Xobni, a startup that looks to make your inbox a little less chaotic, is well known for walking away from an acquisition offer from Microsoft last year, not long after being publically complimented by Bill Gates. Since then the service has continued to grow, with over 2 million downloads in the last year and an avid user base. But until now, there’s been one big piece of the puzzle missing: a source of revenue. Tonight, Xobni is finally turning the cash-flow spigot to “On” with the release of a new upgrade to Xobni called Xobni Plus, which introduces a number of enhanced search features sure to be welcomed by Xobni faithful.
Xobni Plus has a heavy emphasis on improving search, which is one of the key components the service has always been based around. Users will now be able to craft more advanced search queries, using either a GUI-based ‘query builder’ or Xobni’s own markup language, which lets you manually specify attributes like “attachment=yes” or “from=Jason” (Gmail offers similar search features, and they are very handy once you’ve gotten a hang of them). Other improvements include Xobni’s autosuggest feature, which can use linked Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to pair Email address with full names, as well as the ability to search within your Xobni ‘feeds’ in the sidebar. → Read More
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. → Read More
With the news that Facebook is going to begin allowing developers to incorporate full streams into their applications, developers are scrambling to get their apps up to speed. This morning we got our first look at the upcoming new version of Seesmic Desktop, and now we’ve learned that Xobni, the popular Outlook plugin that helps make Email easier to manage, will be going live with a new upgrade beginning at 6 PM tonight. Because of the way Xobni is built users won’t have to download an upgrade either – all changes will be server side.
Up until now Xobni has included some basic Facebook contact information, including profile photos and status updates, but it wasn’t as comprehensive as your full Facebook news feed (you couldn’t see how your contacts were interacting with each other, for example). Now you’ll be able to see this information at a glance directly from your Outlook mail client, which is obviously far more efficient than having to manually check your Facebook page. → Read More
Smarter-email startup Xobni has raised $7 million in a B round of financing from Cisco Systems and existing investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Atomico. Three of the four existing investors increased their ownership stakes in the company. But Cisco led the round, highlighting the importance of enterprise e-mail for Xobni (that’s where the money is). CEO Jeff Bonforte says: → Read More
Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn’t like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June.
Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook.
Let’s take them one by one. → Read More
Xobni, the Y Combinator email startup that turned down an acquisition offer from Microsoft earlier this year, has just lost its VP Engineering and first employee, Gabor Cselle. Cselle joined the company in March 2007, sporting a seemingly perfect resume that included work on the Gmail team and a Master’s thesis on “Organizing Email”. The departure may not be abrupt (Cselle won’t be leaving until the end of August), but it is unexpected, and frankly, doesn’t make much sense. Since launching at TechCrunch40, Xobni has shown impressive growth and received widespread acclaim – Bill Gates demoed the service at the Office Development Conference earlier this year. CEO Jeff Bonforte (who joined the company only five months ago) says that Cselle simply decided that he was no longer happy at Xobni, and wanted to try building his own startup. Bonforte says that Cselle likely wants his own shot at glory, and because of Xobni’s quick rise to success, members of the team may believe that launching a startup is far easier than it really is. Cselle’s blog post on his depature seems to confirm this, at least in part: “Ever since reading a biography of Bill Gates when I was 14 years old, I’ve wanted to be a founder of a company that makes a difference. I’ve wanted to build a workplace where people can be creative, productive, and happy, and a product that delights users and improves their lives. I feel like the time is now.” Cselle may be itching to try his own luck, but Bonforte’s explanation still doesn’t sit well with us. Microsoft just threw $20 million at the company, which it turned down, likely in hopes of a better offer somewhere down the road. Why wouldn’t Cselle wait for his payday and then jump ship to start his own company? We’ve heard that Cselle has been unhappy at the company for months, but we haven’t been able to reach him for any further details (we’ll update the post as soon as we do). In his blog post, he says that after leaving Xobni in August, he’s going to travel the world, raising money along the way for a new email startup. CrunchBase Information Gabor Cselle Xobni Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Xobni, the email startup that we’ve described as “The Superplugin for Outlook”, has partnered with LinkedIn to automatically pull contact information from the popular professional network. Xobni will now draw from public profiles on the LinkedIn network, displaying information about