The Smartr & Xobni Blog

Bringing Full Cloud Power to Xobni for Outlook (2.0.3 and 1.9.7)

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:41:00 -0800

By Josh Jacobson

Xobni for Outlook just got Smartr. Our Smartr Cloud (formerly Xobni Cloud) was originally introduced as a simple way to keep all Xobni and Smartr contacts up-to-date across all of your devices and computers. At first, this simply included Xobni for Outlook and Xobni for BlackBerry. All of the smarts involved in finding and ranking phone numbers, email addresses, names, email history, and social connections could be handled by the software on the device (the “client” software). In fact, many times, the clients would “teach” Smartr Cloud the “right” answers. But there has been a shift. The cloud (formerly the “student”) is becoming the teacher.

As we introduced new client software & apps ( for Android, iPhone, Gmail), it made much more sense to let the cloud do more of the heavy lifting. This way a single improvement or update in the cloud would instantly improve the experience for all of our users, across all of our products.

Xobni for Outlook 2.0.3 has been completely re-engineered to take advantage of all of the smarts available in the cloud. As we further develop and innovate cloud functionality, Xobni for Outlook 2.0.3 will automatically improve.

And for those folks that have a Xobni Plus license, we’ve done the same re-engineering for Xobni 1.9.7, which you can download for no additional fee.

What’s new in both 2.0.3 and 1.9.7:

For Smartr Cloud users:
(If you’re a Xobni Pro subscriber, or have installed Smartr Contacts for iPhone or Android, Xobni for Outlook can already connect to your Smartr Cloud account.)

Improved AutoSuggest results
Improved People Search results
More accurate phone numbers
More accurate social profiles for each contact (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc)
Improved automatic contact merging (adding two email addresses to one contact)
More accurate contact names
More frequent connection to Xobni Cloud (after 25 minutes of idle time, rather than 60)

For all users:

Improved message body gadget compatibility and performance in Outlook
Other performance and stability improvements

Detailed release notes are available.

These updates are recommended for all Xobni for Outlook users. Previous versions of Xobni for Outlook will not connect to Smartr Cloud as of March 15th, 2012.

Download Now:

Version 2.0.3 for Xobni Free & Pro Users (most users)
Version 1.9.7 for Xobni Plus Users

Solve Attachment Problems with the New SkyDrive Gadget

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:46:12 -0800

By Josh Jacobson

It’s been long known that large attachments and email systems are sometimes very much at odds with one another. Microsoft’s SkyDrive team is well aware of this and has created a helpful (and entertaining) new site to help solve attachment woes. AttachmentsSuck.com also highlights the brand-new SkyDrive Gadget, which is now available for Outlook in the Xobni Gadget Store.

If you find yourself constantly emailing attachments, especially if you have a set of materials or files that you tend to send over and over again, the SkyDrive Gadget is a perfect companion. In the Xobni sidebar, you’ll see all of your SkyDrive files. Just find the one you want to share, click “Email Link” and a new Outlook mail window opens with the link ready to email. If a file was previously private, you’ll get a URL for that file that is only known to folks that you send it to. Piece of cake!

Also, with the recent addition of the CA Open Space Gadget, the Xobni Gadget Store now has 27 gadgets for your Outlook-enhancing enjoyment.

Try the SkyDrive Gadget now, or read more helpful hints from the SkyDrive team.

Happy sharing!

iTunes features Smartr Contacts + Update 1.4 is released

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:30:00 -0800

by Michael Albers

Update: 1.4 release is now also available, which will provide our users with even more great features. Such as Yahoo! mail support, editing, hiding and much more! Do check it out.

Today is a proud day at Xobni. Not only are we being featured in the “New and Noteworthy” section of the iTunes App Store, but we also released a big update of the app - just 2 weeks after the launch. Oh, and in case you missed it, we hit 100,000 downloads yesterday.

Now, lets dig into the update - It’s packed with many of your requests - so keep that feedback coming!

Here’s what we’ve got for you:

Email Viewing - Now you can view emails (when available) in the history tab, so you can easily reply and compose!
New Login Screen & Tour - Updated login screen and product overview.
Settings Fix - Ensure settings show the right connected accounts
iPhone Contacts Update - Improved inclusion of your iPhone contact list
Fixes for handling foreign characters
Loading Improvements - Better handling of network/connection issues during contact loading
Crash fixes - You found ‘em. We fixed ‘em.
Link to FAQ - Support url now points directly to our updated FAQs
General bugs and fixes - Fixes and improvements throughout the app

To get the latest version, visit the App Store from your phone and select “Updates.”

