Hey there friends and fans of BlackBerry!

We just wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with the Xobni for Blackberry product as well as some exciting news. We really appreciate the excitement and anticipation for the product and can’t wait to share it with you!

So what’s the good news? The good news is that we’re in alpha and really close to having a truly compelling Xobni for BlackBerry product. We need your help! We’ve got the product built and we’re all using it internally (and loving it).

To help move this process along, we’re looking for some of our most passionate Xobni friends to dive in and take it for a spin.

If you’re up for the alpha, please send us an email. Don’t forget to put BlackBerry alpha in the subject field and then tell us what model BlackBerry you have and whether or not you use Xobni for Outlook.

While we may not be able to include everyone in the alpha, we’ll sure try.

Disclaimer: IT IS an alpha. We’ve done a pretty good job buttoning up our product but we certainly expect some bumps in the road as we scale, so make sure you can tolerate some (hopefully small) hiccups if you want to participate. Thanks in advance for your help! We’re committed to reinventing the address book for smartphones and are one step closer today.

A few weeks ago we took up camp in Twitter’s old office space on Bryant Street in San Francisco.  We loved the location of our last office, but we moved into that space with 4 people in 2007 and found ourselves bursting at the seams when we finally left with nearly 30 team members crammed into that space.

Now we are at 539 Bryant, and we love it!

In addition to the awesome views, sprawling space, and great lighting, we’re also hoping some of Twitter’s good karma will rub off on us. 

As we were packing our desks, Adam (cofounder) and I took some time to reflect on the offices of Xobni over the past four years.

“Office” #1

Adam started Xobni in his dorm room at MIT back in 2006.  As you can imagine, he clocked lots of hours trying to understand the wealth of data hidden in email.  A few months later I got a call from Adam. After some persuasion on Adam’s part I moved from the University of Maryland, where I dropped out of grad school, to focus on turning this email project into a business.  I moved into MIT’s East Campus dorm with Adam.   We lived and worked in that 12 foot by 12 foot space.

“Office” #2

With school on hold* for both of us, and the dorm room getting a bit crowded, we rented an apartment near Harvard Square and were able to fully commit to this business we now called Xobni.  And that we did.  We worked all waking hours, usually until 5 or 6am when we’d rush to bed at daybreak, hoping to fall asleep before the sun would start to convince us otherwise.  It was a crazy time.

“Office” #3

When our summer lease ran out, we temporarily moved into the apartment of fellow Y Combinator startup founder, and now Xobni employee, Bryan Kennedy.  Again, back in a cramped space, but this time with about $100k of angel funding in the bank.  We began to contemplate our future.   It wasn’t long before we realized we needed to be in the Valley if we wanted to give Xobni the greatest chance for success.  We made the decision over a weekend and on Monday we started the 3,000 mile drive to California.

“Office” #4

Office #4 was a “deluxe apartment in the sky” at The Crystal Towers in San Francisco.  This “office” still has probably the best view of any office I’ll ever have.  The place was so great that many other Y Combinator startups moved into the building.  It became known as the “Y Scraper.”

Now that we were in San Francisco and closer to the action, it wasn’t long until we raised our first big round of funding, $4M bucks.  Finally with cash in the bank we decided we could do two things: hire employees and get a real office.

The employees came first.  Greg and Gabor.  They both moved into the Y Scraper.  They worked out of our apartment with us.

Office #5 (no quotes this time!)

Finally in June of 2007, over a year after starting the company and after working out of 4 different “offices” we moved into our first legitimate office** at 211 Sutter Street, one block from Union Square.  This is where we launched Xobni to the world.  Everything feels like it’s been on fast-forward since then.

Office 6

Four million downloads and many employees later, here we sit at 539 Bryant Street in a space that will be able to hold us for at least the next year or two.  (Note: we are growing fast – check out these current positions we are hiring for.)   Looking back, there’s not one move that we regret.   It has been a lot of fun and we and even a bit nostalgic to think about the places we’ve called Xobni’s home.

* We never went back. 

** One that wasn’t our primary residence (though we did sleep our fair share of nights in the office).

Photo credits (new office): Mitch Aidelbaum

Our friends at RIM kindly invited us to show our upcoming BlackBerry app and integration at the BlackBerry booth (South Hall #30851) at CES this week.  While talking for hours on end day after day about the same thing can get exhausting, talking to our users and being reminded of the need for Xobni on mobile devices has been rejuvenating and encouraging.

We’ve also received some love from mobile/BlackBerry media and bloggers.  Inside BlackBerry posted a demo of the product, CrackBerry did a great roundup of the day, and LAPTOP Magazine listed us as a candidate for the CES Readers Choice Awards in the smart phone apps category.  Vote for us, please!

If you find yourself lost in the madness that is CES this week/end, find your way to us.  We’d love to see you.  And if you happen to practice reflexology, we promise to give you extra Xobni love.

