Xobni
Encyclopedia
Xobni is a San Francisco-based company that makes software applications and services including products for Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices. It was founded in March 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina from Adam's dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts
as part of the Y Combinator
summer founder's program. In late 2006, it relocated to San Francisco to help grow the company and have access to Silicon Valley talent pool.
Xobni's first product, Xobni for Outlook, was launched into private beta on September 18, 2007, at the TechCrunch
40 conference. Xobni plugs into Microsoft Outlook
and offers fast search and people-based navigation of email archives. The company has hinted at plans to offer the same functionality for other email clients and launched its first mobile product in March of 2010 for BlackBerry users, which aims to offer an improved address book for the mobile device. When the Outlook product was first launched, it was called Xobni Insight, and was soon changed to Xobni for Outlook, or simply Xobni.
Xobni has received mostly positive coverage, although initial versions had performance problems on large inboxes. Many users find that the preinstalled version of Xobni (and possibly the manually installed equivalent) cannot be removed. Some anti-virus software has also flagged Xobni as malware. Xobni has not responded to questions regarding the software's use of email credentials. It is clear that the software communicates with Xobni's servers.
The company opened its beta to the public on May 5, 2008 and has since garnered media coverage from a number of blogs and media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal
, The New York Times
, CNET
Businessweek
, CIO Magazine, TechCrunch
, and more.
In February 2008, Xobni hired Jeff Bonforte, a Vice President at Yahoo!
, as their CEO. In the same month, Bill Gates
gave a demo of Xobni at the Office Developers' Conference. This led to rumors of a US$20 million acquisition by Microsoft
, which the company reportedly rejected.
4.26 million from Vinod Khosla
, First Round Capital
, and Atomico
, along with a number of angel investor
s including well-known angel investor Ron Conway
. In January, 2009, Xobni announced that it closed a US$
7 million B round of financing that included current investors as well as adding Cisco Systems
and BlackBerry Partners Fund. The website CrunchBase also shows an additional US$
16.2 million investment in Xobni (April 2010) led by RRE Ventures
(new investor in Xobni) and Khosla Ventures
, with participation from existing investors Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, FirstRound Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Cisco. This brings the total funding to US$
31.7 million for the San Francisco-based software development company.
. In 2008, blogger Om Malik
wrote that the company would have to "raise gobs of additional money to fine-tune its product."
Since the initial release, the company has received higher marks for the product's performance. Product reviews from CNET (5 stars) and PC Magazine (Editor's Choice) have expressed significantly improved performance and reliability with the Xobni for Outlook product. "Unlike many other Outlook add-ons, both free and upgraded versions of Xobni add functionality without greatly dragging down Outlook's performance." (CNET, 4/15/10)
With the release of the paid Xobni Plus product as of Xobni's 1.8 release, Xobni withdrew some functionality from its free version, namely the capability to index multiple Outlook PST archives. Existing users as of the launch of Xobni Plus were grandfathered in and still receive this functionality in the free version today. This also led to some consternation among users of the free product. Xobni released version 1.9.5 in October 2010. According to the company, Xobni for Outlook has been downloaded nearly six million times.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
as part of the Y Combinator
Y Combinator
Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year...
summer founder's program. In late 2006, it relocated to San Francisco to help grow the company and have access to Silicon Valley talent pool.
Xobni's first product, Xobni for Outlook, was launched into private beta on September 18, 2007, at the TechCrunch
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
40 conference. Xobni plugs into Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite...
and offers fast search and people-based navigation of email archives. The company has hinted at plans to offer the same functionality for other email clients and launched its first mobile product in March of 2010 for BlackBerry users, which aims to offer an improved address book for the mobile device. When the Outlook product was first launched, it was called Xobni Insight, and was soon changed to Xobni for Outlook, or simply Xobni.
Xobni has received mostly positive coverage, although initial versions had performance problems on large inboxes. Many users find that the preinstalled version of Xobni (and possibly the manually installed equivalent) cannot be removed. Some anti-virus software has also flagged Xobni as malware. Xobni has not responded to questions regarding the software's use of email credentials. It is clear that the software communicates with Xobni's servers.
The company opened its beta to the public on May 5, 2008 and has since garnered media coverage from a number of blogs and media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, CNET
CNET
CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...
Businessweek
BusinessWeek
Bloomberg Businessweek, commonly and formerly known as BusinessWeek, is a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P. It is currently headquartered in New York City.- History :...
, CIO Magazine, TechCrunch
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
, and more.
