Blog

• Where did we get the name Xobni?

  Etymology

  Back in the spring of 2006 Adam was talking with Paul Graham, our first investor, about naming the email company Paul had just invested in. Adam was toying with the name “InboxAdvisor” mostly because he was consulting at a consumer Internet security company called SiteAdvisor at the time.

  Paul suggested that Adam use the word “inbox” spelled backwards. Paul is known for this type of momentary genius. Adam went home, and registered the available (!!) five letter domain name www.xobni.com for $8.00. It is nearly impossible to find a five letter domain name these days, and yet we found one that actually had something to do with the company we were building.

  Pronunciation

  From the beginning we pronounced Xobni with a long ‘o’: Zobe-nee. Friends who have known Xobni since the beginning still pronounce the name with a long ‘o’. As the company began to get more exposure however, we found that everyone was pronouncing Xobni with a short ‘o’, including Bill Gates. Rather than fighting the tide, we now officially pronounce the name with a short ‘o’: Zob-nee , but it wasn’t until a few months ago that we removed the line over the ‘o’ in our logo, which was our early attempt at forcing the long ‘o’ pronunciation. Lesson: Don’t try to force user behavior or pronunciation.

  Logo

  There are a lot of fun things you can try with a company name that’s spelled backwards. I think a lot of early stage companies spend too much time worrying about names and logos. We did too. Below are the major milestones in the progression of our logo:

  Okay, I’ll take the blame on this one. Yuck! I’ve never been called an artist. And this was the image on our first business card. I wonder what the VCs thought when we handed our cards across the board room table.

  

  Finally, my Photoshop skills improved and I discovered my new favorite font: Trebuchet MS

  

  We hired Bryan “rounded corners” Kennedy. Everything got nicer around here with Bryan on the team.

  

  This is the logo we launched with at Techcrunch40

  

  For public launch, Jeff insisted that we go lowercase and remove the line over the ‘o’. It was a good call, but my nostalgic side cried a little bit. We also tried a new method of highlighting the ‘backwards’ inbox.

  

  But if you take a close look at our mascot, the Xobni man, you may notice a vestige of the days of old:

  

  Misspellings

  I wonder how many people visiting our website fail to realize xobni is the word “inbox” spelled backwards? We see misspellings of our company name in the media and in the Google searches that drive traffic to our site. Here are my favorite misspellings of X-O-B-N-I:

  1. Xobini
  2. Xobin
  3. Xobnini
  4. Xoboni
  5. Xonbi
  6. Xobani
  7. Zobni
  8. Zobny

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I wanted to find a way to work the misspellings of “xobni” into a blog post. With our good pagerank this blog post should quickly move to the top of the Google search results for all xobni misspellings.

  May 15th, 2008 · No comments
• Xobni Launches Public Beta

  Today is an exciting day for everyone at Xobni. After seven months of invite-only beta, and over two years of product development, we’re proud to announce that Xobni is now publicly available for anyone to download. Xobni can be downloaded for free here.

  The official press release for our launch can be found here.

  Today’s New York Times is covering our successful beta program and the public launch of Xobni here.

  It has taken a lot of hard work to get to this point. Our team has grown from two guys in an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts to a group of 14 dedicated team members in San Francisco that call Xobni home.

  While the Xobni team has been working hard to make Xobni a success, our users also deserve a lot of credit. Your feedback has been essential in helping us to improve the performance and features of Xobni over the past seven months. We have responded to thousands of support and feedback emails from the over 50,000 individuals that have downloaded Xobni during our seven month closed beta period. We have had several dozen beta users visit us at the Xobni headquarters for user studies and another several dozen users have done remote performance and configuration tests with our engineers.

  We will continue to work hard to improve the Xobni experience. Xobni has done a lot to improve our users’ email lives, but email and personal information still have a long way to go. Xobni and its users still have a long way to go, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

  For Current Xobni Beta Users

  If you are currently running Xobni it will automatically update to the latest version. If you need to re-download Xobni, you can download it instantly here.