As a few have heard via TechCrunch, or while test-driving the Xobni Salesforce Extension, a new improved version of Xobni has been in the works. Xobni 1.8.5 (build 9142) is packed with useful improvements for everyone, including a brand-new feature that is free to existing Xobni Plus members. Download it now or read more about the latest enhancements.



(All features mentioned below are new since version 1.8.3 build 8997):

Links Exchanged (Xobni Plus feature)

• Instantly see a list of links you have exchanged with a contact, ordered by date. Easily filter the list by URL.
• Right-click any link in Xobni to preview and access the original message that contained it.
• Links contained in any Xobni message search are now shown separately, for easy scanning.

Laptop-Friendly Tabbed Interface

• New tabbed interface makes better use of your limited screen space and allows for more resizing and flexibility within Xobni
• View a familiar summary of your communication with a contact, or switch tabs to show only one type of data (thanks to alpha testers for their feedback with this).
• Filter the items in any tab with a quick search (Xobni Plus users have access to more advanced options)
• More compact “business card” area
• Extensions (such as Twitter and Facebook) can be resized to show more information. The LinkedIn, Hoover’s, and Salesforce extensions have been redesigned to take advantage of this as well (To get the Salesforce extension, please follow the instructions here).
• Fans of the original panel-style interface can still switch back in the Xobni options.

Improved Phone Number Extraction and Display

• Xobni is now smarter about finding the right phone number for your contacts in their emails.
• A new “i” icon appears next to phone numbers that are automatically extracted from emails by Xobni. Clicking this will show you the text that the number came from. Numbers from your Outlook Contacts, or numbers that you edited yourself, do not have this icon.
• Phone numbers are de-duplicated, and Outlook Contacts numbers are given higher prominence (thanks to cassianofonseca, Fred Greco, and Rob)

Productivity Enhancements – Saving You More Time

• Click the folder icon when viewing a message to jump to that folder in Outlook (thanks James, Nick, and others for the idea). Please note that the message itself will not be selected in Outlook.
• Enhanced drag-and-drop support for messages, conversations, and attachments. Drag any email, email thread, or attachment to any other window.
• Drag messages to folders to add a copy of that message to the target folder.
• Right-click any message to copy it and paste it into a new message as an attachment instead of as text.

Other Features & Fixes

• New “share” button in the Xobni Statistics tab allows an easy way to show someone what time of day they most email you. “Hey, look what a night person you are!”
• Direct Messages are now available in the Twitter extension (just click the “D” button when available)
• Email addresses sent to you in message bodies are now indexed and available in people search. This is especially helpful when trying to see if you know anyone at a given company — just type their domain name into Xobni’s search and you might be surprised at whom you already know!
• Bug fix: Adding LinkedIn contacts that were more than three levels away from you works more reliably (thanks Daniel)
• Other minor bug fixes and performance improvements

General info: After you download, you will be prompted to close Outlook and the new Xobni version will be installed. If you’re already using Xobni 1.8, it is recommended that you re-index your mail to see all Links Exchanged. Simply select “Index Outlook Mail” from the Xobni menu to complete the index. All of your data (merges, contact information entries) will be maintained, no matter what version you are using currently.

If you have already purchased Xobni Plus, this download will simply update your software. You will not need to sign in again and no extra fee is required.

Thanks again for your feedback and thank you for using Xobni!

Well, the day came and went before we even had time to boast about it, so we’ll do it now.  Yesterday, Microsoft named us the Startup of the Day.  Yip yip!

Our love affair with Microsoft goes way back.  It started when we created a product that makes Outlook infinitely better, then spiked when Bill Gates demoed Xobni last year at Microsoft Office’s Developer’s Conference.  We were recently chosen to be part of BizSpark 100, and are very excited about being the Startup of the Day (yesterday).

To read the BizSpark interview with Jeff (our CEO), click here.

It’s been a big year: 3 million downloads, Xobni Plus, Xobni Enterprise, Xobni for Salesforce & Xobni Mobile soon.  While we’re very proud of our accomplishments so far, we have a lot we want to do, and know that we wouldn’t be where we are without our loyal fans and users.

As a small token of our appreciation, we’ll be giving away Xobni Plus to 25 people who tweet and/or post to their public Facebook wall: “All I want for Christmas is Xobni! http://xobni.com/holiday” (Of course, you can replace “Christmas” with a holiday of your choice.)  We’ll choose the winners randomly from the posts we see by searching on Twitter and Facebook.

