Xobni Releases Blackberry App

Xobni has long been one of my favorite desktop apps. For the unfamiliar, Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is an Outlook plugin that tremendously simplifies searching in Outlook. While Outlook already has built-in search, Xobni is somehow a lot faster and offers many more advanced search options than Outlook. Xobni has saved me hours of time over the past couple of years that I would have otherwise spending searching for specific e-mails or documents I have sent or received. As I start typing in a contact’s name in the Xobni search bar, Xobni goes to work, dynamically creating a list of matches in a dropdown menu that gets smaller with every subsequent character I type (similar to Facebook search). Once I select the contact I want, I get a full list of e-mail conversations I’ve had with that person (which is much more useful for search than individual emails), along with all of the files I’ve exchanged with that person. With one click, I can preview any of the e-mail conversations or open a file.

Xobni’s release of the Blackberry App, which organizes your Blackberry contacts, ranks them by importance, and pulls in social data from LinkedIn and Facebook, is relatively minor news compared to other events in the small company’s short history that I have not written about (getting funding from Y Combinator, Khosla, First Round, and Cisco, being called “the next generation of social networking” by Bill Gates, rejecting a $20M acquisition offer from Microsoft, etc.). It’s sort of an excuse for me to mention the company, and the tool from which I’ve derived so much utility over the past few years.

I’m not quite sure what Xobni’s end-game is, given that Microsoft seemingly should be able to build powerful search capability into the next version of Outlook. While most of Xobni’s installations are free, Xobni has started to monetize, and now offers a Xobni plus Outlook add-on ($29.95), is charging for enterprise installations, and has started charging monthly subscriptions for tools such as Xobni One. Hopefully, they will soon develop add-ons for other mail clients such as Entourage, and then serve as a central repository for users’ e-mails and contacts across their iPhones, Blackberries, Outlooks, Entourages, etc., which users would be able to sync with. That would be cool.