Blog

• Xobni Joins Facebook Connect Partner Launch at F8 Conference

  As many of you saw (we know because usage has been crazy!), we recently announced a deal with LinkedIn where you can seamlessly receive important information and photos of your contacts directly into your Xobni sidebar. Our mission is to help our users get the information they need right into the inbox.

  

  Today, we’ve expanded on that effort. We’ve been working with Facebook and are announcing today that we are among the first participants in Facebook Connect, which brings Facebook profile information right into the Xobni sidebar. Once implemented, Xobni will be leveraging Facebook’s massive global user base and development platform to automatically show your contacts’ Facebook profile pictures, status, recent photos, mutual friends, location and online presence inside Xobni. Now that is a handy use of your social graph!

  This integration speaks to the ever-increasing importance of social networking data and Facebook’s prominence in the space with over 70 million users around the world. The Xobni sidebar in Outlook will display public data from Facebook profiles and will also offer the user an option to sign into their Facebook account through Xobni and view private data like photos and status messages for their Facebook friends. By leveraging the profiles of Facebook users, Xobni provides greater context around emails by seamlessly informing you of what else is going on in your contacts’ lives.

  Facebook has become a killer social app for tens of millions of people, serving as a new kind of address book for keeping track of contacts. A recent Washington Post article on the future of address books spoke about Facebook, LinkedIn, and the value of the data trapped in social networks. The article also spoke about how Xobni is advancing the address book for email: “The best you can get is a free plug-in for Outlook called Xobni.” We believe that combining data from social networks like Facebook with Xobni will make us all better at personal and professional relationship management.
  

  We’ll be sure to announce here on our blog, to our mailing list, and in our forums when Xobni with Facebook integration is available. To signup for this and future announcements, please do so on our download page (look for the “Keep in Touch” box where you can type in your email).

  July 23rd, 2008 · No comments
• Vroooom – Building the Team

  Focus, experience, skill, passion, and fun – these are the things we look for in hires. We’ve found these traits in the two latest additions to our product team.

  We are pleased to announce that Josh Jacobson will be joining Xobni as our Director of Product Management and Brian Kobashikawa will join Xobni as our Principal Designer.

  

  Both of these guys were part of the Yahoo Messenger team that supplanted AOL Messenger as the #1 instant messaging platform in the United States. They were also both part of the product team that released the Yahoo Messenger Vista client to rave reviews. Their skill and experience will translate perfectly to Xobni; they are great at building products that fit into narrow rectangular boxes!

  Josh headed product management for all of Yahoo Messenger including the Vista, XP, Web Messenger, and Mac Messenger clients.

  Brian brings a rare combination of visual design and user experience design. He was a principal designer at Yahoo, the highest title held by individual contributor designers at Yahoo.

  Both have worked for big companies as well as multiple startups and are excited to return to the startup life. We are excited to have them!

  The Xobni race car is about to hit 3rd gear.

  July 23rd, 2008 · No comments
• Xobni is Growing, Adding Technical Teeth, and Saying Goodbye to a Good Friend

  Today we’re are announcing some additions, changes and opportunities for the Xobni team.

  Engineering excellence is in Xobni’s DNA. We are on seeking teammates who will help us extend our technical and product ambitions.

  

  The key open roles for Xobni today are QA Automation Engineer, software developers, and a VP of Engineering to lead our band of merry engineers.

  Ryan Gerard, our QA engineering lead, seeks an QA Automation Engineer. Ryan wrote a great blog post that gives a good perspective on the value quality engineering. If you are interested in this position, please email jobs@xobni.com with the subject “QA Automation Engineer”. 

  This week we just had an offer accepted for a Sr. Software Engineer position. Great news, but we have more roles open, and it took us months to find this candidate (all the way in Israel, nonetheless). We are seeking more fantastic software developers, so if the problems Xobni is tackling inspire you, send us your resume at jobs@xobni.com. You will find our software engineering job description here.

  And finally, at the end of this summer Gabor Cselle will be leaving Xobni to work on his very own startup. Gabor has filled the role of VP of Engineering admirably for the past year and half. We will capture some great Gabor moments in a future blog post, and maybe we can inspire one of the team to put together a “Best of Gabor” video And while we are sad to see Gabor go, his departure is a big opportunity for Xobni.

