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Posts Tagged ‘xobni’

It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.

Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be more important in the long run. It is called Xobni One, and it syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. As Xobni rolls out more apps in the future, Xobni One should be able to sync contacts across those as well (very Mesh-like).

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. Xobni One isn’t free. It costs $4 a month or $40 a year, bundled with the Blackberry app. Keeping your contacts in sync is expensive. Doesn’t it seem that Google or Microsoft will eventually just do this for free?

As we first reported on Friday, Microsoft is adding some social hooks into Outlook 2010. Outlook will gain the ability to pull in profile information, photos, and update streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. You can try the LinkedIn plugin now in beta. The other social networks will be added later when Outlook 2010 goes on sale, probably in July.

The new social features make it look a lot more like Xobni, the social email startup backed by Vinod Khosla that Microsoft looked at buying nearly two years ago. Well, a poor man’s Xobni. With Xobni, which itself is a plugin for Outlook, you can pull in relevant contact information, photos, and social stream data from both LinkedIn and Facebook today. It also supports Twitter, and Hoover’s information on companies. Salesforce integration is currently in beta, and SharePoint is coming soon.

The idea behind bringing social streams into Outlook is that as you are reading or composing an email, you can see recent status updates or pictures of the person you are corresponding with to give you some instant context. The Outlook plugins are built on top its “Social Connector,” and was previewed last year. The Social Connector was really created for Microsoft SharePoint, which supports corporate profiles and file sharing. Getting the major social networks to write their own plugins directly for the Social Connector means that Outlook can support additional social streams down the road. Of course, these have to be written in .Net and sent out as executable files, but that’s a different issue.

The bigger issue is that the Social Connector will only work on Outlook 2010, whereas Xobni works on every version going back to Outlook 2003. Companies tend to replace Outlook at a glacial pace, but it is clear that Microsoft is trying to make Xobni a feature of Outlook. And it only took two years to announce. And even now, many of the comments on Microsot’s blog post are complaining that the beta is crashing their computers. Some examples:

SocialConnector.dll crashes my 32-bit Outlook 2010 beta on Win 7 64 bit.

After installing this, Outlook will no longer start up. I’ve have removed the connector, but it still crashes outlook, not the computer. I’m using 64bit Win 7 Ultimate, with 32bit Office 2010.

Xobni could still be doomed, but it does have a few things going for it. The plugin has been downloaded more than 4 million times, its users are rabidly loyal, and the company will eventually expand to other email systems beyond Outlook. It also does email search a lot better (at least right now) than Outlook and can resolve different identities to the same person in your contacts list.

Most people don’t sign up for Facebook or even LinkedIn with their corporate Outlook email accounts. If the email addresses of your contacts in Outlook don’t match their email on LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace, you won’t be able to see their profile information or stream data using the Outlook Social Connector. Xobni does a better job resolving the multiple identities people choose to have on the Internet. That doesn’t mean the folks at Xobni should be breathing easy. Microsoft has endless patience and eventually it gets things right.

Google Calendar may not be the sexiest product Google offers, but, as with Gmail, there are plenty of people who use it to manage their business and personal lives (and wind up staring at it for hours each week as a result). Today, we’ve gotten our hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be an internal build of Google Calendar, giving us an idea of what a forthcoming UI refresh might look like. We’ve included photos of both the internal version and the current version below for comparison’s sake (be sure to click on the photo for a larger version).

As far as we can tell, the changes are all aesthetic and fairly minor but they add up to make a difference — the new version looks more modern, and it also looks more like Google’s other Apps. The new version replaces many of the text-based navigation links with the sleeker silver buttons, which are also found throughout Gmail and Google Docs. The calendar has been spruced up a bit, and the entire interface is now surrounded by a colored border (in the current version, some text and links and hover above the calendar, which looks a little less polished).

You’ll also notice a worldwide clock in the screenshots of the new UI. These aren’t part of the default Google Calendar site now, but you can activate it through Google Calendar Labs, which launched last summer.

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I’ve been a fan of Apple’s Mail.app for quite some time, even though we’ve had our ups and downs, it’s gotten the job done. One of my biggest beefs with Mail.app is searching through past emails. It’s just horrible.

Central Atomics is hoping to fix that problem with Rocketbox. Rocketbox is a new way of searching your e-mail in Apple Mail.app — it’s more advanced than Mail’s search, with the ability to search by person, a search engine that is up to 200x faster than Mail’s, and powerful filters that make it easy to find what you need.

One neat thing about Rocketbox is its search-by-person suggestions.  Rocketbox analyzes your e-mail correspondence and provides a list of important contacts when you search, so you know who you’ve emailed the most.

Also, Rocketbox will show you Inline previews, with highlighted snippets telling you why a message was found, making it easier to scan through emails. The highlighted section then helps you improve your queries and takes the guess work out of using search.

Rocketbox is extremely similar to Xobni, which is the Windows alternative, with a few more features like social network information, and contact information, etc.

