8 ms·

Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

26 points by drinko 18y ago

bosshog 18y ago
He cropped his photo, which was a good move. Can we concentrate on the merits of his argument this time?
- greatapps 18y ago
  re the photo, one tries to please. Sadly, I am getting fewer invitations out for a drink following the change :-)
wumi 18y ago
1. It's obvious that Xobni has more stuff planned, whether or not they're "features." I'm sure the "leak" just happened to be timed before the acquisition rejection. 2. "especially since there is no clear revenue stream opportunities with the product - do you really want ads inside Outlook or would you really pay in order to get the "information" being thrown up about email traffic?" I'm pretty sure there are more ways to potentially monetize Xobni than advertising or b2b/b2c SaaS. Than again, if I remember correctly, this guy didn't really do his homework last time either, so why should I think he's done it this time?
- greatapps 18y ago
  Homework? In the last blog post to which you refer I gave a personal account of the usefulness of Xobni to me, and wasn't presenting a research paper. I'd be delighted to hear the ways you think they can monetise the product/feature, partly to demonstrate the amount of thought you've given the matter. In its current incarnation, Xobni is a tool aimed at the individual user. Obviously, the company/product can go in all sorts of directions but so can anyone given time/money/effort. Let's consider the possibility that their current offering is a prelude to looking at the corporate market. There are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target". You should also consider that many CRM tools already enable emails to be automatically incorporated into the communication profile/history of a contact, supplemented by richer tools than Xobni presently offer [task mgt, workflow] e.g. salesforce, zoho crm, siebel.
  - wumi 18y ago
    "'information' thrown up about email traffic." you clearly still consider just the analytics part of the email, which shows you STILL probably haven't really used the product if that's all you think it is. "While Xobni is focused for now on email organization for Outlook, it wants to be able to aggregate information from different webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and others. It also wants to bring in instant messaging, and aggregate information from social networks. Brezina gave the example of a friend who remembers a story another friend related about a ski resort in Vermont. A user will be able to search Xobni’s database for “Stow,” the name of the ski resort, and instantly find all the related threads , conversations, and media traded with friends." sounds a bit like useful social search to me. and since you've already nixed advertising, and a saas model -- again based on apparently never trying the product there's also freemium, support & service behind the product a la open source, cross-sales/ partnership with a CRM package (read: salesforce or zoho)
    - greatapps 18y ago
      I got my invite to trial the product on Dec 14 2007 and tested the Xobni service over a few weeks using Outlook 2003. I've also re-installed it recently, just in case there were new features which would change my views - not so far. Several people have mentioned the requirement to aggregate across multiple webmail clients - I confess that I'm not affected by this as I consolidate multiple email accounts in one location and avoid the need to check separate email services individually. If operating on multiple webmail clients is common practice, then I confess to having been ignorant of this gap in the market - of course, people could consolidate their email in either Outlook or Gmail. As for search, does Google Desktop search not work on your PC? It searches both within your email [certainly Outlook and Gmail] and across the filing system, whilst being free. This should go some way to addressing your example of locating conversations. As for the media attachments, I concede that I've long since stopped using my email inbox as a filing system, saving them off to file directories if they are important enough [Pst files in particular always seem to react badly].
      - wumi 18y ago
uuilly 18y ago
This all based on a ton of speculation. There are three big unknowns as I see it: -Nobody really knows the details of the offer. -Nobody really knows what Xobni has in store. -Nobody really knows how much say the VC's had. Most companies start with a feature that becomes a product which becomes a company. The Outlook plugin could be the tip of a much bigger spear. I have never used xobni b/c I don't use outlook but I can see a bunch of possible directions for them. Who knows though? Maybe it is a minor feature. But anyone in a startup knows enough to know how little they know about the inner workings of another company. And anyone who's tried to raise money knows how thoroughly you have to explain your long term plans and revenue models. If you can't say I'm going to be a $100 million dollar company in X years b/c of Y and Z reasons, you're not going to get a series A. You'd also know that $20 million is a small offer after a series A.
- greatapps 18y ago
  Re your point on having to thoroughly explain your revenue model to investors, there are some VCs/investors who are happy to let this emerge, odd as that may sound. For instance, I believe that Fred Wilson [of A VC blog fame] has commented along these lines about his investment in Twitter. In some of these instances, the plan appears to be to focus on building a large active user base, preferably one that gets "locked in" via a network effect and then figuring out how to monetise. I am interested to hear about the "bunch of possible directions" you can see. Can you elaborate?
- utnick 18y ago
  Regarding what xobni has in store.... couldnt u just then sell the outlook plugin for 20 mil then start on your real big idea in a couple years with 20 mil in the bank
  - wanorris 18y ago
    1. There's a good chance that at that multiple the VCs get the bulk of the money. 2. A deal with Microsoft almost certainly requires them to come on board at Microsoft for some period of time. 3. A deal might include a noncompete for after they leave. It really does depend on what the terms of the deal on the table were.
