4 ms·

I presume there's a lot more to their business model than just an Outlook plugin (albeit a very good one!)?

hussong 17y ago
With Xobni One, they could be Dropbox for contacts. Having all contacts from a range of services well organized in one place plus having it synced over a number of different devices would take a ton of pain out of everyday communication.
- ShabbyDoo 17y ago
  This makes the investment understandable -- I had only seen the Outlook plugin on the xobni homepage and didn't know about One.
- ajg1977 17y ago
  Perhaps I'm missing something, but syncing contacts between different devices seems to be pretty much a solved problem.
  - adamsmith 17y ago
    Today's address books are broken. For one they can't handle volume / thousands of contacts, for example.
  - count 17y ago
    You must be an Apple user... The synching of contacts/info between everything, and the single system-wide address book/etc was the primary reason I moved to OS X + iPhone.
brezina 17y ago
Matt, co-founder of Xobni here. Adam and I started Xobni with the basic idea that google organized the world's public information, yet no one had done that for personal information (Adam's insight - not mine - he was in grad school looking for huge data sets to do stuff with). Not only are the personal data stores much larger than public data (most of which is in email), they also have to be treated different. Google (and products like gmail, google desktop, etc) don't get this. What we discovered after pounding our heads at this problem for 6 months was that Email Is About People and no current email clients understand that. Xobni was born. We took that concept, and with $12k of YC money in the bank, we realized we would get Zero adoption if we asked people to switch to our new email client. We also realized the largest group of existing valuable email users are on Outlook (it has grown from 500M to 600M since we started Xobni). So, we took our vision to Outlook via a plugin. People liked it. We solved some existing problems for people like keyword search (note: it is easier to acquire users when you solve a problem they know they have), and sprinkled in features that produce our true vision of organizing information around people and relationships. Individuals pay for our premium Outlook product (Xobni Plus) and companies license it for their employees (Xobni Enterprise). However, we've finally started to stretch the vision to new areas. We launched Xobni for BlackBerry - an app that takes our people-centric vision of personal information to the blackberry. And Xobni One, our cloud service that connects the xobni service between Outlook, BlackBerry, and upcoming new platforms. Add onto that other cloud services (Salesforce.com, linkedin, etc) that you want to access and view from Xobni profiles on Outlook, BlackBerry, and everywhere else you maintain and manage relationships. Would you like to be on your friend's Facebook page and see the phone number that Xobni extracted for you last time that friend called you on your BlackBerry? I would. So, Outlook plugin can be seen as a means, not an end. Meanwhile, the plugin is damn useful :)
- dschobel 17y ago
  Sounds great, I just hope you guys have fantastic privacy controls when munging all those various networks together.
- samratjp 17y ago
  This is exactly why I love HN. Nowhere else could you expect the founders to take time to excite (and educate) us in such detail :-) Congrats Matt & Xobni. I hope that fund means that we'll get an Apple Mail & Thunderbird Xobni soon. I bet Xobni will good on the iPad.

With Xobni One, they could be Dropbox for contacts. Having all contacts from a range of services well organized in one place plus having it synced over a number of different devices would take a ton of pain out of everyday communication.

ShabbyDoo 17y ago
This makes the investment understandable -- I had only seen the Outlook plugin on the xobni homepage and didn't know about One.
ajg1977 17y ago
Perhaps I'm missing something, but syncing contacts between different devices seems to be pretty much a solved problem.
- adamsmith 17y ago
  Today's address books are broken. For one they can't handle volume / thousands of contacts, for example.
- count 17y ago
  You must be an Apple user... The synching of contacts/info between everything, and the single system-wide address book/etc was the primary reason I moved to OS X + iPhone.

brezina 17y ago

Matt, co-founder of Xobni here. Adam and I started Xobni with the basic idea that google organized the world's public information, yet no one had done that for personal information (Adam's insight - not mine - he was in grad school looking for huge data sets to do stuff with). Not only are the personal data stores much larger than public data (most of which is in email), they also have to be treated different. Google (and products like gmail, google desktop, etc) don't get this. What we discovered after pounding our heads at this problem for 6 months was that Email Is About People and no current email clients understand that. Xobni was born. We took that concept, and with $12k of YC money in the bank, we realized we would get Zero adoption if we asked people to switch to our new email client. We also realized the largest group of existing valuable email users are on Outlook (it has grown from 500M to 600M since we started Xobni). So, we took our vision to Outlook via a plugin. People liked it. We solved some existing problems for people like keyword search (note: it is easier to acquire users when you solve a problem they know they have), and sprinkled in features that produce our true vision of organizing information around people and relationships. Individuals pay for our premium Outlook product (Xobni Plus) and companies license it for their employees (Xobni Enterprise). However, we've finally started to stretch the vision to new areas. We launched Xobni for BlackBerry - an app that takes our people-centric vision of personal information to the blackberry. And Xobni One, our cloud service that connects the xobni service between Outlook, BlackBerry, and upcoming new platforms. Add onto that other cloud services (Salesforce.com, linkedin, etc) that you want to access and view from Xobni profiles on Outlook, BlackBerry, and everywhere else you maintain and manage relationships. Would you like to be on your friend's Facebook page and see the phone number that Xobni extracted for you last time that friend called you on your BlackBerry? I would. So, Outlook plugin can be seen as a means, not an end. Meanwhile, the plugin is damn useful :)

dschobel 17y ago
Sounds great, I just hope you guys have fantastic privacy controls when munging all those various networks together.
samratjp 17y ago
This is exactly why I love HN. Nowhere else could you expect the founders to take time to excite (and educate) us in such detail :-) Congrats Matt & Xobni. I hope that fund means that we'll get an Apple Mail & Thunderbird Xobni soon. I bet Xobni will good on the iPad.