Xobni Betas Outlook Relationship Add On

May 5, 2008

Xobni launched its Microsoft Outlook add-on that organizes your inbox by relationships. With email volume growing rapidly and monopolizing many people's workdays, Xobni helps users quickly find and understand what's in their inbox, freeing up wasted time.

Displayed as a sidebar in Outlook, Xobni's proprietary technology analyzes email in the same way your brain naturally understands communication. The rich data provided by Xobni offers a quick glimpse into your contacts--how you've communicated with them, how they've interacted with each other and what files have been exchanged. This unique set of data, personalized for each user's set of contacts, exposes the social architecture buried in every inbox.

"Xobni analyzes mountains of data and shows you what matters--your relationships, your communication habits, context around messages---information trapped in email that's often lost or forgotten," said Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni. "Exposing that data to people is incredibly valuable; it reveals a network of relationships that email software designed 20 years ago leaves disjointed. We connect the dots to draw a clearer picture of every aspect of your life that flows through email."

Xobni launched its beta product on stage at the TechCrunch40 conference in September 2007 and received thousands of downloads in a matter of hours. Xobni quickly switched to a private, invite-only approach.

Xobni kept its beta small by design to respond to user feedback thoroughly and iterate on the product in its early stages--a true beta is an idea rarely visited in what's become a development culture obsessed with launching as quickly as possible, sometimes without consideration of the product's future. Through months of testing and integrating ideas from early users, Xobni refined its focus around a single goal--find what you need, when you need it. The result is a clean interface that makes it easy to find anything in your inbox--people, messages or attachments--faster than anything currently available in Outlook.

Despite countless attempts by companies to create new social networks in recent years, most online social interaction continues to occur over email. Xobni is the first company to take the concept of a social network and offer immediate utility--a more productive email experience--around a platform users have grown accustomed to for years.