  Please let your friends and colleagues know that a better Outlook email experience awaits them at Xobni.com.

  Thanks!

  May 5th, 2008 · No comments
• A Shout-Out to a Fellow Email Fan

  Email is so 1.0. But there are a few of us out there trying to show the inbox some new tricks. Making the inbox smarter and more powerful is the driving force behind Xobni. But we aren’t the only ones that are looking to the potential of email. So we thought would give a shout out to a new favorite at Xobni:

  TripIt Just send your travel itinerary confirmation emails to plan@tripit.com and they magically become a living breathing travel plan for your trip. They combine your hotel, car rental, airline details into one smart itinerary. And because this is the internet, the information is now dynamic. It handles multiple members in your travel party seamlessly. Plus, now they have added a social element by showing where your friends are in the world, too. Wait until you see how simple it is to register, too. Perfect. If you travel, you should use TripIt!

  April 25th, 2008 · No comments
• Goodbye, Organize Tab

  We started shipping a new version of Xobni Insight to users today. We’ve made Xobni perform better, prettied up the details of the user interface, and removed the “Organize” tab. Yes, you read that correctly: we removed a section of Xobni’s functionality.

  

  The Organize tab was born shortly before our September 2007 beta launch. We wanted to superset the functionality of Outlook 2007’s To-Do Bar, which also contains upcoming appointments and outstanding tasks.

  We decided to focus exclusively on creating an awesome user experience with our core piece: Lightning fast search and a view on email that works the way your brain does – by people. We felt that the Organize features were a distraction from the core product. If only we had read our own blog entries: This post, “Do One Thing and Do It Well”, talks about how Lookout, a popular Outlook plugin that Microsoft acquired, had only one major piece of functionality and people loved it! Thus, instead of loading Xobni with more pieces of functionality, we decided to perfect the most important pieces.

  The functionality we took out might make a reappearance, but in a different form. For now, we encourage you to enjoy the new speed and prettiness of your Xobni Insight.

  You can check if you have this version by going to “Xobni > About”. It should say version “1.2.3 (build 3197)” or higher.

  April 4th, 2008 · No comments
• Xobni announces support for Pine email client

  
  
  Xobni is proud to announce the beta release of Xobni for the Pine email client. This new release includes support for all major operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows running Cygwin.

  Xobni beta for Pine exemplifies our commitment to bringing Xobni to platforms outside of Microsoft Outlook.

  Click here to see the revamped Xobni homepage which will go live tomorrow.

  Xobni for Pine will feature all of the same great features you’ve come to expect from Xobni for Outlook, including: ultra-fast search, conversation threading, and social network discovery. It also adds some new features that we’re sure you’ll find useful, like spacebar navigation, ASCII avatar rendering, 100K memory footprint, and a powerful keyboard command set (see man page).

  We’re very excited about the future of the pine platform and look forward to developing and improving Xobni for Pine in years to come.

  April 1st, 2008 · No comments
• Apologies for the email flood:

  Xobni would like to sincerely apologize to our users who received duplicates of the same support message repeatedly between yesterday evening (3.25.08) and this morning. The situation was caused by an error in a recent release of our support ticketing software (SupportTrio) and was out of our hands.

  In fact, we were flooded with repeated identical tickets from our users as well and are still cleaning up the mess.

  We do realize the enormous inconvenience this placed on many of you and we apologize again. We are so upset by this and other issues with the support system that we have decided to end our contract with them and try a new system.

  It is possible that a few legitimate support requests were lost in the flood, so if Xobni’s support team has not responded to your request, this could be the reason. Please feel free to write again in the event that your ticket was lost.

  We look forward to helping you with better success! Keep writing!