Thanks again for your enthusiasm - We would not be here without you all!

PS - As you know, apps live and die by their reviews - We’d love your support, so if you like the app, please submit a positive review in the App Store.

100,000 iPhone Downloads in 13 Days!

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:39:00 -0800

Wow. What a day. Smartr Contacts for iPhone has hit the 100.000 downloads milestone! It’s an understatement to say we were excited that tens of thousands of people asked to be notified when Smartr Contacts for iPhone was available… but getting 100,000 downloads in under 2 weeks even passed our lofty expectations (and hopes)!

As a whole, Xobni and Smartr products have had over 10 million downloads - so we’re used to exciting growth - but we’ve never hit 100,000 downloads for one product so quickly in Xobni’s history. The momentum started from day one. As Jeff Bonforte (our fearless leader) pointed out on Twitter after the iPhone launch, “we had more new users from iPhone launch in three days than from the first week of our Gmail and Android launches combined. Hmmm.”

Don’t get me wrong, the growth for those products are very impressive, but you just can’t touch what is happening on iPhone. It seems iPhone users have a particular hankering for a “magic address book!”

Thanks to all our blogging friends for helping us get the word out - and of course to our users who are using, tweeting and sharing the app with their friends.

Here we come 1,000,000!

“How does mobile change the way we connect and stay in contact...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:33:00 -0800

“How does mobile change the way we connect and stay in contact with people? The paradigm of the “contact manager” or “personal information system” is being changed by the context and connectedness of mobile devices and one company is reinventing this information layer that ties us all together.”

Check out this great blog and interview of our very own, VP of Product Management, Michael Albers.

Smartr Contacts for iPhone now available!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 05:02:53 -0800

By Michael Albers

Xobni is very excited to announce the release of Smartr Contacts for iPhone!

A few months ago we introduced Smartr Contacts for Android and announced that Smartr Contacts was coming to iPhone. Since then, we’ve gotten great feedback on the Android product, and have been astounded by the level of interest in the iPhone app. In fact, tens of thousands of people asked to be notified when it was available. Boy, did that motivate the team to bring what many have called “the world’s best address book” to the iPhone!

So now, in addition to having products for our Android, BlackBerry, Gmail, Kindle Fire and Outlook users - we can add iPhone to the list of platforms we support! w00t!

For anyone who uses Gmail or Outlook, this free app will transform your address book into one that is smart, easy to use and automatic. Essentially, we create a profile for every person you’ve ever communicated with, even those who aren’t in your iPhone address book - Automatically.

So, what does Smartr Contacts do for you?:

Automatic Address Book - Imagine having an address book that automatically identifies and maintains the names and contact information for everyone you communicate with.
Smart Contact Discovery - Enabled by the Smartr Cloud, contacts are automatically discovered from email data (currently Gmail or Outlook), as well as data from social networks.
Rich Profiles - A complete profile is created for each contact, including a photo, job title, phone numbers, company details, email history, common contacts and info from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Robust Search - Search by name, initials, company, title, email, phone and more to make finding anyone fast and easy.
Ranked by Importance - All contacts are ranked by importance, not alphabetically, so the most important people are at the top.

A video of the Smartr Contacts for iPhone can be found here, but thought we’d also list some of our favorite features:

Home Screen - The app home screen offers a great way to explore all your contacts by showing highlighted Facebook photo’s or Twitter updates.
Browse Contacts - Clicking the search box, immediately allows you to peruse or search your network and instantly see all your contacts ranked by importance.
Rich Profiles - Of course the robust and rich contact profiles!
- Swipe the social tab to see all the networks and click to see the latest updates (either opening the native app or website)
- The Details tab show you the emails and phone numbers in ranked priority allowing for 1 click access to call, SMS or email a contact
- The History tab highlights your communication history and your recent communications for everyone (you can’t open these messages yet, but that is coming soon)
- The Common tab is a crowd pleaser, showing all the people you have in common with each contact (now you can’t forget anyone).

In addition to these features, we’re already working hard on additional features and functionality coming soon via an update, including contact editing, design updates and the ability to view emails within the app.

We hope you enjoy Smartr Contacts for iPhone, and welcome your feedback and comments. Simply click the “Email Feedback” button in the app settings screen.

Smartr Contacts for iPhone is available for download from the iTunes App Store.

Enjoy!

The Xobni Team

Smartr Contacts Tip: Get your widgets!