michael_dorfman 18y ago
I tend to agree with the analysis here, and think that Xobni missed a nice chance. I'd be surprised if Microsoft comes knocking again, and I don't see any reasonable way that they can build their tool into anything that is not parasitic on Outlook, much less effectively monetize it...
- cdr 18y ago
  So what if it's parasitic on Outlook?
  - michael_dorfman 18y ago
    Then the best business model available to them is to get bought by Microsoft. This is not a bad business plan, by the way-- there are quite a number of folks who have made good money filling some gap Microsoft missed, and getting acquired.
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  They could license their product to large businesses for more money than you think it's worth. Even if they save users 10 minutes a day, do you know how much an executive is willing to pay to save 10 minutes of frustration? Any extension to the Microsoft Office suite should just be marketed straight to enterprise customers. More hours are spent looking at Microsoft Office every day than probably any other activity save sleeping. It's a huge market filled with deep-pocketed customers.
jgrahamc 18y ago
From TFA: "What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook?" The core problem with this commentary is that the writer doesn't understand that Xobni can be more than just an Outlook feature. I think he has a hard time seeing beyond the UI that's been presented. I am reminded of VitalSigns that many people saw is just a toy for looking at how well your dial up connection was working. Others realized that the underlying technology was interesting, that it applied in the business environment and VitalSigns was bought out for a good price.
- greatapps 18y ago
  Please elaborate on the many things you evidently think it could be, highlighting how easily and in what timeframe they could achieve this, thereby "educating" the rest of us?
  - nanijoe 18y ago
    It may be time to put down the hatorade for a minute, and consider that the guys who walked away from $20m may be intelligent enough to value their own product.
    - justindz 18y ago
      Amen. I'm not eval'ing their move one way or the other, but I would suspect that they have more inside info about their company, product, the deal and business plan. By definition, you know.
  - jgrahamc 18y ago
    I can't tell from your reply if an obnoxious personality is coming through, or if it's just the problem with ASCII communications. --- Email is a very target rich environment, I've done quite a lot of work in this area and I think there are two key things to realize about email: 1. Mining the content of emails can give you information about what's in them and the person who wrote them. Examples are any spam filter, POPFile, GMail ads., automatic email response systems. 2. Email also contains relationship information. And this information doesn't need to be gathered by forcing the user to 'friend' people. If you have access to the email box of a user you have all their email which means all their relationships plus all the subjects they are interested in. If you then do that across a company (or another group) you have a great deal of information for clustering (both by relationship and by content). You also have IP addresses which leads to physical location (with some degree of error) and time information (including time zones). That's a great deal of information to have (for example, companies like Facebook would love to know as much about you as possible but only really get the friend relationship; email gives you that effortlessly with content th analyze). The obvious follow up on this is 'how are they going to make money'. I don't know Xobni so I can't answer for them, but if you look at the areas where money as been made analyzing content or relationships, it's not hard to see that Xobni could be a trojan horse (an Outlook or other email pluging) that gives the user some value while providing greater value behind the scenes.
metatronscube 18y ago
good for them!!
aneesh 18y ago
> Duh? What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook? Everyone can criticize all they want, but this is a clear case of asymmetric information. Xobni knows a lot more about their value than you or I do. But even with the limited information I have, I have to say they are a lot more than just a feature. With the Yahoo! Mail release (and I'm guessing GMail/hotmail/other client releases in the pipeline), what they're really doing is being a hub for all your contacts, attachments, and online interactions, INDEPENDENT of your email client. I use 4 different email addresses, and at least a couple different email clients for various reasons. With this synchronization across mail clients, Xobni has transformed itself from an analytics feature to a full-fledged network to manage your contacts and interactions. I could see this integrating powerfully with, for example, Salesforce.com.
josefresco 18y ago
You don't value your own company, value is set by the market, and in this case the market said 20 mil. Will it increase or decrease depends on the actions of Xobni and the market. The arguments that the founders "know their potential value" better than us is completely irrelevant. Don't you think MS investigated the company first, it's offerings and it's future before making an offer? I own a startup and think it could be worth billions someday... does that make it so?
- bigtoga 18y ago
  Huh? One company valued xobni at $20m - how is that the be-all, end-all of valuation? If I value my company at $500,000 and someone offers me $100,000, am I wrong or are they wrong (or are we both right) when I turn them down? Answer: you don't have enough information to make a decision.
  - cstejerean 18y ago
    until someone else gives you a $500,000 valuation your company is not worth 500k. So far Xobni is only worth 20 million. They are hoping that one day they will be worth more.
    - emmett 18y ago
      Xobni is worth at least $20,000,000. It is currently unknown as to whether they're worth more. Evidence suggests those with the most at risk believe they are worth significantly more.
pg 18y ago
How on earth did this troll post get 17 votes? There's only one paragraph in it that's even new, and that doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said.
