebook or Hoover’s extension as much, simply because these websites aren’t as big in the Netherlands. The biggest social network in the Netherlands is Hyves, and Tom would love to see that data in Xobni.

I had a great call with Tom, and learned a lot. It makes me excited about doing these calls with users every week.

It was especially cool speaking with Tom because he is working on a startup of his own. HelpWithThisForm.nl embeds a discussion forum next to forms on government and company websites. It helps crowdsource the Q&A that often accompanies a confusing form. I think this is a pretty cool idea, and it is very cool that Tom is also using Xobni to manage his email at his startup. We’ll be looking out for them when they launch.

Thanks Tom!


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/13/week-1-tom-kronenburg-one-user-per-week-series/feed/ 0 xobniblog slide0016_image053-1 http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/05/one-user-per-week/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/05/one-user-per-week/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 23:13:07 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=358 ]]> Ever since we started Xobni, one of the things I’ve enjoyed more than anything else is conversations with our users. I’ve always enjoyed talking to users about how they use email, how they keep track of their email relationships, how they use Xobni, and how we can improve Xobni to better meet their needs. When I say “talk” to users, I don’t mean exchanging emails, or reading survey responses, or even doing formal user studies – instead I mean spending time, talking on the phone, and getting to know the person behind the inbox.

Where do our users work? What is the hardest thing about using email at their job? And how is Xobni impacting their life?

So, I’ve decided to spend 20-30 minutes on the phone with one user per week. I’m not going to have a rigid format for the discussion, but this will be formalizing something I already do every week.

I’m going to write one blog post each week about the person I met, what they do for a living, how Xobni solves their needs, and how Xobni can be improved to make their email life even better.

I’m hoping I can get each person to send me a picture of them and a link to their blog, company website or twitter page they would like me to share with the Xobni community. I’m also going to send off a couple Xobni tshirts to everyone I talk to – so they can share Xobni with their friends and coworkers.

I believe by setting aside time to talk with one user per week I can help extend Xobni’s mission of email happiness.

Are you interested in being one of the first Xobni users featured in One User Per Week? Comment on this blog post. We’ll reach out to you to set up a time for a call. I’m looking forward to our phone call.

Note: when you submit a comment to the xobni blog, you will be asked for your email address. Your email address will not be posted publicly on the blog. Then we’ll contact you by email to get your phone number and schedule a phone call.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/05/one-user-per-week/feed/ 33 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/04/live-from-wireless-enterprise-symposium%e2%80%a6it%e2%80%99s-xobni-mobile/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/04/live-from-wireless-enterprise-symposium%e2%80%a6it%e2%80%99s-xobni-mobile/#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 16:44:42 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=352 ]]> You may have seen some conversations taking place during the past few days about Xobni coming out with a mobile version. We figured these questions would pop up, especially after we announced a recent round of funding from BlackBerry Partner’s Fund. Well, we’re currently getting ready at Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) and we thought there’s really no better place to confirm such a rumor. Yep folks, Xobni will be going mobile soon.

We’re not going go into too many details quite yet, but rest assured, Xobni users will soon be able to have access to many of the relationship management features they already love on their desktop from their mobile phones as well. Think of it as your phone’s address book getting even smarter.

Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for more information about Xobni’s mobile product. In the meantime, be the first to try Xobni Mobile by signing up here. And, for those of you at WES in Orlando this week, please stop by and meet our team.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/05/04/live-from-wireless-enterprise-symposium%e2%80%a6it%e2%80%99s-xobni-mobile/feed/ 1 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/04/30/new-xobni-facebook-extension/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/04/30/new-xobni-facebook-extension/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:38:01 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=342 ]]> Hello Friends,

We have pushed live a new Xobni Facebook extension. For those of you that don’t know our naming ontology, extensions are the 3rd party information area that appears in the Xobni sidebar below the business card section.



The extensions show you information from Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers as well as stats from your email history. The cool thing about these extensions is that they are like mini websites, so we are able to update them on our servers and our users can see new feature without having to install a new version of Xobni.

On Monday, Facebook extended their API to allow profile streams to be accessed via the API. What does this mean for Xobni users? Now the data in the Facebook extension in your Xobni sidebar is even more relevant and more real time. You will see recent status updates, pictures, wall posts, and other information that appears on your friend’s facebook profiles. You will also be able to comment and “like” these items from within Xobni. Our hope is that this information will allow you to build stronger and more informed relationships inside email.

This new extension will automatically be pushed live across all Xobni users within a few days. If you want to see it immediately, you will have to clear the cache in Internet Explorer. You can do that by following these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Tools > Internet Options > General Tab
3. Click “Delete…” under “Browsing History”
4. Click “Delete all…”
5. Close IE
6. Restart Outlook.

