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).

Day two of WES 2009 has come and gone and with its passing we have a few bits and pieces of BlackBerry news to report. While a lot of people were tired from a long night of eating free food and drinking free booze as will.i.am performed on stage, the symposium continued on Wednesday though there really wasn’t much in the way of announcements from companies. Nonetheless, we’re here on location and there’s more to report so hit the jump for the skinny.

Because the Bold is old news on AT&T, we didn’t bother to look at it yesterday as we instead focused our attention on the Curve 8900. Turns out that wasn’t the best move on our part because when looking at it today we noticed that it was running OS 5.0.0.93. Now we all know that OS 5.0 was a long time coming, but to this date RIM has been playing it really close to its chest and has declined to comment on it. Funny thing is that it’s proudly on display right under its nose at its own show, albeit loaded on only one of four Bolds the company was showing off. The case was exactly the same with one of the three 8900s which explains how we missed this yesterday.

Also making an appearance was OS 4.7.0.141 on a Verizon 9530 Storm. It was leaked a while ago so a lot of people are familiar with it, but we do have to say that we’re impressed with how much better the Storm performs with the latest OS builds. Anyway, this was a Verizon branded 9530 but it was RIM itself that had it on display. At least in this instance the company was open about the fact that it’s beta and should be coming out very soon.

Since BlackBerry App World is just over a month old, a lot of new apps appeared at WES in addition to some oldies but goodies that have received considerable updates. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most talked about apps:

Xobni officially announced that it’s taking the company’s outstanding Outlook plug-in mobile for BlackBerry devices. While it’s being extremely secretive as to what Xobni Mobile will include, we do have an idea of what it looks like thanks in part to a leak less than a week ago. When we stopped by to discuss Xobni Mobile we were met with some pretty stiff resistance and merely directed to the email launch mailing list. To make things worse, Xobni Mobile was not even on display leaving interested onlookers with nothing to see but its Outlook plug-in. Hmm.

Storm users take note: Popular multi-service IM app BeeJive now has finally launched a beta version with you in mind. It’s taken quite a lot of time to get to this point, but we caught up with a few people who were using it on their Storms and we have to say that any Storm user who is looking for a great IM solution is going to be absolutely thrilled with the final product.

Poynt, already an amazing location based services app for movies and yellow page listings, will soon be releasing an update that features reverse number look up through white pages as well as restaurant searches. Utilizing both BlackBerry Maps and Google Maps, Poynt is sure to become even more popular in App World when the update goes live in a few weeks time.

WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry launched Wednesday and offers, among other things, the ability to import numbers from call logs which makes reverse number look ups a breeze. The app even lets you add a search result to your contact book with the click of the trackball. WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry runs $6.99 for a six month subscription and is currently available in App World.

Vlingo updated its popular voice-powered application to version 3.0 which adds quite a few new features such as the ability to search the web, exchange text messages with other Vlingo users, dial the phone, update both Facebook and Twitter statuses and launch native and third-party apps through speech. Vlingo 3.0 sells for $17.99 in App World.

Now available in App World is WeatherBug, the popular weather application. Featuring GPS-enabled weather alerts, detailed maps with radar and time-lapse animations from US-based weather cameras, WeatherBug is a bargain at the low, low cost of free.

Read – Xobni Mobile
Read – BeeJive Storm beta
Read – Poynt
Read – WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry
Read – Vlingo 3.0

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