contacts’ employers, job titles, and pictures as part of the plugin’s sidebar. Xobni’s sidebar helps manage Outlook email boxes by automatically threading email conversations, sorting attachments, and creating a network of related contacts within your inbox. Since its launch at TechCrunch40, the company has seen remarkable success. Earlier this year Bill Gates demoed the product at the Office Developers Conference, calling it “very, very, cool” – so cool, in fact, that Microsoft extended an offer to acquire the company for $20 million. After weeks of rumors, Xobni walked away from the deal, fearing it would just get swallowed up and forgotten in the Microsoft machine. The partnership with LinkedIn makes Xobni even more useful. It’s too bad Xobni users are still limited to Outlook and Microsoft Windows (though there’s a web-based version for Yahoo Mail on the way). Hey guys, where’s the Mac Mail version? Seriously. CrunchBase Information Xobni LinkedIn Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It might not be as sexy as Xobni, but Outlook users who find that plugin useful should check out ClearContext Personal. It too intends to make email more manageable, albeit with a greater focus on projects than people (you won’t find any attempt to turn email contacts into a social network here). ClearContext Personal has a number of tricks up its sleeve. First, it analyzes 30-40 characteristics of each message that hits your inbox to determine its priority. Messages deemed important, semi-important, or unimportant are color coded as such, and you can sort by this prioritization so that all your most important emails show up on top. You can also organize your messages into topics and then view all of the contacts and attachments from messages within these topics. Attachments can be seen in a panel below your messages or viewed in a fullscreen attachment explorer that allows for file previews. To help users deal with an overload of social network notifications, ClearContext automatically places these notification messages into special folders. It then summarizes the type of notifications you have received so that you don’t have to view them one-by-one. In a panel below your inbox, for example, you can view how many friend requests, messages, confirmations, and invitations you have received on Facebook. If you go into the special Facebook folder, you can choose to view notifications by these types. Similar functionality is available for LinkedIn, and ClearContext can be extended with other services that offer their own filters via a simple XML file. There’s a handful of other features, such as a panel for keeping track of your threaded conversations, as you would in Gmail. An “unsubscribe” button also lets you opt out of future replies to a thread (for when people get a little too comfortable hitting the “reply all” button). The first 200 users who sign up with the code “techcrunch” will be invited to download the plugin, which launches in private beta today. A batch of randomly-selected users will also get free licenses to ClearContext’s paid project management plugin, as well as invites to the upcoming professional version of its personal software, which offers some extra bells and whistles. For other innovations in email, see Xoopit and Zenbe. CrunchBase Information ClearContext Xobni Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
This is an interesting story in light of the discussion yesterday about the fate of the intellectual property of failed startups. Email startup Xobni, which recently turned down a $20 million acquisition offer from Microsoft, says they have acquired the key patents around a product called Zaplets which originally launched in 2000. Zaplets was an email product that put synchronized applications into email messages. The goal was to reduce email back and forth around things like scheduling meetings, coordinating events, etc. Any time an email turned into a thread, Zaplets may be more useful – all those responses would be brought right back into the original email. The Zaplet automatically updated itself in the original email, so long threads were avoided. If Zaplets launched today, they’d call them email widgets. Zaplets parent company, FireDrop, raised over $100 million from a slew of investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Their 2000 Series D round alone was reportedly $90 million. USA Today called it “one of the Valley’s most sizzling start-ups.” Dave Winer, by contrast, failed to find it interesting. As an aside, I remember being in their offices and seeing a demo of the product, but I can’t remember why (I had my own company then, and certainly wasn’t running around getting startup demos). I liked it. But Zaplets were not to be it seems. Eventually Firedrop shut down, the employees dispersed and the assets eventually made their way to MetricStream. Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte says the Zaplet idea was a good one, just too early. And that’s why they’ve acquired much of the intellectual property of FireDrop from MetricStream. He won’t say what they paid, but hinted that it was in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars for the portfolio of ten key patents. Bonforte says reducing email threads down to a single active message is a key factor in solving the email problem I wrote about last month. And he thinks Xobni will eventually be able to do that with the IP they’ve just acquired. Some screen shots of the old Zaplet website are below. → Read More
