Xobni: Turbocharging Outlook

xobni

A graduate of the Y Combinator venture firm, San Francisco-based Xobni, which is “inbox” spelled backwards, has been in the Outlook enhancement business since 2006, according to their site. Every time you get an e-mail, Xobni creates a profile for the sender, with their contact information, all the attachments they’ve sent you, all the conversations you’ve recently had, their social networking accounts, et cetera, all for easy retrieval later. It’s even smart enough to suggest users you might want to send that memo to. They claim that users tell them “Xobni makes your inbox work the way your mind does.”

Xobni comes in a few flavors, but the one resellers are going to want to look at is Xobni Enterprise, which offers expanded search capabilities and corporate controls. It’s a neat concept. Assuming it works, such features could benefit Outlook users.

Still, I just can’t help but feel like Xobni is a band-aid for the very real problem of keeping disparate information organized and integrated; a problem that many software as a service e-mail solutions are taking great strides in solving.