Xobni for Gmail Arrives in Private Beta; Xobni for Android and iPhone Moving to Beta Soon

Now busy users can connect Xobni Contacts across Outlook, webmail, and mobile platforms for a seamless contact management solution

San Francisco, CA (Vocus/PRWEB) March 18, 2011

Xobni, the relationship management service that creates rich contact profiles to help you manage all your business and personal relationships in email and mobile, today announced a private beta for its highly-anticipated product for Gmail and Google Apps – Xobni for Gmail. The product is free and helps users find and easily manage contacts. Xobni will move its Android and iPhone apps into beta for users to test within 90 days. People interested in testing any of these new products can request access to the beta versions on Xobni’s website.

Xobni for Gmail (beta) is a browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox that shows up as a sidebar in Gmail and helps users search and manage their relationships effortlessly. It creates rich profiles for anyone you’ve ever emailed in Gmail, similar to what users have come to expect in the Outlook product. These profiles include name, picture, job title, company, and full social network details. Xobni is also introducing some new functionality never before seen in Xobni products, including relationship history, predictive autosuggest that suggests other related contacts based on other people in the “to” line, and multimedia module to view social updates and insights from people in your network (example: even if you don’t follow a frequently emailed contact on Twitter, their latest tweets might appear in this module).

“Initially, Xobni focused on providing a search and contact add-in for Outlook. Today we’re much more,” said Jeff Bonforte, Xobni CEO. “Our users have been telling us they needed Xobni for all their many inboxes and devices. We wanted to be there too, so we built a cloud infrastructure that unifies your contacts, enhances them with third party content, and makes them accessible from multiple touch points.”

For customers with multiple inboxes and devices, there is now a cloud-based service called Xobni Pro that connects your contacts across multiple platforms, creating one pain-free, automatic, and comprehensive contact list. Currently, users of Xobni for Outlook, BlackBerry and Gmail will find all of their contacts and inbox insights available to them, no matter which device or inbox they are using. In addition to this new cross-platform portability, Xobni Pro users have access to advanced features for email junkies – like the ability to export all contacts to the native Outlook and BlackBerry address books, and benefit from daily Spam Rescue, which rescues and alerts you of messages that were incorrectly filtered into the junk mail folder.

Xobni for Gmail, Android and iPhone will ultimately be available in both free and Pro versions.

All products will start in private beta with increased access over time. Users who would like to help test can request access to beta versions here: Xobni for Gmail and Google Apps, Xobni for Android and Xobni for iPhone.

About Xobni
Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) is a San Francisco-based relationship management service that enhances productivity in the workplace. The Xobni service creates robust profiles by combining individual email/phone/text exchanges with social media content (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) to give users a complete 360-degree view of all their contacts and personal networks. These profiles are connected and made available across various devices and platforms, including Outlook, Gmail, BlackBerry, and soon Android and iPhone. Xobni offers a free product suite across all platforms, and has been downloaded over 6 million times. Xobni’s new full-featured premium product — Xobni Pro — connects these profiles in the cloud across Outlook, webmail and mobile platforms to provide a seamless and comprehensive contact management solution. Xobni is funded by Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures, Cisco Systems, BlackBerry Partners Fund, First Round Capital and others. For more information, visit xobni.com (for English) or xobni.de (for German) or xobni.com/fr (for French).

If you’re a Google Apps user, you’ve had the ability to delegate access to your email account for quite some time. Now, Google is giving all users of its Gmail web-base email service that option. Via a blog post, the Big G announced the email delegation feature for all users of its popular email platform. The new functionality can be found in “Settings” by clicking on the “Accounts and Import” tab. From there you can add another Gmail account that you would like to grant access to your inbox; delegates will not be able to change settings, passwords, or chat as the user. “Each account will open in a different browser tab or window so you can view both accounts simultaneously, all while signed into your primary account,” writes Google. The new feature is immediately available to all users.

Read

If you rely heavily on Google Voice, as we do, but don’t have an Android handset — preventing you from leveraging the superb Voice app — we have good news. Google has added the ability to send missed call notification emails directly to your email address of choice. As the Google Voice Blog explains: “Starting today, whenever you miss a call, you can see a notification in your Google Voice inbox, or receive an email notification, or both. This setting can be turned on and off from the Calls tab in the Settings menu.” The feature is live and ready to be used. Enjoy.

Read

Last night, Google announced the addition of a Priority Inbox to its Gmail email service. As Google explains:

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else.” As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you.

The new feature has been rolling out to Gmail users since late last night. If you see “New! Priority Inbox” in the top right-hand corner of your Gmail window, you’ve got the new feature. Hit the jump to see a video explanation of just how the new inbox will improve your digital life (complete with Ragtime music).

