After negotiating over the past few weeks with Microsoft and signing a letter of intent to be acquired, e-mail startup Xobni has walked from the deal, according to a source close to the negotiations. The deal would have been a natural for Microsoft, which was offering to buy the two-year old startup for somewhere in the $20-million range. (The company has raised less than $5 million so far in… → Read More
E-mail startup Xobni may or may not be in acquisition talks with Microsoft (they say no), but they do have a nifty project up their sleeves that Microsoft would be interested in, especially if its proposed Yahoo deal ever goes through. Xobni makes a plug-in that super-charges Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail software by organizing conversations and people in ways that are much easier to find them. → Read More
Two independent sources tell us that the Microsoft/Xobni deal is moving along and that Microsoft signed an acquisition LOI in the last week. I have not yet been able to track down the price, but a previous offer of sub-$20 million was supposedly rejected by Xobni. Bill Gates has publicly complimented the service, calling it “the next generation of social networking.” Xobni, which launched… → Read More
Microsoft has been in acquisition discussions with email startup Xobni, we’ve confirmed through multiple sources. The company, which launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year, currently offers an outlook plugin for Windows users that significantly improves the desktop email experience (particularly search). Microsoft may have first approached the company months ago and floated an… → Read More
At Yahoo, they don’t have golden parachutes, they have purple ones. Yahoo’s vice president of social search, Jeff Bonforte, is among the thousand or so employees being laid off. (The picture at left is of him skydiving with the parachute Yahoo gave him as a signing bonus when he joined the company a few years ago). His last day is today. But Yahoo’s loss is startup Xobni’s… → Read More
Anyone who depends on email to work, knows how surprisingly bad Outlook is when you get beyond about ten contacts; conversations easily become jumbled, and keeping contacts up to date can be a pain. Xobni’s Outlook plug-in solves these problems with a sidebar that automatically tracks contacts and organizes emails into fully searchable threaded conversations linked back to those people. They… → Read More
Software is moving to the web and as it does, tech companies are becoming easier than ever to launch. One of the most notable changes to the tech industry of late has been the emergence of a significant number of startups that have succeeded after raising only hundreds of thousands of dollars. Joe Kraus, CEO of recently acquired JotSpot was able to bring them to market on $100,000. Reddit took… → Read More
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