Bill Gates demoed Xobni as part of his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California today.

See the webcast here. The demo of Xobni occurs 44 minutes into the webcast.

Bill called Xobni “the next generation of social networking.” He credited Xobni as leveraging the data in email to help users better manage their relationships.

Another quote (he actually pronounced Xobni correctly):

“Xobni - it’s actually the word inbox spelled backwards: This is where someone has come into Outlook and decided to add value. “You look over there to the right, that’s their unique display area. They help you understand how you communicate, what groups of people you work with.”

Thanks Bill!

We know that becoming an integral part of our users’ email lives requires a high level of responsibility. Email is the most mission-critical business tool that exists today. That’s why our goal from the beginning has been to be highly accessible to our users, and help them solve any problems they may encounter in a timely fashion. And we’ve interacted with thousands of our users! User feedback drives our innovation.

The demand on our technical support team has exploded since we’ve expanded our user base. We’d considered building a community forum for some time now, but it was the nudge of a Xobni “evangelist” named Gary that set us to doing so. He generously made an initial draft of a forum, which has now become community.xobni.com! You’re likely to see Gary patrolling the forums assisting as our first moderator. Be sure to say hi!

We envision this forum will be a place for Xobni users to communicate with each other, assist new users with common issues, and discuss new ideas for Xobni. The Xobni team will also take an active role, but mostly because we ourselves are Xobni users. We really want this to be an open dialog between Xobni users. Sometimes we’ll be the ones responding to questions, sometimes we’ll just read the threads for product ideas, and sometimes I expect we’ll even ask our own questions.

We’re also going to be more proactive about updating our FAQs and making product help accessible. With all of these improvements we hope to be able to provide a higher level of service to our users.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

go there now: community.xobni.com

Today we can officially announced our acceptance into the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program. See the official press release here. We join fellow Y Combinator funded company, Loopt, as well as 20 other startups in this great program.

We were introduced to the program by Don Dodge, who is part of Microsoft’s emerging business team and is a good friend of Xobni. Thanks Don!

The Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program is designed to help high potential software startups get access, guidance, and support to accelerate their success on the Microsoft platform. So far we’ve received media support, introductions to potential business partners, and free software. Everybody in Xobni has a copy of Visual Studio running on their machine and thanks to the accelerator program this usually expensive software is provided free of charge. We’ve received a lot of other free software as well as media support over the past few months. The support we receive as part of this program extends into many aspects of our business.

As frequent readers of this blog know, two weeks ago we began a program where current Xobni users could invite their friends. We have since added a lot of users. Every time we add new users we love reading the deluge of happy comments from our new Xobni friends. Here are a few of our favorites:

Ok, so a few days ago, I finally got an e-mail from you guys to join the public beta of xobni. Well I installed it this morning, I’ve been using it for a few hours and all I have to say is WOW, where have you been all my life! I friggin love this thing (Google eat your heart out).

Geoff Hackett, Systems Analyst

Guys,
I must say that this is the first time in my life I send an immediate applaud. What an amazing application!!! Well done !!! It is the best application I have seen on outlook ever …maybe on my PC.

Rani Cohen, Israel

I just finished installing the beta, and have only been using Xobni for a few minutes now. I’m already sold, and completely blown away. This product is amazing! I find myself already wondering how I’ve survived without it all this time.
Bravo!
Jack

Every day our support guy, Skyler, sends out an email to our team with his favorite feedback or support quote of the day. He takes these quotes right out support and feedback emails. They are always motivating and often very funny. Here are some more examples:

Gentlemen,

I have to say that so far, I’m really, really impressed with Xobni. It’s clear you’ve put some real thought into it and the interactions are really well-designed. It’s about time someone made Outlook work properly; I’ve always thought that it’s a total dog of a program, which I use only under duress and in consistent ill-humour, so thanks for bringing some kind of functionality to it. Just being able to search email improves the usefulness by about 1000%. I have been evangelizing about Xobni all day - just wish I had more than 5 invites.

