Xobni, a startup that looks to make your inbox a little less chaotic, is well known for walking away from an acquisition offer from Microsoft last year, not long after being publically complimented by Bill Gates. Since then the service has continued to grow, with over 2 million downloads in the last year and an avid user base. But until now, there’s been one big piece of the puzzle missing: a source of revenue. Tonight, Xobni is finally turning the cash-flow spigot to “On” with the release of a new upgrade to Xobni called Xobni Plus, which introduces a number of enhanced search features sure to be welcomed by Xobni faithful.
Xobni Plus has a heavy emphasis on improving search, which is one of the key components the service has always been based around. Users will now be able to craft more advanced search queries, using either a GUI-based ‘query builder’ or Xobni’s own markup language, which lets you manually specify attributes like “attachment=yes” or “from=Jason” (Gmail offers similar search features, and they are very handy once you’ve gotten a hang of them). Other improvements include Xobni’s autosuggest feature, which can use linked Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to pair Email address with full names, as well as the ability to search within your Xobni ‘feeds’ in the sidebar.
Xobni may be calling this a ‘Plus’ version, but pretty much anyone who uses the service with any frequency is probably going to want to upgrade (I’d be surprised if the company puts much effort into adding new features to the free version after this). Xobni is expecting fairly broad uptake by its users, so it’s pricing the upgrade at a modest one-time fee of $29.95. However, the company also has more task-specific “Pro” features in the works that will likely appeal to different segments of their userbase, and it sounds like these will be more expensive (a mobile-only premium product is also in the works, with plans to release it later this summer).
Cool! I use and like Xobni for corporate email, but I find it a tad ironic that you have to pay for a plugin that makes an already $$premium$$ application (Outlook) comparabel to a free Gmail!
I love it! Looks amazing, especially the “auto-complete” and the “advanced search”. Too bad the trial last for only 14 days…
Nice. Plus it seem’s that they are charging additional $9.95/computer as well apart from the base $29.95
In all, good to see that they will make some money.
Jason, thanks for the link to my Bill Gates post, but there is a typo in the html behind “complimented” (rhef instead of href) so the link does not work…
This is an excellent product. A must have for anyone using outlook. I plan to upgrade.
Mail.app support? Entourage support? Come on this isn’t 1998 anymore. More than half the employees in my company use Macs.
I’ll second that.
I was pretty impressed with the features – the autocomplete is something I’m very interested in. I was a bit put off by the price though – I thought $29 was a bit much, about half that would seem reasonable to me. Not sure whether I’ll purchase or not yet.
Definitely a fan of Xobni…it’s a terrific product, though I use it more for its search capabilities than the email analytics. But I’m still waiting for them to integrate their contact info aggregation (from LinkedIn and Facebook) back into Contacts.
I think it’s the only piece of software that came out in the last few years that I’m willing to pay for. They’ve done an excellent job and deserve to make some money.
I agree! I don’t understand why it took them so long to start charging.
Cheers Xobni for offering such a great product!
I’ve been using Xobni since Jan/08. I’ve had the rare occasion when something did not show up in search over the past 19 months, but all-in-all it’s invaluable for work email. 30 bucks for Plus? Gladly.
Thanks to Cambrianhouse
Given the following:
1. Most Outlook users are using Outlook at work.
2. Most companies block social media sites.
How is there a market for this? Another way to phrase this question would by why would anyone use Outlook for personal use, when it is $$$ and doesn’t even work as well as free solutions like Gmail which is the account/server/client all-in-one?
Word as an HTML editor? Ha!
Unable to forward HTML emails without first downloading ALL images and thus allowing to be tracked?
1. It’s geared toward business emails.
2. It’s not a social media site.
Isn’t Outlook 2007’s search working the same way?
Is this a joke — would more then 500 people pay $30 for a slightly improved mail search.
Mail is broken today but Xobni’s solution is so limited that it actually complicates my mail experience more then enhancing it. It is a band-aid on a big wound and that band-aid is a hassle to deal with.
Love Xobni…absolutely love it! It is by far the quickest and most efficient way to keep Outlook organized. I’m ready with credit card in hand to purchase the Pro edition
I don’t really understand the value-add for $30.
If you use Outlook 2003 on Vista, or Outlook 2007 on anything, then you get *all* of search features for free anyway, i.e. try typing these into the in-built Outlook search box (it’s pretty much instant results anyway):
from:David has:attachment
before:10/9/2007 subject:budget
etc etc
If you pay for this then you’re throwing your money away. All the search helpers are listed here:
http://www.micr...sandtricks.mspx
Also, the Outlook 2010 public tech preview rocks, plus doesn’t need these add-ins (which tend to slow down your machine and produce instability anyway)
The difference between Xobni search and Outlook’s default is painfully obvious. Let’s say you’ve got an email account at work, with thousands upon thousands of emails, shared inboxes, hundreds upon hundreds of contact.. things like that. Now let’s say you go to do a search. Even on a dual core 4GB computer, the default search in Outlook is painfully slow. Outlook goes to “Not Responding” within seconds, and you’ll be sitting there waiting.
You take that same set up, same scenario, same hardwared, run it side by side with xobni, and that’ll pull up the info you need within 1-2 seconds. When you’ve got someone screaming in your ear on the phone demanding info to be resent to them, would you rather wait on Outlook’s default search, or Xobni? Me? Xobni. Been using it for 2 years now, and it’s the best search option for Outlook. No question about it.
Xobni is an enhancement to outlook but it’s still just regular old SMTP with all it’s inherent problems, poor capabilities and security holes. Still, Xobni has a place. We’ll see if they should have accepted the buyout since they can’t change the world.
This type of “fawning” article is what is annoying about TechCrunch and what makes people suspect the intent of stuff that TechCrunch publishes. Xobni is an Outlook add-on for crying out loud.
For personal use, it was an extreme waste of time. The add-on is a total RAM memory hog and every new software update would often crash Outlook completely. The one good thing is removing it wasn’t overly painful.
To be fair, I see the potential business uses of this app. for cataloging/threaded double digit emails, topics, etc.
I use xobni at work. For the most part I like it. However, the most annoying thing about it is the ‘auto’ discovery of contact information from received emails. 90% of the time it will either not recognise a telephone number for the sender, (even if there is an email signature!), or it will pickup a telephone number from the ‘content’ of the email and assign it to the sender when it’s not related at all!
This will all be irrelevant when we’re using Google Wave anyway. It looks like they should have taken Microsoft’s money when they had their chance.
Just cant stop my self to comment on your blog. Good post.