- paul 18y ago
  I'm starting to get the feeling that there's a big jealousy factor developing here. The formula is simple: find something that's getting traction and getting talked about, and then bash it. This bashing is very appealing to people whose own efforts are less successful (or more likely have never started), because it reassures them that the other people's efforts and success aren't "real" or legitimate. The same thing can be seen in the comments on TechCrunch (along with the jealousy of failed competitors).
  - ashu 18y ago
    I think the "never have started" is probably the crux of the matter. People who don't actually build things tend to look at the world from a very different perspective. The focus is more on "how is this thing different from anything else I have seen" and not on "is this thing actually useful to a non-trivial set of people out there". When they focus on the first part, it is very easy to bash almost all things out there. Google? That's just search. Gmail? That's just webmail. IPhone? Just a smartphone - doesn't even have 3G and GPS!
    - nostrademons 18y ago
      I think it's more a distinction between "people who have problems" and "people who don't have problems". When you don't have a problem, you're in browse mode - open to new ideas, but only if they're substantially different from everything you've ever seen and trigger some flicker of recognition, some reason to think it's a good idea. When you do have a problem, you're actively looking for something to solve it, and get really excited about the solution. So if you happen to have the particular problem that Xobni solves, it's great, but if you don't, it's just ho-hum.
      - 18y ago
webwright 18y ago
People need to do some math before they say this was a good opportunity for Xobni (and the investors-- who likely have the power to veto any acquisition). When you take 4.35 million in investment, you are giving away a percentage of your company. Say it's 1/3rd for the sake of argument. That creates a post-money valuation of $13m. Which means that a $20m buyout (once the lawyers get their slice) is, what-- a 1.5x return on investment? The only way an investor would approve that is if the company was tanking (Xobni isn't-- they are buried in good press). Outlook (and email) is the #1 technology time-sink on the planet (RescueTime has the data to prove it-- someday we'll publish some interesting stats). If you could walk up to any enterprise and propose to make email 10% more efficient, that's worth a TON of money.
- apathy 18y ago
  RescueTime has the data to prove it-- someday we'll publish some interesting stats) I see what you did there ;-) Your business model makes a lot more sense now.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
greatapps 18y ago
Just in case I am missing features from the version I have installed, here's what I can access in Xobni from the top - emails received time summary graph. - count of emails sent/received and resultant ranking - request for phone number / phone number captured from email - "schedule time" which opens a blank email - create email - listing of other people that were included on emails received from the contact, and ability to hop onto the email profile for that person if they too are one of your contacts - list of emails from the contact which you can navigate to - list of file exchanged which you can navigate to Anyone got anything different? I ask only because as I'm evidently missing something in the app, based on some of the comments made towards me. Let's be clear, if you love the app then that's great and I want to hear how it has helped you. If I am missing a trick, then perhaps others are to and so help us to be believers. If you've spotted where this app is heading, explicitly clue the rest of us in, don't simply allude.
iloveyouocean 18y ago
"More than a feature." - My guess: [Forward Looking Statements] Xobni is able to be integrated into 'all' email clients. Lots of people do this because its FREE and provides some immediate benefit (enhanced information, etc.). When you use Xobni, your 'information' is synced back to Xobni's servers. From this they create a social network-like thing that is sort of a hybrid between Plaxo (contact management) and LinkedIn. [Even if you only try out Xobni, they still extract your 'email social structure' to add to the big picture] Suddenly Xobni is a Social Productivity Network riding on top of Email that is super useful to businesses and that people are willing to PAY FOR to get enhanced networking capabilities, productivity tracking, spam filtering, mobile directory[People include their cell phone nums. in emails all the time]. It requires almost no effort from people to establish 'connections', email is ubiquitous, blah social, blah networking, blah aggregate, blah circle jerk. Profit.
apathy 18y ago
Wow, it's a good thing that Xobni couldn't integrate with GMail or Yahoo! Mail and play off the monstrous business interests against each other. Also, it's a good thing that the information they mine from the social structure of your contacts is useless. (Moreso, the joint distributions of contact networks among multiple employees in a large organization, or the temporal patterns therein... nothing to see here, move along now) But most of all, it's a good thing that everyone commenting on the deal knows all there is to know about the product, its futures, and their value to Microsoft and other companies, due no doubt to vast, deep expertise in the field. Because if the above were not true, well, then it would be just a windbag yelling into an echo chamber, and that simply would not do! Yes, it's a great thing that everything has already been invented, cannot be improved, and is already maximally efficient. We're done now, let's go get a low-paying service job (or, worse, program Java for a big company)
- chaostheory 18y ago
  Xobni’s Secret Project: Merge Outlook With Yahoo Mail http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/xobnis-secret-project-merge-outlook-with-yahoo-mail/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/xobnis-secret-project-m...
aswanson 18y ago
I'm starting to understand, why, in some cases, a narrow, limited communication channel is a good thing.