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:17:12 -0800

Add the Smartr Contacts Widget to your Android homescreen to ensure your contacts are always close at hand. With the widget, you’ll have one click access to search all your contacts or compose an email to multiple people.

We think it’s a lifesaver and hope you do too!

Adding the Smartr Contacts Widget is easy:

From an empty spot on your screen, press and hold until the menu appears
Select the Smartr Widget (Large or Small) from the list
You’re done!

Smartr Contacts Tip: Contacts in Focus

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:49:23 -0800

You may notice that sometimes on the Smartr Contacts home screen, you see a “focused” view of single contact. What is this?

The contact in “focus” is displayed in 4 squares and is surrounded by photos of all the contacts you both have in common

Tap any photo to view the complete profile details for that contact

This is a great way to explore your contacts and find those with whom you may have lost touch.

Smartr Contacts Tips

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:34:32 -0800

As you know, there are loads of great features and functionality in Smartr Contacts for Android and we want to make sure you can make the most of the app - So we are starting a series of tips for both the Android and Gmail products - We hope you enjoy!

Tip #1 - Smartr Contacts ranks everyone by importance, so the people you talk to the most are at the top.

Swipe the contacts screen up or down to scroll through all your contacts

Use the search bar at the top to search by first or last name, company, title or phone number

Smartr Contacts keeps all your contacts close and your important contacts closer!

Get the Smartr Contacts for Android update!

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:26:00 -0800

We’ve got a new version of Smartr Contacts for Android, just in time for the holidays. We’ve added some great new features and made some key bug fixes — This is an update you don’t want to miss.

To download this release (Version: 1.5.814) go to http://xobni.com/adl
To make this easier in the future, enable Auto-updates on your phone, by clicking the menu tab from the Android Market
For those early Alpha and Beta testers, you’ll need to uninstall the old app and re-install Smartr Contacts from the Android Market.

Here’s what’s new:

Fixed issues some users had when adding Gmail accounts.
Support for moving the app to an SDCard.
Fewer app notifications.
Home screen swipe improvements when sliding between the pictures and calendar.
Search your Smartr Contacts by area code or phone number.

Thanks again for all the feedback and keep that feedback coming. We love it.

Latest updates to Smartr Inbox for Gmail

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:40:06 -0800

Version 0.1 Production-68

We’ve just pushed another update to Smartr Inbox! This smaller release features a handful of goodies that you’ve been asking for. If you’ve already have Smartr Inbox installed, it’s easy to get on the latest—just refresh your Gmail page. You can also download it for free on our website.

Main highlights include:

Support for the Preview Pane lab in Gmail!
New minimalist Smartr theme
Thanks to this addition, your Smartr sidebar can sport the same signature red accents and clean look as Gmail’s “Light” theme.

Changing your theme is quick and easy. Just use the Smartr dropdown selector and choose the red/white box.
Improvements to the minimized state
If you’ve never minimized the sidebar before, all you need to do is to mouse over the left edge of the sidebar and click to minimize. Done!

Xobni - Nominated as Top Sales Productivity Tool 2011

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 07:41:00 -0800

Xobni and Smartr are priceless for Sales & Marketing professionals as these products allow them to take relationship management to a new level. In the Sales world, your contacts are your business and both Xobni and Smartr make finding anyone you’ve ever communicated with incredibly easy!

Xobni has been nominated for “Top Sales Productivity Tool” as part of the Annual Top Sales & Marketing Awards 2011 and we need your votes to win!

Vote for Xobni today !

New Features and Fixes for Smartr Inbox

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:09:00 -0800

By Angel Steger

Great news! We’ve made some recent additions to Smartr Inbox for Gmail, including some much requested bug fixes. You won’t want to miss out. If you’ve already have Smartr Inbox installed, just refresh your Gmail page. Want to try it out? You can also download it for free.

Here’s what’s new:

Support for multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts
Now, you can easily switch between your Gmail and Google Apps accounts in the same browser.
Intelligent phone number extraction
Smartr Inbox automatically finds phone numbers in your email messages and adds them to your Smartr contacts, so you don’t have to do it manually. Want to know where we found the number? Just mouse over it and we’ll show you a snippet from the original email.
A new look for Relationship History
We’ve exchanged our sparkline graph to a more elegant bar graph. Roll over a bar and see three subject lines from that week.
Improved autosuggest performance

Support for international characters
Thanks to everyone who worked with us on this! If you were experiencing this issue, here’s how to fix it.
And more! See the complete list.