  Today we kick off a search for that perfect engineering leader to come join Xobni for the next set of challenges. The right person will champion our engineering ethos, while delivering a fantastic product, on-time. The team will be growing quickly, so a candidate should be an able manager who excels at rapid company growth. They must know how to ship desktop software, particularly with today’s tools and challenges.  They must know how to add or remove process as a company grows, and they must command the team’s respect through their hard work and character.

  This is a key role for Xobni, reporting to the CEO with board of directors visibility. If you are or know the perfect engineering leader for Xobni, drop us a line. You will find the full job description for our VP of Engineering here.

  July 23rd, 2008 · No comments
• Out is In: Xobni + LinkedIn = Job titles, Employer, and Pictures

  Today we’re launching a new version of Xobni that we’re very excited about. Early during the life of Xobni we realized that email is about people, but no existing email clients gave people the priority they deserve. We quickly seized on what we believe is a huge opportunity to build a more socially aware email environment. We’ve long believed this idea extends beyond email to other sources of relationship data, both on the desktop and on the web.

  For our users, Xobni has become both a way to organize an overloaded inbox and a way to manage relationships. Xobni’s capacity as a relationship management tool is greatly enhanced by today’s announcement that LinkedIn profile data is now visible in Xobni profiles. Integrating data from LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network, will dramatically improve Xobni’s utility as a relationship management tool and further integrate email with data from the web.

  See the official press release here

  This new version of Xobni (version 1.4) is being automatically updated on existing users’ machines and is also available for immediate download at www.xobni.com/download

  What you will find in version 1.4:

  
  LinkedIn integration

  Xobni users will now see LinkedIn public profile data automatically displayed in Xobni profiles. You will see the job title and the employing company of the person you are emailing with. Clicking on the LinkedIn logo will take you to that contact’s LinkedIn profile. Also, LinkedIn profile pictures will be automatically displayed in the Xobni sidebar. We’ve been using this feature internally for several weeks, and having this information at your fingertips when you are interacting with a new person is immensely powerful.

  We have plans to extend this feature with more information from LinkedIn that becomes available when you are logged-in to their service. Make sure to verify that your LinkedIn profile and picture are set to “public” so that other Xobni users can see your pretty LinkedIn picture when you send them an email.

  Keyboard shortcuts

  This feature is for our power Xobni users – thanks for your
  feedback! We have implemented the
  following keyboard shortcuts for use with Xobni.

  Keyboard shortcuts for when the Outlook window has focus
  These keyboard shortcuts function anytime the Xobni sidebar is showing (collapsed or open) and the main Outlook window has focus.

  • Focus on the Xobni search box: Ctrl - [~]
  • Collapse/Expand sidebar: Ctrl - Shift - [~]
  • Email the person in sidebar: Ctrl - Alt - N (mirrors Outlook’s compose email: Ctrl-N)
  • Go Back in the drilldown/search history: Ctrl - Backspace

  Keyboard shortcuts for when the Xobni sidebar has focus:

  • Go Back in the drilldown/search history: Backspace

  Folder selection

  Another feature many of our users want is the ability to select or deselect folders or outlook data stores that you want included in Xobni’s search results and person profiles.

  Do you store important data in the deleted items folder? Do you want Xobni to index that folder? Now you can. Do you have a ton of old PSTs that you don’t want searched by Xobni? Now you can deselect those folders from our index:

  

  After you’ve selected or deselected a folder, and only after we re-indexed your machine, the xobni search index will reflect the changes. Remember re-indexing occurs during idle times or when you manually force an indexing in the Xobni menu.

  Performance improvements

  We are constantly working to improve the performance of Xobni. We also work hard to limit our interaction with the native Outlook email client. We have made two great steps in improving both of these areas. We have improved the way by which we index new messages as they are sent and received. This improves the responsiveness of Outlook for users that experienced a slowdown when they were sending or receiving new messages. Also, we’ve made an improvement to the Xobni UI rendering. Xobni profiles that contain long histories of conversations and attachments now load much faster.

  June 26th, 2008 · No comments
• Quick Tip: Searching for contacts within a company

  Xobni has lightening fast people search. But you can also search on company names to find employees within that company with whom you have exchanged emails, or who have been copied on an email with you. So if you are looking for people from Apple Inc, you can search apple.com and you will find people with emails name@apple.com in the search results. Very simple and very powerful.