In February 2008, Xobni hired Jeff Bonforte, a Vice President at Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
, as their CEO. In the same month, Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
gave a demo of Xobni at the Office Developers' Conference. This led to rumors of a US$20 million acquisition by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, which the company reportedly rejected.
Free and premium services
There were a lot of questions while the product was in beta of how Xobni planned to make money and the scope of their products. In July of 2009 Xobni released a paid version of its product called Xobni Plus, offered initially for $30. Xobni Plus includes features such as advanced search, appointment search, the ability to search multiple PST archives, no ads, and one year support. In 2010, the company rolled out additional revenue-generating products, including their first mobile application, a cloud service to share Xobni data across multiple devices, and enterprise gadgets that bring third party systems/data into Outlook. The company also built an enterprise business and rolled out a product to sell to enterprises directly and through reseller partnerships; as well as launched a platform for developers to create gadgets to run within Xobni's sidebar in Outlook. In addition, Xobni created localized versions of their Outlook product (free and paid) for French and German markets in 2010.Funding background
In March 2007, Xobni raised US$United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
4.26 million from Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-born American venture capitalist and an influential personality in Silicon Valley....
, First Round Capital
First Round Capital
First Round Capital is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Managed by Josh Kopelman, Chris Fralic, Rob Hayes and Howard L. Morgan, the Philadelphia-based company typically provides seed-stage investment that ranges from $250,000 to $500,000...
, and Atomico
Atomico
Atomico is an international technology venture capital firm headquarted in London, with offices in Shanghai and São Paulo.The company focuses on new consumer technologies that have the potential to transform markets, and places an emphasis on strong management teams.Its co-founder and CEO is Niklas...
, along with a number of angel investor
Angel investor
An angel investor or angel is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity...
s including well-known angel investor Ron Conway
Ron Conway
Ron Conway is an American angel investor, often described as one of the "super angels". Conway is recognized as a strong networker and is based in Silicon Valley.-Early career:...
. In January, 2009, Xobni announced that it closed a US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
7 million B round of financing that included current investors as well as adding Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...
and BlackBerry Partners Fund. The website CrunchBase also shows an additional US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
16.2 million investment in Xobni (April 2010) led by RRE Ventures
RRE Ventures
RRE Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on investments across several disciplines, including software, internet, mobile, financial services, environmental, and other related technologies, primarily within the United States, and especially in and around New York...
(new investor in Xobni) and Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on early stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, silicon technology and clean technology sectors....
, with participation from existing investors Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, FirstRound Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Cisco. This brings the total funding to US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
31.7 million for the San Francisco-based software development company.
Difficulties experienced
The initial releases of Xobni were repeatedly criticized by tech bloggers and other journalists for stability and performance problems, as documented on the company's community forum. Other reviewers have criticized Xobni for monopolizing system resources, disabling other standard Outlook functionality like calendar appointments, and also deleting Outlook archives. Users have reported that these issues persist even in production (non-beta) versions. Some speculate these difficulties derive from engineering CPU and I/O intensive indexing on the closed source Microsoft Outlook platform, which has an extensive and heterogeneous deployment space with thousands of parameters to testQuality Assurance
Quality assurance, or QA for short, is the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service or facility to maximize the probability that minimum standards of quality are being attained by the production process...
. In 2008, blogger Om Malik
Om Malik
Om Perkash Malik is an Indian-American web and technology writer. He is the founder of Giga Omni Media, Inc. and executive editor for technology blog GigaOM. He is also a host on a former Revision3 weekly web-business centric podcast, The GigaOm Show.- Personal life and education :Malik was born...
wrote that the company would have to "raise gobs of additional money to fine-tune its product."
Since the initial release, the company has received higher marks for the product's performance. Product reviews from CNET (5 stars) and PC Magazine (Editor's Choice) have expressed significantly improved performance and reliability with the Xobni for Outlook product. "Unlike many other Outlook add-ons, both free and upgraded versions of Xobni add functionality without greatly dragging down Outlook's performance." (CNET, 4/15/10)
With the release of the paid Xobni Plus product as of Xobni's 1.8 release, Xobni withdrew some functionality from its free version, namely the capability to index multiple Outlook PST archives. Existing users as of the launch of Xobni Plus were grandfathered in and still receive this functionality in the free version today. This also led to some consternation among users of the free product. Xobni released version 1.9.5 in October 2010. According to the company, Xobni for Outlook has been downloaded nearly six million times.
Reviews
- PC Magazine Editor's Choice
- CNET - Xobni for Outlook
- CNET - Xobni Mobile
- Wall Street Journal - Xobni Mobile
- Wall Street Journal - Xobni for Outlook Review
- PC Advisor - Xobni Plus
- PC Pro - Xobni Plus