We announced this feature, and have received some great press.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/163977/xobni_meets_facebook_right_inside_outlook.html

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/27/xobni-brings-facebook-streams-into-outlook/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/feed-me-xobni-going-live-with-full-facebook-stream-tonight/


http://mashable.com/2009/04/27/xobni-facebook-stream/

Please pay us the greatest compliment by twittering, blogging, or emailing this story to friends that are suffering in Outlook without Xobni. Here is an easy link to this blog post: http://bit.ly/A7rpC


Posted in Xobni Links Tagged: changelog, minorrelease, releaseupdate ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/04/30/new-xobni-facebook-extension/feed/ 2 xobniblog fbextension http://blog.xobni.com/2009/04/15/great-performance-hotfix-from-microsofts-outlook-team/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/04/15/great-performance-hotfix-from-microsofts-outlook-team/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:51:55 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=337 ]]> In case you haven’t heard, while the Xobni team has been working hard on improving performance, the Microsoft Outlook team itself has been focused on performance. They have come up with a hotfix that improves Outlook’s performance, especially under the stress of large PST files. This hotfix will be shipped as part of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 next month, but if you want it now, you can get it here:

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=961752&kbln=en-us

We love seeing this kind of improvement come out of Redmond. Microsoft Outlook product manager, and friend of Xobni, Dev Balasubramanian has written about their hotfix release in this blog post.

Most of the team here at Xobni has installed the hotfix and we are happy with the performance improvements. Some users have reported a 15-60 min Outlook startup after first installing this hotfix as it reconfigures your PSTs, but nobody here at Xobni has experienced any issues.

We just wanted to share this tasty snack with you as our goal at Xobni is to share email happiness with our users ever chance we get.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/04/15/great-performance-hotfix-from-microsofts-outlook-team/feed/ 6 xobniblog http://blog.xobni.com/2009/03/25/blackberry-partners-fund-invests-in-xobni-and-we%e2%80%99ve-launched-xobni-17-no-more-beta/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/03/25/blackberry-partners-fund-invests-in-xobni-and-we%e2%80%99ve-launched-xobni-17-no-more-beta/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 04:02:02 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=297 ]]> In early January we announced that Xobni completed a $7 million Series B led by Cisco Systems. Today we are happy to announce that BlackBerry Partners Fund has also joined our Series B, increasing the total investment round to over $10 million. See the official press release here. Additionally, BlackBerry Partners Fund partner Rick Segal will be joining our board of directors. We’d like to officially welcome Rick to the team.

This investment will allow us to strengthen our service and extend Xobni to new platforms for our customers. The next stage of development will focus on the launch of our premium service later this summer.

This funding announcement comes at a time when we have other very exciting news to share. Today Xobni goes “gold.” The beta label is coming off and version 1.7 is now available to everyone.
Download or upgrade to the newest version by clicking below.



After almost one year of beta testing Xobni, we have digested feedback from tens of thousands of users and improved our product to a point where we are confident that it solves our users’ needs with a high level of performance and consistency. Of course Xobni will never stop improving. For all of us, this is just the beginning.

What’s New in Xobni 1.7

Since our public beta launch in May 2008, we have been working to optimize speed and performance. The new version of Xobni makes the following significant improvements:

• Outlook now starts 31% faster*
• Additionally, you now have the choice to make Xobni start immediately with Outlook, or start only when you want to use Xobni
• Xobni Profiles now load 42% faster*
• We’ve cached profile data, so Xobni stays out of the way of Outlook when it is doing its thing
• More performance controls
• Users can control how often and how much data Xobni indexes
• Users can control when Xobni is running

* Users with large inboxes will experience more dramatic improvements. We made these improvements for you!

We’ve also fixed multiple software incompatibilities with Xobni. Xobni no longer conflicts with the following software:

• Microsoft Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Avaya voice email products (V5 and above)
• Blackberry w/ Blackberry Desktop Software
• MobileMe
• Microsoft Office Communicator
• McAfee Enterprise VirusScan (V8.5 and above)
• Cisco Security Agent (V6.0 and above)

In case you missed it, this work follows continuous improvements to our core product over the last year including recent integrations with leading content providers including LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Skype and Hoover’s.

If you are not currently using Xobni, download it for free here.

Existing Xobni users can update to the newest version by downloading the new installer here (note: this will run an update on your machine and won’t require reinstalling or re-indexing if you are using version 1.6) All users will be automatically updated over the next several weeks.

Thanks for your continued support.


Posted in Xobni Links ]]> http://blog.xobni.com/2009/03/25/blackberry-partners-fund-invests-in-xobni-and-we%e2%80%99ve-launched-xobni-17-no-more-beta/feed/ 62 xobniblog xobni1_7_checklist Download Xobni http://blog.xobni.com/2009/01/12/xobni-fun-facts/ http://blog.xobni.com/2009/01/12/xobni-fun-facts/#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:31:24 +0000 Xobni http://www.xobni.com/blog/?p=291 ]]> Xobni’s fun facts feature is a cool way to discover and share statistics about your email patterns with the people you email regularly.

Occasionally users ask us if Xobni automatically sends emails to contacts without permission. We want to assure you that this is not the case.

Immediately after installation, Xobni displays fun facts while it is preparing your email index. A ‘Click to Send’ button appears at the bottom of each fun fact. When a user wants to share a fun fact with the contact that is the subject of the fact, they can click the “Click to Send” button. You must click the ‘Click to Send’ button for an email to be sent. Xobni does NOT send emails automatically and if the button is not clicked the screen will simply continue to the next fun fact without sending an email.


Should you decide to share one of these facts, Xobni also provides the option to edit and personalize the message before sending. Just click the ‘edit message’ button.

Xobni fun facts can be discovered at anytime by clicking the “share fun facts” menu item in the options menu.

Xobni takes user and data privacy seriously. Extensive details regarding data privacy can be found in our privacy policy and in various FAQ entries on the Xobni web site. We proactively address privacy concerns so that everyone can comfortably and happily continue using Xobni to combat email overload.


Posted in Xobni Links