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 venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Atomico, First Round Capital, Ron Conway, and Y Combinator). But the deeper that Xobni got into the discussions, the less comfortable it felt about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft machine. The fear was that Xobni would end up nothing more than a feature of Outlook. Microsoft wanted the entire team to move up to Redmond, and was vague in its answers about what it had planned for that team, or the product. In the end, the body language just wasn’t there. Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that makes it smarter and easier to use by giving you handy stats in a sidebar and showing you how your contacts are connected to each other. But the company has greater aspirations than to become a feature of Outlook, as its internal integration with Yahoo Mail suggests. The service is still in private beta, and is approaching 50,000 registered users. Was Xobni crazy to walk away, or did it make the right move in the long run? Should Xobni Have Sold Itself to Microsoft For $20 Million? Hell, yes! Are they crazy? 228953% of all votes No, they will be worth a lot more a year from now. 202447% of all votes Total Votes: 4313 Started: April 30, 2008 CrunchBase Information Xobni Information provided by CrunchBase → 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. It also shows users their social network based on who they email the most. Now the company has a working prototype that works with the No. 2 most-used e-mail on the planet: Yahoo Mail. The Yahoo Mail product has not been released yet, and is not even in beta. It is just a working demo on Internet Explorer at this point. (First screen shot below). Every time you click on an email inside Yahoo Mail, a sidebar on the right shows you a graph of total emails you’ve received that day, how many you’ve received or sent to that particular person in the past, as well as links to previous conversations and files you’ve exchanged with that person through email. It also shows you any other contacts that might be connected to that person because they were CCed on a previous email. But not only does Xobni work in Yahoo Mail, it also integrates with Outlook. So in that Xobni pane under “conversations”, you can also see any previous emails that you had with that contact in Outlook (assuming you have the Xobni plug-in for Outlook installed). Similarly, conversations with that contact that happened on Yahoo are visible in the Xobni sidebar inside Outlook as well (second screen shot below). Xobni constantly syncs Yahoo Mail and Outlook contacts, and you can see both of them in one view on the Web (third screen shot below). And, this is the nice part, you can search both Yahoo and Outlook e-mails using the Xobni search box, even from within the browser. No word on when this might actually launch, but it makes sense for Xobni to move beyond Outlook. The fact that it is looking to Yahoo first is also no surprise, since new CEO Jeff Bonforte (personal friend alert) used to head up the IM group at Yahoo under Brad Garlinghouse. And, should anyone from Microsoft stop by the Xobni offices, well, that’s the kind of demo that gets deals done. Outlook-Yahoo Mail integration would no → 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 at the TechCrunch40 conference last year, offers an outlook plugin for Windows users that significantly improves the desktop email experience (particularly search). They recently hired notable Yahoo’er Jeff Bonforte as CEO. The timing on this is perfect as the New York Times and others are doing their seasonal focus on the problems with email. Xobni is one of the top startups trying to fix the problem. Update: yet another source says the LOI hasn’t been signed by Xobni yet Update 2: Xobni won’t return my emails, but they’ve told a source the following, passed on to us: “we’re staying an independent company and will be exiting beta soon.” CrunchBase Information Xobni Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 offer of sub $20 million, which was apparently rejected. But the company, which recently hired notable Yahoo’er Jeff Bonforte as CEO, is now back at the table with Microsoft corporate development. Xobni currently only works with Outlook, although the company has said they will extend to integrate with other email clients, instant messaging applications, and social networks in the future. The current product creates an information profile for each person you interact with, and surfaces historical information that is relevant to what you are working on. Xobni displays contact information, threaded conversations, attachments, related people, email usage statistics, and information from the web. See our post from January with a more detailed overview of the service. The company was founded in 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina, with early funding from Y Combinator. Other investors include Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Ron Conway and Baseline Ventures, Atomico Investments, Paul Buchheit, Ariel Poler, Saar Gur, and Tom Pinckney. Xobni has not yet responded to our request for comment. Update: Zoli Erdos points out that Bill Gates loves Zobni: CrunchBase Information Xobni Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 gain. On Monday, he plans on accepting