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Microsoft Outlook is the email client by default of the Office Suite, so it makes no surprise that it is also the most popular email client out there, with over 400 million registered users. Unfortunately, Outlook is not the most competitive email solution out there, mostly since Gmail's been around.
Thanks to Y Combinator, Outlook gets a second skin with Xobni (inbox spelled backwards). Xobni started out as a email search engine that enhanced the communications management experience with Outlook. Walt Mossberg wrote a great article about Xobni's benefits.
Xobni's vision goes way farther than email search and contact management.
Back in June, Xobni announced the integration to the LinkedIn platform, enabling your email contacts to be synced with your LinkedIn professional data. No later than a few days ago, we could read that Xobni brought some new features to their third-party application, including an integration with Yahoo! Mail, Facebook Platform and Hoover's. This means that Xobni now taps into all those different platforms to bring you the richest, most up-to-date information about your contacts, right in your Outlook inbox.
It makes no doubt that Xobni is a productivity booster. Syndicating useful info in one place has always been a time-saver, and Xobni is pushing hard in this direction. The next milestone? Integration to the Salesforce.com platform. All your Salesforce history will be integrated in your email inbox, which will open the way for much smarter commercial communications. There is no date for the release of this new integration.
I covered quite a few Y Combinator startups here on HyveUp: Auctomatic, Popcuts, Disqus, Scribd and Clickpass. All have the merit to add a lot of value to our daily online activities. Xobni is no exception to this, and Microsoft should be glad to see a startup adding competitiveness to one of their Office Suite products.
