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Xobni Corporation
Company typePrivate (venture-backed)
IndustryEmail applications
Founded2006
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
Jeff Bonforte, CEO
Adam M. Smith, Co-Founder
Matt Brezina, Co-Founder
Websitewww.xobni.com

Xobni (pronounced zob-nee)[1] is a San Francisco-based company that makes software applications and services including products for Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices. It was founded in March 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina from Adam's dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts as part of the Y Combinator summer founder's program. In late 2006, it relocated to San Francisco to help grow the company and have access to Silicon Valley talent pool.[2]

Xobni's first product, Xobni for Outlook, was launched into private beta on September 18, 2007, at the TechCrunch 40 conference. Xobni plugs into Microsoft Outlook and offers fast search and people-based navigation of email archives. The company has hinted at plans to offer the same functionality for other email clients[3] and launched its first mobile product in March of 2010 for BlackBerry users, which aims to offer an improved address book for the mobile device.[4] When the Outlook product was first launched, it was called Xobni Insight, and was soon changed to Xobni for Outlook, or simply Xobni.


Xobni has received mostly positive coverage,[5][6][7] although initial versions had performance problems on large inboxes.[8] Many users find that the preinstalled version of Xobni (and possibly the manually installed equivalent) cannot be removed.[9]. Some anti-virus software has also flagged Xobni as malware. Xobni has not responded to questions regarding the software's use of email credentials. It is clear that the software communicates with Xobni's servers.
The company opened[10] its beta to the public on May 5, 2008 and has since garnered media coverage from a number of blogs and media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal,[11] The New York Times[12], CNET[13] Businessweek[14], CIO Magazine[15], TechCrunch[16], and more.

In February 2008, Xobni hired Jeff Bonforte, a Vice President at Yahoo!, as their CEO.[17] In the same month, Bill Gates gave a demo of Xobni at the Office Developers' Conference.[18] This led to rumors of a US$20 million acquisition by Microsoft, which the company reportedly rejected.[19]

"Xobni" is the word "inbox" spelled backwards, and it is pronounced Zob-nee.[1]

Free & Premium Services

There were a lot of questions while the product was in beta of how Xobni planned to make money and the scope of their products.[20] In July of 2009 Xobni released a paid version of its product called Xobni Plus, offered initially for $30. Xobni Plus includes features such as advanced search, appointment search, the ability to search multiple PST archives, no ads, and one year support.[21] In 2010, the company rolled out additional revenue-generating products, including their first mobile application, a cloud service to share Xobni data across multiple devices, and enterprise gadgets that bring third party systems/data into Outlook. The company also built an enterprise business[22] and rolled out a product to sell to enterprises directly and through reseller partnerships; as well as launched a platform for developers[23] to create gadgets to run within Xobni's sidebar in Outlook. In addition, Xobni created localized versions of their Outlook product (free and paid) for French and German markets in 2010.

Funding Background

In March 2007, Xobni raised US$4.26 million[24] from Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, and Atomico, along with a number of angel investors including well-known angel investor Ron Conway.[25] In January, 2009, Xobni announced that it closed a US$7 million B round of financing that included current investors as well as adding Cisco Systems and BlackBerry Partners Fund. The website CrunchBase also shows an additional US$16.2 million investment in Xobni (April 2010) led by RRE Ventures (new investor in Xobni) and Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, FirstRound Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Cisco. This brings the total funding to US$31.7 million for the San Francisco-based software development company.

