Xobni aims to solve Outlook users’ e-mail-related woes

Xobni, a company that revolutionizes the way people manage email relationships, today (May 5) launched its long-anticipated Outlook plug-in that the company boasts will significantly save users’ time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments.

Launched in public beta, the Xobni, which is the word "inbox" spelled backwards, is aimed to make Outlook users’ e-mail-related life easier by helping them quickly find and understand what's in their inbox.

Displayed as a sidebar in Microsoft’s desktop e-mail program, Outlook, Xobni (pronounced zob-nee) enriches it with a bunch of interesting features like it indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages quickly and easily searchable as well as automatically extracts phone numbers from e-mails and offers in-depth email analytics.

It also offers quick search, threaded conversations, people-centric navigation, easy attachment discovery and one click scheduling.

"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, the San Francisco-based startup has launched the beta version of Outlook add-on with a single goal- find what you need, when you need it. The company said the plug-in enables users easily find anything in their inbox -- people, messages or attachments -- faster than anything currently available in Outlook.

Launched in 2003, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook is a personal information manager from Redmond giant Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. It is the world’s most popular e-mail tool, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Although often used mainly as an e-mail application, it also provides a calendar, task and contact management, note taking, a journal and web browsing.

However, Mr. Adam Smith, the 23-year-old co-founder of Xobni, thinks that email volume is now growing rapidly and Microsoft Outlook is so poorly suited for most people’s intensive e-mail habits.

“Using Outlook today is like taking a Volkswagen Beetle into space,” Mr. Smith said. “People are kind of exerting all these stresses upon it that it wasn’t originally designed to withstand.”

The software is available for free download at www.xobni.com, and will also be sold to companies.