Once you've added x-ray vision to your email inbox, you'll never go back to life without it. The latest service to offer just that is Xobni, a high-profile startup that brought its Outlook plug-in out of Beta status a year ago next week. Today Xobni comes to Gmail and it looks really nice. The first 100 ReadWriteWeb readers who visit this link and enter the code XOBNI-RWW will be provided access to it. The company says iPhone and Android versions will open for testing within 90 days.
Xobni competes with Rapportive (my favorite to date) and Gist, which was recently acquired by Blackberry company RIM. Another service called eTacts (site now down) was recently acquired by Salesforce. Xobni was funded by Blackberry Partners a year ago, but remains independent. Check out the screenshot below to get a feel for how it looks, what it offers and how it's different.
LightBox is a beautifully designed new Android application, debuting at this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The app, which describes itself as a "social camera roll," is notable not only for its attractive design, still somewhat of a rarity in the Android world, but also for its business model: LightBox is building for "Android First." What that means is that LightBox's founders, Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel, are building Android applications that will eventually be ported to iOS, and not the other way around.
The LightBox photo app, a combination camera and photo gallery, is only the first of many the company plans to build. These apps, for the most part, will be designed to replace default Android features with professionally designed counterparts.
Only a few weeks ago, when local discovery app WHERE launched a recommendation engine for sharing places with friends, I said I wished someone would build an app that used Facebook or Foursquare checkins instead. As it turns out, someone did just that. A new application called PathCrosser, launching right now in the iTunes App Store and Android Market is a mobile app that, like WHERE, uses Bump technology to compare your own personal local recommendations with your friends. With the Bump integration, you simply launch the app and tap phones with another person to make a connection. But unlike WHERE, it doesn't expect to use data housed only within its own service - it pulls data from the services you already use: Facebook and Foursquare.
If you're looking for a new app to try while waiting in line for some of those SXSW parties tonight, give PathCrosser a go and see what you think.
Let's say you're about to get on an airplane. That means it's time for some pleasure reading, if you're lucky enough to be free from work obligations on a wifi-free flight. What you need to do is fire up Instapaper, the offline mobile reading application made for good times like this.
Instapaper announced its 3.0 version tonight and has added a long list of features that will please and delight you. It was already a great way to read good articles without internet connectivity. Now it includes: an in-line browser that will make grabbing things to read offline really easy, qued social sharing so you can post links to share great articles automatically when you come back online, social discovery of articles your Twitter and Facebook friends have Liked on Instapaper and much more. It's a big update to a great app.
Widely celebrated iPad social stream reading app Flipboard (Apple's iPad App of the Year for 2010) tonight unveiled its first upgrade in more than 6 months; the upgrade delivers cross-network search, a partnership with popular iPhone photo sharing service Instagram and big speed improvements.
The news was embargoed until 6am Thursday but was just disclosed on the company's own blog. Upgrades are becoming available around the world on a rolling basis. The changes are dramatic and positive - but they also point toward big improvements the service will need to make in the future.
Rdio, the streaming music service started by the founders of Skype, is releasing a nice, simple desktop app for the Mac this morning. The full-featured program is a great way to avoid dealing with Adobe Flash problems in the browser and it's just nice to have separate software running in the background for something as constant as music. Rdio has offered an AIR app for the desktop for both Mac and Windows for some time but a native Mac app should be all the more stable and efficient.
The app is pretty solid and easy to learn to navigate. I pay $9.99 per month for Rdio and am relatively happy with it. Subscribers to the $4.99 web-only subscription level will not also have the option of using this Mac app.
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said last summer. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
What should you be doing next? A former Googler named Jyri Engeström, whose microblogging service Jaiku was cooler than Twitter, but was acquired into oblivion by Google three years ago, now thinks he can beat Google to the punch on that question. His new service Ditto launches today (iPhone app). It aims to use social suggestions, structured data and your existing Twitter and Facebook social graphs to recommend places and activities to fullfill your every desire.
Chomp for Android is a new release from Chomp, a company's whose search engine for iPhone apps launched last year. Available as both an online search engine and downloadable application, Chomp offers an attractive user interface for finding new Android applications which improves on the official Android Market application in many ways.
Unfortunately, where the service's search algorithm breaks down is in one of the most important aspects: the nature of what it indexes and how it ranks its results. This is why a search for "fitness" yields dozens of results but a search for "navigation" returns nothing.
Russian startup News360 released a feature-rich iPad app this morning that makes it easier to learn a lot about current events than does any single news source. The interface isn't as responsive or as attractive as it could be, but the app has a whole lot of potential. At the price of free, it's worth taking a look at (iTunes link).
The service aggregates coverage from multiple outlets about each story, like Google News does, and includes Twitter discussions about the topics. News360 users can scroll through images about a story, dive down into definitions of terms on a page, sign up for a personalized feed of stories from select sources or by topic and more. News360 will unveil its new app today at the Demo conference; ReadWriteWeb will have ongoing coverage of other launches from that event today.
Have you ever sent a credit card number, bank account info, password or other sensitive information by email and felt that familiar sense of apprehension as you clicked on the "Send" button? If you have, then it was for good cause. Information like this could be intercepted in any number of ways, from packet sniffing to someone other than your intended recipient on the other end accessing that email account.
Lockify, a so-called Bit.ly or Twitter for secure communication, gives users a quick and simple way to send sensitive information over the Internet while making sure it gets where it needs to without being seen by anyone in-between.