26 points by drinko 18y ago

bosshog 18y ago

He cropped his photo, which was a good move. Can we concentrate on the merits of his argument this time?

greatapps 18y ago
re the photo, one tries to please. Sadly, I am getting fewer invitations out for a drink following the change :-)

wumi 18y ago

1. It's obvious that Xobni has more stuff planned, whether or not they're "features." I'm sure the "leak" just happened to be timed before the acquisition rejection. 2. "especially since there is no clear revenue stream opportunities with the product - do you really want ads inside Outlook or would you really pay in order to get the "information" being thrown up about email traffic?" I'm pretty sure there are more ways to potentially monetize Xobni than advertising or b2b/b2c SaaS. Than again, if I remember correctly, this guy didn't really do his homework last time either, so why should I think he's done it this time?

greatapps 18y ago
Homework? In the last blog post to which you refer I gave a personal account of the usefulness of Xobni to me, and wasn't presenting a research paper. I'd be delighted to hear the ways you think they can monetise the product/feature, partly to demonstrate the amount of thought you've given the matter. In its current incarnation, Xobni is a tool aimed at the individual user. Obviously, the company/product can go in all sorts of directions but so can anyone given time/money/effort. Let's consider the possibility that their current offering is a prelude to looking at the corporate market. There are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target". You should also consider that many CRM tools already enable emails to be automatically incorporated into the communication profile/history of a contact, supplemented by richer tools than Xobni presently offer [task mgt, workflow] e.g. salesforce, zoho crm, siebel.
- wumi 18y ago
  "'information' thrown up about email traffic." you clearly still consider just the analytics part of the email, which shows you STILL probably haven't really used the product if that's all you think it is. "While Xobni is focused for now on email organization for Outlook, it wants to be able to aggregate information from different webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and others. It also wants to bring in instant messaging, and aggregate information from social networks. Brezina gave the example of a friend who remembers a story another friend related about a ski resort in Vermont. A user will be able to search Xobni’s database for “Stow,” the name of the ski resort, and instantly find all the related threads , conversations, and media traded with friends." sounds a bit like useful social search to me. and since you've already nixed advertising, and a saas model -- again based on apparently never trying the product there's also freemium, support & service behind the product a la open source, cross-sales/ partnership with a CRM package (read: salesforce or zoho)
  - greatapps 18y ago
    I got my invite to trial the product on Dec 14 2007 and tested the Xobni service over a few weeks using Outlook 2003. I've also re-installed it recently, just in case there were new features which would change my views - not so far. Several people have mentioned the requirement to aggregate across multiple webmail clients - I confess that I'm not affected by this as I consolidate multiple email accounts in one location and avoid the need to check separate email services individually. If operating on multiple webmail clients is common practice, then I confess to having been ignorant of this gap in the market - of course, people could consolidate their email in either Outlook or Gmail. As for search, does Google Desktop search not work on your PC? It searches both within your email [certainly Outlook and Gmail] and across the filing system, whilst being free. This should go some way to addressing your example of locating conversations. As for the media attachments, I concede that I've long since stopped using my email inbox as a filing system, saving them off to file directories if they are important enough [Pst files in particular always seem to react badly].
    - wumi 18y ago