an offer to become CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes Outlook e-mail smarter. (Disclosure: I’ve known Bonforte for a long time. We once lived in the same house). As head of social search, Bonforte oversaw Yahoo Answers and Delicious before those businesses were recently absorbed by other groups. His real accomplishment at Yahoo, though, was prior to that, as the VP in charge of Yahoo Messenger!, working for Brad Garlinghouse. Under Bonforte, Yahoo Messenger! surpassed AIM in number of users for the first time, revenues went up sixfold, and he also introduced all those funky avatars to the product. Before Yahoo, he did a stint as president of Michael Robertson’s SipPhone, where he developed the Skype-like Gizmo Project on the sly. And during the go-go 1990s, he founded i-drive, one of the first online storage services (it went belly up—a good idea that was too early). At Xobni, his experience with both Yahoo! Messenger and search should serve him well. Xobni launched at TechCrunch40 (read our review). It is a 14-person YCombinator startup that raised a $4.2 million Series A last year from Atomico Investments, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures. The VP of engineering, Gabor Cselle, worked on Gmail and did his Masters thesis on inbox organization (I’m not joking). Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that helps you sort through your inbox. Click on a person, and you can see all your threaded conversations with them, as well as any attachments they may have sent in the past. “It makes email, in general, work the way your brain does,” says Bonforte. Bill Gates is also a fan. When Bonforte first met the Xobni founders a few months ago, he brought them into Yahoo to talk to other executives there. They made a lasting impression on him at least. “We weren’t looking for a CEO,” says co-founder Matt Brezina, “but any time we find good people we ask, How can → 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 were a TechCrunch40 startup – see our coverage here. Being the only guy with Outlook in the office, it’s been a personal favorite of mine. Xobni’s sidebar has improved Outlook for me by offering faster search, and automatic organization of my email and contacts. Their search function alone has saved me time by just being faster and more comprehensive than Outlook’s native search. Emails can be searched as independent threads or viewed in the context of a contact’s profile (pictured right). The profile shows basic contact info (automatically updated) and a full history of threaded conversations, files, and people they’re connected to (the email “social graph”). Today Xobni is greatly expanding their closed beta by adding everyone on the waiting list (14,000 people). They will also be giving each registered user 5 invites to give to their friends. However, 200 TechCrunch readers can download the program by entering a special invite code , ‘techcrunch’, here as well. The latest version is the product of three more months of work, which includes speeding up the algorithms, usability improvements, and the beginning of web integration. No, it’s not the anticipated webmail version of the tool, yet. Xobni’s first step is to search the web (via Yahoo) while you search your email in an effort to find more information about what your query and provide a possible revenue source through referrals. → 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 even less money and were just acquired by Conde Nast. Reddit’s primary backer, Paul Graham’s fund Y Combinator, has become the poster child for making a successful startup with only tens of thousands of dollars in funding. Charles River has also scaled back the size of some of their investments as entrepreneurs are willing to take less money in exchange for more control. Y Combinator primarily invests in software and web services. Twice a year (Fall and Spring), teams submit applications about their ideas, focusing less on business models and more on vision and the founders themselves. Summer teams interview during the Spring in San Francisco, while Winter teams interview during the Fall in Cambridge. If selected, the Summer teams work in Cambridge, while the Winter teams work out of the Bay Area. The last application drive was Oct 18th, with interviews happening this past weekend. Startups are usually funded 3 months living expenses, or $6,000 a person. Y Combinator’s investment is not so much in money as it is in the experience and connections the group provides to the teams, often shared over their weekly dinners. The money teams get is a bare minimum, often stretched by living and working in an apartment or moving in with friends and family. The young teams (usually around 23 yrs. old) may be under-funded compared to investments by other funds, but companies such as Thinkature and JumpChat have shown themselves formidable competitors to larger startups. While the Y Combinator team ponders what they saw in last weekend’s interviews for the next round of funding, we thought now would be a good time to take a look at the last batch of Y Combinator companies. Many of these companies are still in heavy development, but if you’re wondering what kinds of services are receiving funding from this innovative fund – here are some short introductions. JamGlue – An online application to mix and share music tracks online. The site features an online audio → Read More
San Francisco, CA
