If you use Outlook e-mail, meet Xobni ….Brad Stone
Adam Smith was 12 when Microsoft introduced its desktop e-mail programme, Outlook. Outlook is now the most popular e-mail tool in the world, used by hundreds of millions of people. And Smith, now 23, thinks that the programme is so poorly suited for most peoples intensive email habits that he has cofounded a company, Xobni, intended to fix it.
Using Outlook today is like taking a Volkswagen Beetle into space, Smith said. People are kind of exerting all these stresses upon it that it wasnt originally designed to withstand.
Xobni, based in San Francisco, has introduced a new tool on Monday that plugs into Outlook. Smiths general complaintone that is shared by many users of Outlookis that the more the programme is used, the slower it gets and the harder it is to search for e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
To solve these problems, Xobni (inbox spelled backwards and pronounced zob-nee) has produced free downloadable software that, once installed, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages quickly and easily searchable. The software, available at www.xobni.com, will also be sold to companies.
Other programmes, like Google Desktop, perform that same basic index-and-search function. But Xobni, which its creators call an intelligent filter, adds a few more features. When it scours the inbox, it extracts phone numbers it thinks are associated with the sender. So when a user searches for a person, Xobni presents the number in a side panel to Outlook. The software also interprets the social relationships between people who are sending messages to each other. For example Xobni recognizes that if an executive sends a copy to someone else on each message he or she sends, it might be to an assistant or another colleague. When someone using Xobni searches for that executive in Outlook, the second person is listed as well. Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlook. Jeff Bonforte, a 35-year-old former Yahoo vice president, joined Xobni as chief executive in February. NYT NEWS SERVICE