uuilly 18y ago

This all based on a ton of speculation. There are three big unknowns as I see it: -Nobody really knows the details of the offer. -Nobody really knows what Xobni has in store. -Nobody really knows how much say the VC's had. Most companies start with a feature that becomes a product which becomes a company. The Outlook plugin could be the tip of a much bigger spear. I have never used xobni b/c I don't use outlook but I can see a bunch of possible directions for them. Who knows though? Maybe it is a minor feature. But anyone in a startup knows enough to know how little they know about the inner workings of another company. And anyone who's tried to raise money knows how thoroughly you have to explain your long term plans and revenue models. If you can't say I'm going to be a $100 million dollar company in X years b/c of Y and Z reasons, you're not going to get a series A. You'd also know that $20 million is a small offer after a series A.

greatapps 18y ago
Re your point on having to thoroughly explain your revenue model to investors, there are some VCs/investors who are happy to let this emerge, odd as that may sound. For instance, I believe that Fred Wilson [of A VC blog fame] has commented along these lines about his investment in Twitter. In some of these instances, the plan appears to be to focus on building a large active user base, preferably one that gets "locked in" via a network effect and then figuring out how to monetise. I am interested to hear about the "bunch of possible directions" you can see. Can you elaborate?
utnick 18y ago
Regarding what xobni has in store.... couldnt u just then sell the outlook plugin for 20 mil then start on your real big idea in a couple years with 20 mil in the bank
- wanorris 18y ago
  1. There's a good chance that at that multiple the VCs get the bulk of the money. 2. A deal with Microsoft almost certainly requires them to come on board at Microsoft for some period of time. 3. A deal might include a noncompete for after they leave. It really does depend on what the terms of the deal on the table were.

michael_dorfman 18y ago

I tend to agree with the analysis here, and think that Xobni missed a nice chance. I'd be surprised if Microsoft comes knocking again, and I don't see any reasonable way that they can build their tool into anything that is not parasitic on Outlook, much less effectively monetize it...

cdr 18y ago
So what if it's parasitic on Outlook?
- michael_dorfman 18y ago
  Then the best business model available to them is to get bought by Microsoft. This is not a bad business plan, by the way-- there are quite a number of folks who have made good money filling some gap Microsoft missed, and getting acquired.
Prrometheus 18y ago
They could license their product to large businesses for more money than you think it's worth. Even if they save users 10 minutes a day, do you know how much an executive is willing to pay to save 10 minutes of frustration? Any extension to the Microsoft Office suite should just be marketed straight to enterprise customers. More hours are spent looking at Microsoft Office every day than probably any other activity save sleeping. It's a huge market filled with deep-pocketed customers.

jgrahamc 18y ago

From TFA: "What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook?" The core problem with this commentary is that the writer doesn't understand that Xobni can be more than just an Outlook feature. I think he has a hard time seeing beyond the UI that's been presented. I am reminded of VitalSigns that many people saw is just a toy for looking at how well your dial up connection was working. Others realized that the underlying technology was interesting, that it applied in the business environment and VitalSigns was bought out for a good price.