Overall, Rocketbox is a great addition to Mail.app, and the entire search experience. You can get a 30 day trial, or buy the full version or $14.95, but the first 100 TechCrunch readers to use the code “TECHCRUNCH“ can get Rocketbox for $9.95, instead of the regular $14.95, when checking out.

PC users, rejoice, for Google has just announced that there’s a fresh, stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, with added extensions and bookmark sync features.

You can check for the new version manually if you’re already using Google Chrome for Windows (go to Settings > About Google Chrome), or you can wait for the new release to be automatically updated within the next week.

Google previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and says over 1,500 have now made their way to the extensions gallery. The other new feature baked into the Chrome browser for Windows, Bookmark sync, is particularly useful if you use more than one computer, as it enables you synchronize your browser bookmarks on all of your machines.

To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel only for now. As for Google Chrome for Mac, the search giant requests you keep hanging tight: extensions, bookmark sync and more should make their way to the beta ’soon’. Or, you could use the dev version of Chrome for Mac, which already supports extensions.

Web developers and designers might want to dive into the new features of this Chrome release on the Chromium Blog, as it includes a number of fresh HTML and JavaScript APIs.

If you’re using a version of Chrome with extensions support, also make sure to install the TechCrunch one. It works like a charm.

In a savvy move, SoundCloud are to partner with music portal The Hype Machine to let labels and artists service music bloggers – a key component of the music scene now – with new and pre-release tracks.

The Hype Machine is going to be able to aggregate the output of blogs, but more importantly the bloggers get official releases without having to be forced to release an MP3 into the wild. In addition labels/artists can track listens and pull analytics on who and how the content is being consumed, as tracks get released. Since labels and bloggers haven’t traditionally got on, this move is potentially a lot more productive for both sides.

Tonight, Xobni is selectively allowing users to download a new version of its client with a number of UI enhancements. This launch coincides with Xobni’s new Salesforce extension. This is notable because it marks the launch of premium extensions for the first time, that give the company a new potential revenue stream.

Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics.

There are a half dozen or so other enhancements to the client such as extensions now being resizable, and better drag and drop support. There’s also finally a way for users to easily open a folder that emails reside in. Basically, if you’re addicted to Xobni, there’s a lot of little tweaks (and some bigger ones) to try out.

But again, the big news is that Xobni is opening premium extensions to users — and not just business users, all Xobni users. If Xobni is able to effectively convince users to buy these (as well as get more beyond just Salesforce), it could be a decent new revenue stream for the company. Back in July, the company introduced ‘Xobni Plus’, the premium version of their product. Revenue streams can be addicting when turned on, it seems.

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Earlier tonight, Xobni quietly released, at least to some users, a new version of its Outlook plug-in that brings Twitter streams into your email in an intelligent way. Instead of acting like any other Twitter client and showing you the full stream of everyone you follow, it shows you only the recent Tweets of the person whose email you are reading, whether or not you follow them on Twitter. (A Xobni blog post went up briefly about it and then was taken down, but not before I was able to grab the screenshot at right).

Instead of replicating Twitter outright, it shows you the Tweets in the context of an email to help you learn more about the person with whom you are communicating. This is consistent with the way Xobni brings up similar information about a contact from Facebook or LinkedIn or Skype. If you don’t know the person, it gives you some more context. If you do, it gives you something personal to talk about. (Threadsy, which launched at this year’s TC50, also shows Tweets in context alongside emails).

With both the full Facebook stream and now Twitter built into the product, chances are you’ll see what each contact has been doing recently. Xobni also lets you reply via Twitter, and follow a contact from within its application.

One of Xobni’s investors is Vinod Khosla, who told me a few weeks ago that Xobni is getting “great traction.” I’ve since heard that the product is approaching 3 million downloads.

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It’s been just one month since email startup Xobni got an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund, which brought its total B round up to $10 million, and already it has a working prototype for an upcoming Blackberry app. Xobni executives were showing off the app at a Mobile Meetup in San Francisco last night, and the screenshot above found its way into my inbox (which is “xobni” spelled backwards, you know).

The app was working, and could be released sometime this summer, according to my source. The photo above shows the app on a Blackberry Bold, and appears to be showing off its contact search functionality. You type in a few letters, and it returns the contact information for every match in your inbox (even people who you haven’t necessarily added to your address book yet). I wonder what else it can do.

Xobni, which is a plug-in for Outlook that incorporates data from various social networks, currently does not have a mobile client. But the company has hired a small team of engineers to work on mobile apps, with Blackberry being the first device to get one.

Not only is there the connection with the Blackberry Partners Fund, but I’ve been told in the past that there is about 50 percent overlap between Xobni users and Blackberry owners. (There must be an Outlook-Blackberry mental axis out there). So it makes sense to go after the Blackberry first. But the startup cannot afford to ignore the iPhone. Can it?

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