We hope to see you on the latest version! Got ideas or feedback you’d like to share? Visit our forum. Keep your feedback coming—we’re listening :)

New Hire: Mike Rizkalla from webOS to head up Xobni Mobile

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:44:27 -0800

It’s not every day that you’re able to hire one of the top engineering leaders in the mobile space - but today is our day (Ryan at GigaOm caught wind before we posted). We’re beyond thrilled that Mike Rizkalla has joined the Xobni team, overseeing engineering for our Mobile products.

Mike came from HP’s Palm Business Unit, where he led application development for webOS. But greener pastures awaited him at Xobni. In his management role, he’ll be overseeing production direction and strategy, carrier readiness for mobile apps and platforms, performance, scale, and pretty much all things mobile.

Welcome, Mike!

On Facebook, it's now 4.74 degrees of separation

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:41:17 -0800

The old “six degrees of separation” adage appears to be shrinking quickly!

92% of Facebook users are separated by only 4 degrees from any other user, according to analysis Facebook calls, “the largest social network studies ever released.”

“The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74,” Facebook says. You can learn more about Facebook’s newfangled spin on 1960s social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiments to prove that people are separated by only six contacts here.

Facebook is not the only place where you can see your network connections. With the common contacts feature in Smartr Inbox for Gmail and Smartr Contacts for Android, you can see all the people you have in common with any contact so you can easily grow your network. Simply select any contact in Smartr and select the common contacts tab (show the icon maybe) and here you can easily see all your mutual contacts and drill into each person’s profile. Now you can truly see how small the world really is.

Tis the Season... to Work! [INFOGRAPHIC]

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:00:00 -0800

Xobni has released our 2nd annual survey results on email behavior around the holidays… and it ain’t pretty if you’re a believer in disconnecting over the holidays. Overall, the percentage of people checking and receiving email was shockingly similar to last year’s results, leading us to believe this is a very valid representation of email behavior over the holidays.

The highlights of the survey are as follows:

A whopping 79% of U.S. working adults say they receive work email on traditional holidays like Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, etc.; and 68% with email admitted to checking it.
19% of people said that they are actually “thankful for the distraction” or “relieved” to receive work email on holidays.
37% of people surveyed admitted to feeling annoyed, frustrated or resentful after receiving work-related emails on holidays. This number dropped slightly from 41% last year, leading to more evidence that people are accepting (and for some, embracing) work on the holidays.
41% of people that admitted to checking email because they believe doing so would ease the work load once they return from the “break.”
Funny bone stat: 6% say they use work email as a way to avoid awkward family/holiday commitments and “crazy” friends and/or relatives. ;)

But, there’s good news for the holiday purists. According to the survey, men are checking email LESS. That’s right - in 2010, 67% of men admitted to checking email in 2010, and that number fell to 58% in 2011. And women are checking slightly more… meaning we’re closing the gender gap on who checks email while spending time with friends and family over the holidays.

If you’re intrigued and want to learn more, here’s a link to the full data released today (and here are the results from last year). We’ve only got one rule - don’t read this from the Thanksgiving table!

Smartr Inbox named a Top 100 Product of 2011 by PCWorld

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:50:07 -0700

Ok - so we’re not big on using this blog to beat our chests, but we just can’t contain ourselves… Xobni’s new Smartr Inbox product for Gmail was just named one of PCWorld’s 100 Best Products of 2011!! And we are among some great company - Samsung, HP, Verizon, Apple, Intel, Canon, Lenovo, Motorola, T-Mobile, Spotify, Box.net. We’re thrilled to be named a Top 100 product alongside these incredible brands/products and remain focused on providing great products for users around the world.

Workday Comes to Outlook via Xobni Gadget Store

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:20:00 -0700

For years, Xobni has been known as a tool to make Microsoft Outlook “livable” and “more productive” with our easy people and email search plugin. While there has been a lot of excitement and hoopla recently around our new Smartr-branded products for Android and Gmail (“a smarter way to go about overcoming contact overload”), we continue to improve upon the product that put us in business – Xobni for Outlook. Earlier this year, Xobni launched a new Gadget platform and store (along with 20 leading partners) to bring more productivity to Outlook users, and to extend our Outlook expertise to developers that had an interest in bringing their products to the hundreds of thousands of Outlook users, but didn’t have the resources or expertise (there’s a reason Xobni is the #1 Outlook plug-in… it’s hard!).

We launched the platform with 20 gadgets in our store, including Dropbox, Evernote, Klout, Salesforce.com, WebEx, Yammer, and many more. We’ve heard great things from users and enterprise customers about how bringing these products into Outlook has enhanced productivity, and developers have helped us fine tune the product into a super simple path into Outlook.