greatapps 18y ago
Please elaborate on the many things you evidently think it could be, highlighting how easily and in what timeframe they could achieve this, thereby "educating" the rest of us?
- nanijoe 18y ago
  It may be time to put down the hatorade for a minute, and consider that the guys who walked away from $20m may be intelligent enough to value their own product.
  - justindz 18y ago
    Amen. I'm not eval'ing their move one way or the other, but I would suspect that they have more inside info about their company, product, the deal and business plan. By definition, you know.
- jgrahamc 18y ago
  I can't tell from your reply if an obnoxious personality is coming through, or if it's just the problem with ASCII communications. --- Email is a very target rich environment, I've done quite a lot of work in this area and I think there are two key things to realize about email: 1. Mining the content of emails can give you information about what's in them and the person who wrote them. Examples are any spam filter, POPFile, GMail ads., automatic email response systems. 2. Email also contains relationship information. And this information doesn't need to be gathered by forcing the user to 'friend' people. If you have access to the email box of a user you have all their email which means all their relationships plus all the subjects they are interested in. If you then do that across a company (or another group) you have a great deal of information for clustering (both by relationship and by content). You also have IP addresses which leads to physical location (with some degree of error) and time information (including time zones). That's a great deal of information to have (for example, companies like Facebook would love to know as much about you as possible but only really get the friend relationship; email gives you that effortlessly with content th analyze). The obvious follow up on this is 'how are they going to make money'. I don't know Xobni so I can't answer for them, but if you look at the areas where money as been made analyzing content or relationships, it's not hard to see that Xobni could be a trojan horse (an Outlook or other email pluging) that gives the user some value while providing greater value behind the scenes.

metatronscube 18y ago

good for them!!

aneesh 18y ago

> Duh? What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook? Everyone can criticize all they want, but this is a clear case of asymmetric information. Xobni knows a lot more about their value than you or I do. But even with the limited information I have, I have to say they are a lot more than just a feature. With the Yahoo! Mail release (and I'm guessing GMail/hotmail/other client releases in the pipeline), what they're really doing is being a hub for all your contacts, attachments, and online interactions, INDEPENDENT of your email client. I use 4 different email addresses, and at least a couple different email clients for various reasons. With this synchronization across mail clients, Xobni has transformed itself from an analytics feature to a full-fledged network to manage your contacts and interactions. I could see this integrating powerfully with, for example, Salesforce.com.

josefresco 18y ago

You don't value your own company, value is set by the market, and in this case the market said 20 mil. Will it increase or decrease depends on the actions of Xobni and the market. The arguments that the founders "know their potential value" better than us is completely irrelevant. Don't you think MS investigated the company first, it's offerings and it's future before making an offer? I own a startup and think it could be worth billions someday... does that make it so?

bigtoga 18y ago
Huh? One company valued xobni at $20m - how is that the be-all, end-all of valuation? If I value my company at $500,000 and someone offers me $100,000, am I wrong or are they wrong (or are we both right) when I turn them down? Answer: you don't have enough information to make a decision.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  until someone else gives you a $500,000 valuation your company is not worth 500k. So far Xobni is only worth 20 million. They are hoping that one day they will be worth more.
  - emmett 18y ago
    Xobni is worth at least $20,000,000. It is currently unknown as to whether they're worth more. Evidence suggests those with the most at risk believe they are worth significantly more.

pg 18y ago

How on earth did this troll post get 17 votes? There's only one paragraph in it that's even new, and that doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said.

paul 18y ago
I'm starting to get the feeling that there's a big jealousy factor developing here. The formula is simple: find something that's getting traction and getting talked about, and then bash it. This bashing is very appealing to people whose own efforts are less successful (or more likely have never started), because it reassures them that the other people's efforts and success aren't "real" or legitimate. The same thing can be seen in the comments on TechCrunch (along with the jealousy of failed competitors).
- ashu 18y ago
  I think the "never have started" is probably the crux of the matter. People who don't actually build things tend to look at the world from a very different perspective. The focus is more on "how is this thing different from anything else I have seen" and not on "is this thing actually useful to a non-trivial set of people out there". When they focus on the first part, it is very easy to bash almost all things out there. Google? That's just search. Gmail? That's just webmail. IPhone? Just a smartphone - doesn't even have 3G and GPS!
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    I think it's more a distinction between "people who have problems" and "people who don't have problems". When you don't have a problem, you're in browse mode - open to new ideas, but only if they're substantially different from everything you've ever seen and trigger some flicker of recognition, some reason to think it's a good idea. When you do have a problem, you're actively looking for something to solve it, and get really excited about the solution. So if you happen to have the particular problem that Xobni solves, it's great, but if you don't, it's just ho-hum.
    - 18y ago