And for those of you limited in your choice of software, or the ability to buy Xobni Plus due to your employer’s well-intended policies, we have come up with a fun (and hopefully productive) way for you to get Xobni Plus at work.  Click here http://xobni.com/holiday to see a quirky, ad-libs-like letter for you to download or cut/paste/email to your IT person of choice.  It briefly explains the benefits of Xobni for professionals and the new Xobni Enterprise that will allow you to start using Xobni’s full functionality at your company.  We’ll also be offering a discount on Xobni Enterprise for companies who mention your letter.  And if that’s not enough, we’ll be giving away an Amazon Kindle to the person who uploads to most creative letter to Scribd, so have fun!

Cheers!

If we ever doubted we had the best investors in the world (we didn’t), this sealed the deal.  First Round Capital just released their annual holiday card, which is a compilation of First Round portfolio companies singing “Building Big Dreams” (Les Misérables).  This is turning into a nice tradition from First Round, and we look forward to participating in years to come.  (Last year’s theme was dancing, inspired by WhereTheHellIsMatt, and Rob Hayes is simply spectacular.)

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.

Our very own Adam Smith spoke at MIT (his alma mater) in November where he gave a great overview of Xobni’s history, and advice for future entrepreneurs.  Besides just looking cool on stage, he covered a range of topics based on his experience building Xobni, including learnings on hiring pace, how to be nimble and execute well, and where to live and raise your startup.  He also shared his top reading suggestions for entrepreneurs.  While we like to think you’ll watch the full 28-minute talk, just in case you don’t, the top 3 reading suggestions are Founders at Work; High Stakes, No Prisoners; Paul Graham’s Essays.

As some of you may have seen, Microsoft announced today that they are integrating some social networking features into Outlook 2010. Our favorite tweet of the day was, “Dear Microsoft, we already have Xobni.” (via @_aishaf)

This wasn’t a surprise to us. We have a close working relationship with the Outlook team at Microsoft, and have since the early days of Xobni. And they’ve been watching us too. Bill Gates himself called Xobni “the future of social networking” at the Microsoft Office Developer Conference last year.

In addition, we’ve been selected as part of Microsoft’s BizSpark One program, an invite-only program to help accelerate the growth of high potential startups chosen by Microsoft. We have shown that bringing in social elements into the inbox is very powerful, so this announcement seems like an obvious step by Microsoft to bring Outlook up to speed – kind of.

After 3 years of your feedback (thank you, beloved users) and 3 million downloads, Xobni already provides all of the social stuff you will be able to do with Microsoft Social Connector – and much much more. And even more importantly, we aren’t going to stop innovating. We will mention that the product they are scheduled to launch next year doesn’t have improved search functionality (key Xobni feature), won’t allow users to interact with social networking sites, no automatic phone number extraction, no shared network information, no Xobni Rank, which brings the most important emails and people to the top and many more Xobni features you’ve come to love.

We are also bringing Xobni’s innovation to new areas. There is a lot of excitement out there for our upcoming Blackberry product. We want to get this in your hands as soon as possible. And just yesterday we launched our Salesforce Extension. We are getting a lot of visitors at our Dreamforce booth sharing their excitement for Xobni’s Salesforce Extension.

Microsoft is a massive company that has to serve 500+ million Outlook users with each new
release. Our nimble 30-person startup is happy focusing on those Outlook users that live in email and need a companion like Xobni to make their work day more bearable. We’re excited that Microsoft will bring more awareness to the possibilities of turning email on its side – and making it about relationships again. We’ve been at it for over three years, and there is a lot more to come.

We’re on a roll over here at Xobni, and we ain’t stopping anytime soon.

Two weeks ago, we announced our first enterprise product and got a great response from IT administrators at Enterprise 2.0.  Last week,  Jeff demoed our coming BlackBerry app on stage at the BlackBerry Developer’s Conference with David Yach.  And this week we have more cool things cooking:

1)      Yesterday we announced our availability of our Salesforce extension (well, actually M.G. at TechCrunch beat us to it when also reporting on UI improvements).  And it’s not only available to business users, it’s available to all Xobni users interested in getting Salesforce data in Outlook.  This marks our third revenue stream (behind Xobni Plus and Xobni Enterprise) in a matter of a couple months.  As M.G. reported, “revenue streams can be addicting.”    If you’re at Dreamforce and want to see it, check us out at booth 1308.

2)      Also announced yesterday was that we were selected by Microsoft to join their new BizSpark One program, an invitation-only program designed to accelerate the growth of high potential startups through a One-on-One relationship with Microsoft Corp.  We’ve had a close working relationship with Microsoft for a while now, and are honored to have been chosen with such an elite group of companies.

3)      Lastly, we set out to make an impression at Microsoft’s PDC conference this week by having Xobni ambassadors handing out Xobni-branded t-shirts… and giving away prizes (like $1000 cash, Amazon Kindle, etc.) to the lucky people who are wearing them.  Here’s a video highlighting the promotion.

Gotta love startup land – where things move a million miles a minute, even when working with the big dawgs.