  March 26th, 2008 · No comments
• By: GroovyMojo.com � Blog Archive � Xobni: The Best Thing To Happen To Outlook

  […] is a Outlook add-in that even Bill Gates loves.  What it does is comb through all the emails you have ever sent and received, and puts the […]

  March 24th, 2008 · No comments
• By: GroovyGizmo � Blog Archive : Xobni: The Best Thing To Happen To Outlook � Xobni: The Best Thing To Happen To Outlook

  […] is a Outlook add-in that even Bill Gates loves.  What it does is comb through all the emails you have ever sent and received, and puts the […]

  March 24th, 2008 · No comments
• Behind the Scenes at Xobni

  There is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes at Xobni. This work isn’t seen by our users, but greatly contributes to the success of our product and our company.

  Nimda: Our internal admin toolset

  Bryan, our web developer and designer, spends about 20% of his time working on the pretty Xobni website and other outward facing projects that our users enjoy. The majority of his time is spent building internal tools that help our marketing, product, and support teams perform at the top of their game.

  If you are a data nerd like everyone at Xobni (seriously, people come into Xobni and are shocked by the level of data collection and analysis we do), you’ll appreciate the effort we put into collecting, tracking, and analyzing data.

  The internal tools Bryan has built remove him from the critical path for many important projects: getting data for board meetings, A/B testing a new homepage design, launching new invitation messaging, or surveying users. I’m sure Bryan appreciates the reduction in emails that start with: “hey, can you query the user list for ___.”

  One nice thing Bryan has built are the tools we use to monitor uninstalls and installs over time for each version of our software.

  

  He has also made great interfaces for setting up Xobni invite campaigns. This system allows us to easily A/B test the conversion rates on several variables we can tune. Bryan has reduced the complexity of running an A/B testing campaign across thousands of computers to a simple web form.

  

  There are a lot more pretty graphs, but they contain some data we aren’t quite ready to share yet

  LunchBotr: Automated food ordering

  Another example of behind the scenes effort at Xobni is something Ryan our lead QA developer built “for fun” during the weekend: LunchBotr.

  At Xobni we provide lunch and dinner for our team every day. Not having to think about where we are going to eat helps us to focus on the thing we are best at: building great products. As our company has grown from 2, to 5, to 8, and now 15 people, the task of feeding the team has become more challenging. La Donna, our office manager, is in charge of coordinating lunch everyday. She emails the whole team the menu of the location we are ordering from, and everyone sends back their order (I know this is getting boring, but hold on). This process started to get cumbersome for 15 people, especially because La Donna also takes requests for the lunch restaurant of the day. There was a lot of back and forth. However, Ryan solved this problem with a little weekend project: Lunch Botr.

  

  LunchBotr is awesome. The first employee to submit a lunch request can choose the restaurant of the day. Then an email is automatically sent to the team linking to the lunchbotr page for the day. This is just great. The LunchBotr page also has links to the retaurant menu, yelp review, and it shows what you last ordered from that restaurant. Finally it shows who has already completed their order, who hasn’t, and what everyone ordered. This makes La Donna’s life easier and it is really fun to use.

  Software is awesome, and the guys who build it are awesomer.

  March 11th, 2008 · No comments
• Xobni featured in Newsweek - Reinventing the Inbox

  So a cool Google alert came across my inbox today. Xobni has been featured in a Newsweek story titled “Reinventing the Inbox.” We did an interview with Chris Flavelle a few weeks back on the innovation that is beginning to take place in the ancient internet communication application - email. Chris did an awesome job describing the recent innovation led by companies like Yahoo and us here at Xobni.

  He even got the Bill Gates quote in there, calling Xobni “the next generation of social networking.”

  Oh, and while I’m talking about Google alerts, I thought I would post a screenshot of my Xobni profile for the Google alerts I receive in my inbox.
  

  For those of you that don’t know about Google alerts, read more here.

  I’ve been running Google Alerts for a little over 1 year. I’ve seen 680 Google alert emails come across my inbox, and apparently the most popular time of day to post an article about Xobni is between 2pm and 7pm.

  February 29th, 2008 · No comments