Thanks again,

Ian

Good Evening,

I finally received my Beta invite yesterday, after impatiently waiting for over a month.

I installed it today, and was blown away. My productivity went up at least 40-50% within the first hour of using it. I really think that you guys are underselling the way that Xobni groups similar message threads together. Another ‘killer’ feature that I didn’t see mentioned on the website – the prompt to follow up certain people based on follow up flags & dates I have set. Previously I used to set these flags, but native Outlook does not re-prompt you very well further on down the track.

With Xobni, within the first few minutes of using, I was aware of how many client emails I had to follow up on which will lead to real billable work tomorrow. The software has paid for itself already…oh wait, it didn’t cost me anything! ?
Well done guys (and gals). This is class software.

Cheers,
Devan Sabaratnam
Managing Director, Blaze Business Software Pty. Ltd.

Starting today, Xobni users will be given invites they can use to share Xobni with their friends. The invitations will appear in the bottom of the Xobni Insight sidebar.

Xobni is tackling a big problem. We want to help our users organize their personal information centered around people. Anywhere you communicate or build relationships, we want to help manage that information.

We want to make using Xobni as easy as chewing bubblegum. We don’t want to force our users to change email clients or social networks to use Xobni. Our software seamlessly integrates with the environments and systems that you already use to communicate and build relationships.

The first platform we’ve integrated with, Outlook, is huge. Outlook is used by 350 million people, so we figured it was kind of important. It has been a hard battle, and the battle is not over, but in the last four months we’ve overcome the biggest challenges by working with our users. We spoke with users on the phone, had long email conversations, and had others join us in our office for pizza, beer, and troubleshooting. Having solved many of the challenges we are now comfortable growing our user base. Thus, we are excited to announce our invite launch.

This “Gmail-style” invite system means you can get Xobni by buddying up with a friend who already uses Xobni. Nobody knows potential Xobni users better than our existing users. We will continue to give our beta users invites as time moves forward.

Xobni Insight was developed with the goal of making something people want. It turns out we were mostly right, but our users helped us improve our product even further.

Improved and added features
We read every feedback email, support email, and survey response. We’ve added or improved the huge pieces of functionality based on user feedback: attachment drag and drop functionality, copy, paste, and link clicking within conversations, editable pictures and phone numbers, and improved search and conversation views (our two top used features). Some more detailed feature improvements are discussed in our last blog post.

Social Graph
The blogosphere has been discussing email’s hidden social graph. Our Connected People feature leverages email’s social graph and we will continue to expose the social utility of email as we move forward. Our invitation system is another illustration of using the social graph. Xobni’s invitation system is smart; it uses the frequency and recency of your email patterns to recommend a list of friends you should invite to use Xobni.

Web search
We envision a stronger connection between email and the web. We have big plans for what this means, but today we take a first step. Xobni’s search now includes Yahoo web results alongside people and email results. This feature provides a quick way to look up information on the web without having to leave the Outlook window.

We hope you enjoy the new features. Remember to share email happiness with your friends!

Copy, Paste, Click
Xobni users rejoice! One of the top user-requested features has been implemented. You can now select text, copy, and paste text in the Xobni display. You can also click on links that appear in emails viewed in the Xobni sidebar.

We are approaching a point where you can do almost everything you need to do with email in the Xobni pane. Did you know you can resize the Xobni pane? Might as well slide it over to the left a bit further

Jump to conversation
Thanks, Aamir, for adding this!. I didn’t even realize how much I wanted this feature until I had it working on my Xobni. Now when you find an email using Xobni search you can view the existing email or view the entire conversation. This is HUGE! You can now find a message using Xobni search and quickly view the individual email or the entire threaded conversation.

Message box
Some of you are reading this blog entry thanks to this new feature. The Xobni message box is a really easy way for us to communicate with our users within the Xobni sidebar. A small box pops up with a message like, “check out this blog post about our newest features.” We just like to be able to say hi.

