Archive Page 2

OUPW: Sue Rothberg, Video Production Company Principal

Published June 1, 2010 Xobni Links Leave a Comment
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Sue Rothberg

  • 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!

Xobni Has a New CTO and Change in My Role

Published June 1, 2010 Xobni Links 10 Comments
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by Adam Smith

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

Xobni auf Deutsch, mit XING!

Published May 20, 2010 Press 13 Comments
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by Michael Albers

(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.

Xobni 1.9.3 in German with XING

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:


Xobni in German, with XING!

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.

Google Gadgets in Microsoft Outlook? Yes, thanks to Xobni

Published May 18, 2010 Xobni Links 8 Comments
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Posted by Jeff Bonforte, CEO

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.

Your Gadget in Outlook

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.

Xobni for BlackBerry gets an update

Published May 17, 2010 Xobni Links 1 Comment
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Posted by Michael Holzer

Xobni for BlackBerry contact list
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.

Edit Xobni contact

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.

OUPW: Sarah Craddock – University Residence Hall Director

Published May 12, 2010 User Stories , Xobni Links Leave a Comment
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SarahCraddock

  • 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.

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*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.

We think in minutes not months

Published May 11, 2010 Xobni Links 3 Comments

by Matt Brezina

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.

OUPW: Xobni & the First Job

Published May 5, 2010 User Stories , Xobni Links 8 Comments
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JoTroSchwo

  • Name: Joe Troyen-Schwartz
  • Position: Business Analyst
  • 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.

One User Per Week, featuring Stew Goss

Published April 27, 2010 User Stories , Xobni Links Leave a Comment
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by Maggie Ronan

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:

Stew Goss

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).

Xobni & Outlook 2010 – Together at last!

Published April 22, 2010 Xobni Links 8 Comments

by Britton Glasser

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.

plane

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!

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Xobni’s contact management products offer lightning fast email search and organization of your inbox, as well as an innovative and comprehensive address book for the mobile device.

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