  Let us know your tips on using Xobni. If we publish them, we’ll send you a Xobni t-shirt!

  June 20th, 2008 · No comments
• xobni.com/fan - Get Xobni T-shirts

  Today we have launched xobni.com/fan. This site will serve as a resource for Xobni fans to express their love for Xobni.

  At xobni.com/fan you can invite friends to use Xobni and get a unique Xobni badge to put up on your blog or social network profile page. However, today’s addition is the Xobni store. Now you can get your very own Xobni t-shirt to wear around the office and show off to all of your colleagues and friends.
  

  We are selling these t-shirts at cost, so don’t go mistaking some t-shirts sales for our web 2.0 business model.

  June 16th, 2008 · No comments
• Quick Tip: Quickly add a photo from the web to a Xobni profile

  Xobni is much cooler when your contacts have photos. Recently we added the ability for Xobni to import photos from the Outlook address contact book. But you can also add a photo directly to Xobni, which has a great image cropping tool. Here is how you do it:

  1) Right click on grey holder image of a person’s contact card in Xobni
  2) Select Edit Info
  3) Click Change below the photo placeholder. You can choose a photo from your PC, or there is a cool trick to grab an image off the web. Here it is:

  a) Use something like Google Image Search or Flickr to find a picture of the person on the web
  b) Copy the location of the photo. You can do this by right-clicking on the photo in your browser and selecting “Copy Image Location”
  c) Paste the image location in the File Name: field and click on the Open button.

  Viola you are done. Xobni will grab the image off the internet and you can crop from there.

  June 13th, 2008 · No comments
• Xobni reviewed by PC World, given *Superior* ranking

  Kevin Tofel over at PC World posted a great review of Xobni today. See here.

  Xobni has been featured in PC World several times both in print and online, but today they released their official PC World review of Xobni. These reviews have been known to make or break products and companies. Today’s review made Xobni.

  Xobni received a score of 93/100 and a superior ranking. This is a higher score than any other software product I was able to find on PCWorld.com in 10 minutes of browsing. Very Exciting!

  Some choice quotes from the article:

  “This free application is a must-have for anyone who lives in Outlook”

  “It provides functionality that Outlook should deliver natively, and does so without affecting the e-mail client’s performance.”

  “Instead of treating mail conversations, contacts, and calendars as separate entities, Xobni weaves them together in a responsive, intuitive interface.”

  That last quote is my favorite. That is EXACTLY what we like to hear!

  June 5th, 2008 · No comments
• A Different Kind of QA: Calling all Engineers

  It’s common for people to ask why a good engineer like myself would want to work in QA, especially when you have to fight the stigma’s of QA, namely:

  1) You are in QA because you are not good enough for development

  2) You are in QA as a stepping stone for development

  3) You are in QA because you don’t like coding

  My response to those statements: pish-posh. While these statements may apply to some people in the field, they certainly don’t apply to the people serious about QA. A good QA Engineer solves quality problems with an algorithmic intensity that rivals traditional programmers. They are a true hacker in the older sense of the word - they are here to find and exploit the problems in the system in any way possible.

  Every problem has its boundaries. For most developers, the boundaries for implementing solutions are usually confined to one language, stack, or technology. The boundaries for problem solving in QA are generally much wider, simply because our solutions don’t have to be productized, exposed to the public, and aren’t necessarily even in the same language or stack.

  This allows a much wider range of creative freedom when solving problems. Learning new languages and technologies becomes essential for your work. Having a large arsenal of tools to attack a problem becomes a necessary part of the job. This provides you with even more of a reason to learn about the latest and greatest in tech, which is something that appeals to all engineers alike.

  At Xobni we approach QA differently than most. The people we look for are not here because they are not good enough for development. They are not here because they don’t like coding. The QA people here are expected to be at the top of their game. They are expected to build and create software that can topple the Jenga-like building blocks of our product. They are expected to be creative people who like to learn, explore, and exploit software.

  That being said, Xobni is looking for a QA engineer! Check out the job post, and send resumes to ryan dot gerard at xobni.com if you think you can rock our world.

  

  We call our QA team’s room the Pirate Lair (see above).

  May 27th, 2008 · No comments
• 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