A few months ago, we showed the very beginnings of a Xobni application for BlackBerry at a mobile meet-up in San Francisco. While we weren’t expecting it to get broad attention given the closed environment, we were pleased that there was so much enthusiasm for the product.

Since then, we’ve been making great progress. However, the more we work with RIM, the more ideas we collectively come up with to make Xobni Mobile more useful to BlackBerry users. Expanded functionality has caused the development time line to extend. We are anxious to get Xobni Mobile in the hands of users soon. We didn’t plan on speaking again about our BlackBerry product until it was on the market, but then we were asked by RIM to demonstrate Xobni. They asked for an example of a compelling integration with the BlackBerry to show at their biggest developer conference, and we just couldn’t resist.

More details about Xobni Mobile

Update: Watch the video of Xobni’s demonstration at the BlackBerry Developer Conference Keynote.

At Xobni, we think that you should have access to every person that you need to reach, when you need to reach them. Surprisingly, there’s not an easy or quick way to do this on our phones now. Unlike a static address book of the people you have deliberately put in your Outlook contacts and/or mobile phonebook, Xobni for mobile will be more like your automatic address book made up of all the thousands of people you may have communicated with over the years. Our data tells us that the typical user has 5-10X the number of contacts in their email inbox versus their Outlook address book. If you put all of those contacts into your address book it would be, well, a bit overwhelming – imagine scrolling through 5,000 contacts! Enter Xobni Mobile…

Our coming mobile product will give you access to your whole automatic address book and maintain the integrity of your key daily contacts by not inundating you with details that you don’t need. We do this with Xobni Rank – a list of contacts, in ranked order, depending on the freshness and depth of your relationship.

Anyone that carries a smartphone knows the frustration of wanting to call or email someone you have communicated with but not having quick and easy access to their contact data because it is buried somewhere in an email. Our application helps you quickly find anyone you’ve ever communicated with, along with context to your relationship, in ranked order. For example, most people know more than one Mike. Xobni Rank delivers every Mike you know in ranked order based on how often and how recently you communicated with him. So, the Mike Zander, whom you just spoke with yesterday and email one time per week will be listed above the Mike Andler, who was CC’d in an email once by your coworker. Cool, eh? Manually typing in contact information is so 2008!

We’re thrilled to have been on stage today with our friends (and investors) at RIM demonstrating our partnership and product – and look forward to bringing Xobni to mobile devices early next year. To be notified when the product is available, please sign up here , and stay tuned.

Tags: blackberry, mobile