Read

If you’re a BlackBerry fan, there is probably not a single thing you have been looking forward to more than what we have right here — screenshots and full details of RIM’s upcoming operating system, OS 6.0. One of our AT&T sources has not only showed us the brand new OS, but has also given us some screenshots that we could share. Since we have seen OS 6.0 in action first hand, we will break it down for you guys, along with all the other screenshots, after the break!

You can see the new browser that RIM has skinned up, complete with tab switching, new favorites, and multitouch. Yes, multitouch. The browser looks like it’s coming along quite nicely, all WebKit!

Here’s the actual tab switcher view, with nice transparent overlay. No word on how many open tabs you can keep simultaneously.

Finally, a redone media player, and it doesn’t look half bad, right? The navigation in this view is done by using your finger to browse the album art work and then touching the specific album cover to start playing.

Here is what we can tell you about OS 6.0 that we saw in action… RIM has finally implemented system-wide kinetic scrolling with rubberbanding. This makes the experience a bit more fluid when scrolling through lists, web pages, emails, and the like. There is also multitouch system-wide, from the web browser to the photos application, and yes, pinch to zoom is in there.

Looking at the actual message inbox, things look a bit cleaner, and a bit more modern, but it’s obviously not a huge departure from what we have now, just another evolutionary upgrade which is par for the course with RIM. But, we definitely do like the look of the new inbox. It also features larger thumbnails to the left of each message to identify the type of message (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and we even saw RSS feeds built right in which looked great. We can’t describe this part… but the new inbox feels right. It’s not all work and dry, and it’s not over the top with cheesy graphics or animations, rather a nice compromise of the two.

Something big for OS 6.0 is the homescreen. While we didn’t see any sort of widget support, it appears RIM has made the homescreen completely customizable with pages. You can have your applications on the main page, then slide left or right to another page with different applications and browse that way. In the homescreen screenshot above, you’ll see a sliding field towards the bottom, and you can slide that up, and reveal the first page of applications, and you can then slide that to show the different groups which correspond to the different homescreen page. Favorites, all, home, etc.

Another big thing for OS 6.0 is modal popups with gestures. If you tap and hold (obviously a touchscreen device is required), you’ll get a 9 icon group centered on the screen which is basically a pretty context menu. For instance, you could be composing an email, and instead of pressing Menu + Send, you could tap and hold on the email, see the popup window, and hit the send icon there. Another use would be when emailing photos or videos from your device, just tap and hold on an item there, see the popup, and then just send the item. That way you don’t have to deal with going through the normal menu options which has gotten convoluted with all the various social services/networks available.

The photos application we saw looks quite a bit like the iPhone’s layout, big tiled square photos that appear in thumbnail view with very small borders, that you can flick that list up or down to navigate. Pictures also appeared on screen instantly, not loading one by one by one until you give up. Once you tap a specific photo, you’ll see the picture slide in from the right, sort of like the current animation now when navigating pictures on the BlackBerry. The usual top and bottom UI bars are still here, but if you tap once, just like the iPhone, that view will hide and you’ll have a fullscreen shot of the picture you’re looking at. There was pinch to zoom on the touch screen device we saw (sorry, we can’t comment on the device), but there was absolutely no fluidity when panning around photos. That’s something a lot of manufacturers miss, but, it’s obviously not the end of the world.

Composing an email looks to be a little bit more straight forward. The UI has nice, clean gradients and a very modern web 2.0-feel. Definitely refreshing. There’s also universal search across the system on here… If you haven’t got the point yet, OS 6.0 looks to be a very clean and arguably sexy UI for the BlackBerry platform, let’s just hope there are some under the hood changes as well. Our source says there are many changes we can’t see.

In terms of a release timeframe, we are sure you’ll be pleased as punch to find out that we have been told BlackBerry OS 6.0 will be in market in the June / July timeframe, 100%. I said on Twitter I thought RIM was announcing OS 6.0 at WES (not having heard that at the time), and it looks like I might have been right. RIM needs to knock this one out of the park, and you’ll know we’ll be rooting for them.

If any of you have ever given the Xobni plug-in for Outlook a try you’ll be excited, nay elated, to learn that a screen shot of Xobni’s upcoming BlackBerry app has just surfaced. It’s been almost a year since we last covered the creative and infinitely-useful Xobni offering, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped loving it. Long story short, it makes Outlook awesome. The search functionality alone makes the plug-in a must have and the added social network integration, analytics and other features put it over the top. The company’s BlackBerry offering, now only about a month into development, will be its first jaunt into the mobile game. Little is known about the app for the time being but the screen shot above shows the contact search function quite clearly, suggesting Xobni is trying to do for BlackBerry searches what it has already done for Outlook searches — rock them, hard. We’ll be keeping our eye on this one as we really can’t wait for it to drop. Anyone else as excited as we are?

Read