webwright 18y ago

People need to do some math before they say this was a good opportunity for Xobni (and the investors-- who likely have the power to veto any acquisition). When you take 4.35 million in investment, you are giving away a percentage of your company. Say it's 1/3rd for the sake of argument. That creates a post-money valuation of $13m. Which means that a $20m buyout (once the lawyers get their slice) is, what-- a 1.5x return on investment? The only way an investor would approve that is if the company was tanking (Xobni isn't-- they are buried in good press). Outlook (and email) is the #1 technology time-sink on the planet (RescueTime has the data to prove it-- someday we'll publish some interesting stats). If you could walk up to any enterprise and propose to make email 10% more efficient, that's worth a TON of money.

apathy 18y ago
RescueTime has the data to prove it-- someday we'll publish some interesting stats) I see what you did there ;-) Your business model makes a lot more sense now.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

greatapps 18y ago

Just in case I am missing features from the version I have installed, here's what I can access in Xobni from the top - emails received time summary graph. - count of emails sent/received and resultant ranking - request for phone number / phone number captured from email - "schedule time" which opens a blank email - create email - listing of other people that were included on emails received from the contact, and ability to hop onto the email profile for that person if they too are one of your contacts - list of emails from the contact which you can navigate to - list of file exchanged which you can navigate to Anyone got anything different? I ask only because as I'm evidently missing something in the app, based on some of the comments made towards me. Let's be clear, if you love the app then that's great and I want to hear how it has helped you. If I am missing a trick, then perhaps others are to and so help us to be believers. If you've spotted where this app is heading, explicitly clue the rest of us in, don't simply allude.

iloveyouocean 18y ago

"More than a feature." - My guess: [Forward Looking Statements] Xobni is able to be integrated into 'all' email clients. Lots of people do this because its FREE and provides some immediate benefit (enhanced information, etc.). When you use Xobni, your 'information' is synced back to Xobni's servers. From this they create a social network-like thing that is sort of a hybrid between Plaxo (contact management) and LinkedIn. [Even if you only try out Xobni, they still extract your 'email social structure' to add to the big picture] Suddenly Xobni is a Social Productivity Network riding on top of Email that is super useful to businesses and that people are willing to PAY FOR to get enhanced networking capabilities, productivity tracking, spam filtering, mobile directory[People include their cell phone nums. in emails all the time]. It requires almost no effort from people to establish 'connections', email is ubiquitous, blah social, blah networking, blah aggregate, blah circle jerk. Profit.

apathy 18y ago

Wow, it's a good thing that Xobni couldn't integrate with GMail or Yahoo! Mail and play off the monstrous business interests against each other. Also, it's a good thing that the information they mine from the social structure of your contacts is useless. (Moreso, the joint distributions of contact networks among multiple employees in a large organization, or the temporal patterns therein... nothing to see here, move along now) But most of all, it's a good thing that everyone commenting on the deal knows all there is to know about the product, its futures, and their value to Microsoft and other companies, due no doubt to vast, deep expertise in the field. Because if the above were not true, well, then it would be just a windbag yelling into an echo chamber, and that simply would not do! Yes, it's a great thing that everything has already been invented, cannot be improved, and is already maximally efficient. We're done now, let's go get a low-paying service job (or, worse, program Java for a big company)

chaostheory 18y ago
Xobni’s Secret Project: Merge Outlook With Yahoo Mail http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/xobnis-secret-project-merge-outlook-with-yahoo-mail/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/xobnis-secret-project-m...

aswanson 18y ago

I'm starting to understand, why, in some cases, a narrow, limited communication channel is a good thing.