Today we’re happy to add Workday to the mix of industry-leading gadgets in our Store, and to be part of Atlassian’s new OnDemand offering via the JIRA gadget.

If you’re in HR, you’re either a Workday user, or wish you were. They are part of this revolutionary wave of companies that are re-inventing enterprise software for to be focused on their end-user – in this case, HR professionals. The Workday gadget in Outlook via Xobni enables you to view your colleagues’ contact information right from your inbox, giving you the information you need to work more closely and efficiently with them. In addition to your own contacts, you can search for and view contact info for Workers in Workday, see the list of to-do items assigned to you in your Workday Inbox and access those tasks – all directly from Outlook. Workday users simply download the gadget here, and voila, you’re one step closer productivity nirvana.

The JIRA gadget for Outlook has been available via Xobni since launch in May; however the gadget will now be bundled into the new Atlassian OnDemand offering, which features fully-integrated cloud-based versions of their most popular product development tools. And of course, this includes JIRA for Outlook via Xobni. We use JIRA for bug-tracking internally at Xobni, and have found this gadget absolutely crucial in our time-savings efforts – and have been glad to hear the same from other power JIRA users.

Developers interested in getting an easy path into Microsoft Outlook using OpenSocial APIs can go here to learn all they need to know about Xobni Gadgets.

One to Watch

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:28:00 -0700

It’s not every day that the fearless leader of your start up gets featured in Fortune’s Top 40 under 40: Ones to Watch… So we’re doing a bit of fist pumping and chest pounding for ours: Jeff Bonforte!

Fortune 40 Under 40 Ones to Watch

150 = 4,000 - Cool math and science on the brain

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:15:45 -0700

At Xobni, we often describe a successful product as one that lets you “comfortably” keep track of and manage tens of thousands of relationships.

While our brain can hold on to tiny bits of thousands of interactions and people, we were wired to manage just 150 relationships - a number scientists call Dunbar’s Number, after British scientist Robin Dunbar. Scientists believe this number is an evolutionary restriction wired into the primitive parts of our brain over 250,000 years ago. The number corresponds to the approximate population of a neolithic village. In comparison, modern cities are a recent invention, not to mention the current explosion we see in interactions enabled by our digital lives.

So while our brain manages 150 relationships comfortably, it really strains past 500. Which isn’t so great, given we initiate on average over 2,000 new relationships a year. This may seem hard to believe, but think of all the different people you communicate with each year – via email, calls, in person, etc. We’ve looked, and on average, Smartr uncovers 4,800 relationships per inbox. Add in other inboxes, calls and in person meetings and the number keeps on jumping. For most it will go over 5,000, and for some it will number in the tens of thousands (for me 32,000). We found over 70,000 relationships for one particularly popular/busy customer.

Of course, other parts of our brains have stepped in to help keep track of relationships. CASE IN POINT:

I remember that “cool guy” with the funny hair who worked at UBS and took us to his favorite Greek restaurant in the strange mall with the shark tank in the middle of nowhere. Our friends Lili and Tamas went to school with him. He took all those cool photos of us before my first solo skydive in 2004. I want to reach out to him to send me a photo he took, but if you asked me to remember his name to save my life, I’d be dead.

That is a real memory of him for me. It is remarkably easy to remember effectively gigabytes of strange details about that “cool guy”, but my brain fails to recall a few kilobytes of information: his name and email address, which I know he gave me.

My Smartr Contacts app for Android did remember him and his email address, though. It was buried in depths of an old email account Smartr indexed for me. And it took me less than 10 seconds to find him. Here’s how I did it: I searched Smartr Contacts on my Android for “Lil” (she is my third highest ranked “Lil”), and with one click, there he was - the third shared contact right beneath Lil’s husband and my sister. The “cool guy” is Marcel, and he sent me the photos just four hours after I sent him an email. That’s me and Sioux in Hohenems, Austria eight years ago.

This is a fringe case, right? Sure, on its own. I haven’t emailed Marcel since May 2004, and we have only exchanged five emails in total, including the one earlier this year. But collectively these types of relationships are over 95% of all our relationships with people, groups and organizations. If our brains were getting grades on answering “who?”, we would get an F-.

So while we are a long way from our neolithic ancestors, more relationships hasn’t translated to a massive increase in deep relationships. Hours in the day and our physical wiring has kept growth in the number of deep relationships relatively slow and low. But the total number of “relationships” has exploded. And despite access to supercomputers, the tools we use to manage this massive growth of connections are mere digital copies of paper and pen.