Difficulties experienced

The initial releases of Xobni were repeatedly criticized by tech bloggers and other journalists for stability and performance problems, as documented on the company's community forum.[26][27] Other reviewers have criticized Xobni for monopolizing system resources,[28] disabling other standard Outlook functionality like calendar appointments,[29] and also deleting Outlook archives.[30] Users have reported that these issues persist even in production (non-beta) versions.[29] Some speculate these difficulties derive from engineering CPU and I/O intensive indexing on the closed source Microsoft Outlook platform, which has an extensive and heterogeneous deployment space with thousands of parameters to test. In 2008, blogger Om Malik wrote that the company would have to "raise gobs of additional money to fine-tune its product."[31]

Since the initial release, the company has received higher marks for the product's performance.[32] Product reviews from CNET (5 stars)[33] and PC Magazine (Editor's Choice)[34] have expressed significantly improved performance and reliability with the Xobni for Outlook product. "Unlike many other Outlook add-ons, both free and upgraded versions of Xobni add functionality without greatly dragging down Outlook's performance." (CNET, 4/15/10)

With the release of the paid Xobni Plus product as of Xobni's 1.8 release, Xobni withdrew some functionality from its free version, namely the capability to index multiple Outlook PST archives. Existing users as of the launch of Xobni Plus were grandfathered in and still receive this functionality in the free version today. This also led to some consternation among users of the free product. [35] Xobni released version 1.9.5[36] in October 2010. According to the company, Xobni for Outlook has been downloaded nearly six million times.

Reviews

References

  1. ^ a b Xobni FAQ
  2. ^ Mass High Tech: Fear, greed or comfort: What makes (Boston) VCs invest?
  3. ^ TechCrunch 40: Productivity & Web Apps - Panel Video TechCrunch 40
  4. ^ Wall Street Journal: An App with a Knack for Contacts
  5. ^ Email Company Xobni Launches, may Steal TechCrunch Prize VentureBeat
  6. ^ Xobni - A New Look for Outlook Technology Review
  7. ^ Reinventing the Inbox Newsweek
  8. ^ Xobni Blog: Improving performance
  9. ^ [1]
  10. ^ NY Times: If You Use Outlook E-mail, Meet Xobni The New York Times
  11. ^ Xobni Can Make Good Old Email More Useful
  12. ^ New York Times: If You Use Outlook E-Mail, Meet Xobni
  13. ^ CNET: Personal services get business flavor: Xobni and SugarSync
  14. ^ Businessweek: Will Xobni Help BlackBerry take on the iPhone
  15. ^ CIO: Mobile Contact Management Redefined
  16. ^ TechCrunch: Microsoft Outlook is Starting to Look Like a Poor Man's Xobni
  17. ^ Xobni Blog: Jeff Bonforte Joins Xobni as CEO
  18. ^ Gabor Cselle: Bill Gates demos Xobni
  19. ^ TechCrunch: Microsoft may buy Email Startup Xobni TechCrunch
  20. ^ Rafe Needleman: Xobni makes Outlook better, but where's the business?
  21. ^ https://www.xobni.com/buy-xobni
  22. ^ http://www.xobni.com/enterprise
  23. ^ http://www.xobni.com/developer/
  24. ^ Om Malik: Can Xobni cure Outlook’s ills? GigaOM
  25. ^ Xobni Blog: List of investors
  26. ^ http://www.xobni.com/community/showthread.php?t=131
  27. ^ http://www.xobni.com/community/showthread.php?t=701
  28. ^ http://www.centernetworks.com/xobni-office-setup-and-ram-sucker
  29. ^ a b http://www.xobni.com/community/showpost.php?p=7871&postcount=14
  30. ^ http://www.xobni.com/community/showthread.php?t=1838
  31. ^ http://gigaom.com/2008/04/20/for-xobni-why-it-is-good-time-to-sell/
  32. ^ Xobni drops beta, organizes your outlook info faster
  33. ^ http://download.cnet.com/Xobni/3000-2369_4-10839523.html?tag=mncol
  34. ^ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2367924,00.asp
  35. ^ http://community.xobni.com/xobni/topics/uninstalled_xobni_because_of_new_version_limitations?from_gsfn=true
  36. ^ http://blog.xobni.com/2010/10/12/xobni-for-outlook-1-9-5-released-%E2%80%93-first-xobni-gadgets-available/
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