Xobni Leaves Beta, Adds Features, Takes in Funding
Xobni, the Outlook email plugin that makes your inbox a more social experience, is finally leaving their beta phase after 10 months of testing. The company is also announcing they've taken in an additional investment of $3.2 million to bring their series B round to over $10 million.
The new, official version of the Xobni toolbar (previously covered here and here) is designed to uncover the "hidden" social network of the inbox. The software adds a sidebar to Outlook which adds profiles of the people you're corresponding with and keeps track of related messages, phone numbers, and files exchanged. This latest version adds even more features and has better performance, too. In fact, the company claims there's a 30-40% speed increase (on average) over their previous beta version.
In this release, Xobni has also included additional user controls which will allow users to better customize Xobni's behavior. This feature is designed to help people with "underpowered" computers to take advantage of the plugin. (Can we say netbooks?) The controls let you customize the indexing times and configure a delayed load when Outlook starts, among other things. Although we never did formal tests on the Xobni plugin ourselves besides just using it on our own machines (where it performed just fine), we heard of some anecdotal evidence where people had claimed it slowed Outlook down. For those who reported the slowness issues, these performance enhancements and configuration tools will likely be a great benefit.
As for the funding, the company says the money will be used for continuing development of the product and will help them proceed with work on a premium version of the software, slated for release this summer. The investment from BlackBerry Partners Fund brings the total raised in Xobni's Series B funding to over $10 million and adds BlackBerry Partners Fund Partner, Rick Segal, to Xobni's board of directors. Xobni closed the first part of the Series B in January 2009, led by Cisco Systems ($5 million).
You can download the new version of Xobni here.
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I use Xobni with my MS-Outlook from the first day they opened their Beta. I recommend it to anyone. One od the things they must improve is the need to re-login to facebook connect and linked-in every few days. i hope the new stable version has it fixed.
it's been a while that I tested Xobni. It was quite useful and I liked it a lot, but it slowed down my laptop too much.
Will give it a second try now :-)
Xobni has slowed down Outlook, but it has been worth it by making better use of Outlook-looking forward to this new version...
Xobni has slowed down Outlook,
hey
i tried xobni too, but wasnt satisfied! slowed my computer down and also the search wasnt very good, it often brought me wrong results...
i work with lookeen now,(www.lookeen.com) and like it very much, i find it much more reliable than xobni and what i like the most is that is so similiar too lookout!!
I use Xobni with my boya MS-Outlook from the first day they opened their Beta. I recommend it to anyone. One od the things they must improve boya is the need to re-login to facebook connect and linked-in every few days. boya i hope the new stable version has it fixed.
Thanks. I am a xobni user as well, and I am glad they are adding features. It's something to look forward to. Anyone here use Outlook Track-It? It's a followup email reminder plugin. A small toolbar where you can subscribe to reply reminders. Any posts on cool Outlook things like Xobni and Track-It are much appreciated.