Right click menus
We’ve added a lot of quick functionality in right click menus all across the Xobni UI. You’ll probably find a few that I won’t even mention here. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Copy Bryan’s info
You can now quickly grab a contact’s name, phone number, and email address by clicking anywhere in the top section of the Xobni sidebar (above “people connected to bryan”).

This is super useful for introducing people or sharing your contact’s info with a trusted coworker or friend. Notice: if you have multiple email addresses for a contact Xobni shows the email addresses in the order of most used, with the most used address at the top. Try this feature next time you need to share someone’s contact info with a coworker.

• Copy availability
Users like how easy we make it to share your availability. Now you can copy your availability to the clipboard and paste it into a reply message.

• Copy email address/compose email
If you need to quickly get the email addresses of a bunch of people in Xobni’s list of connected people you’ll like this new right click menu. Our new right click menu allows you to copy any contact’s email address into the clipboard.

• Open email containing attachment
Xobni makes it extremely easy to find old attachments. However, sometimes it is nice to be able to open the conversation that contained the attachment. Now you can easily do that with our new right click menu.

Over the past week we have shipped invites to more than 1,700 people who have signed up for the Xobni beta. Our software is getting better day by day, so the speed at which our invitations are given out will only accelerate in the coming weeks. . If you haven’t signed up yet, please do so here.

Learning from beta users
We are continuing to work closely with our early beta users, many of which have been using Xobni since our 12 hour open download three months ago. Thank you so much for your help! Our whole team thanks you!

Working with our users over the past three months has helped us to make our features more intuitive, our UI simpler, and our performance better. And with such a diverse user base, we’ve been able to validate Xobni’s compatibility with multiple configurations of Windows and Office.

Getting priority access
We continue to have a very active priority badge program. Our priority badge users put the Xobni beta badge on their blog or web site in exchange for faster access to the Xobni beta. We are now sending priority invites within a few days of receiving a request. Get quick beta access by signing up here.

Inviting friends
A lot of users are asking us how they can share Xobni with their coworkers and friends. We will make this very easy from within the Xobni application soon. For now you can invite friends to join the beta by entering their email addresses in the grey box on the Xobni Download page.

We will continue to roll out Xobni Insight to new users over the next several weeks. If you haven’t signed up but want to try it, do so now – email happiness awaits.

One morning after some deep meditation, the Xobni team woke up and realized that not everyone uses Xobni on the same Dell Inspirons and IBM ThinkPads that we all use.  Matt’s head almost exploded from this realization.  True story.

We knew that testing had to be done on the machines our users were actually using.  This involves more than simply doing testing on virtual machines, which we have used since day 1 (for non-techies: virtual machines are software simulations of computers commonly used in quality assurance engineering). Instead we needed computers that have all the pre-configured bloatware, special packs of Microsoft Office, extra restore partitions, and all of the rest of that great stuff that slows down your computer to a crawl.

With this goal in mind, we searched Craigslist for machines that were 1-2 years old, and better represented the types of machines that our users were using.  Behold, I present the Pirate Lab!  Or Ninja Lab, depending on which group you’d rather fall into.

What is that bizarre thing in the corner?

Oh yes friends, we go get hungry here in the Xobni office.  While the kitchen is stocked with goodies to eat, sometimes the kitchen is just too far away.  Brownies, anyone?

If any users out there have extra old laptops that they’d like to donate to our lab please send them to 211 Sutter St. Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94108 c/o Pirate QA Lab.  We’ll send you a free Xobni shirt in exchange!  You’ll also maintain the honor of knowing that you had a small part in changing the world of email.

Becky Buckman at the WSJ wrote an article for today’s paper titled “Email’s Friendly Fire” I was fortunate to get to speak with Becky on several occasions as well as provide her with an interview for today’s story.

Xobni was mentioned in the article which appears on the front page of the Marketplace section. The article discusses the increasing amount of email received in the corporate workplace and products to overcome the resulting email overload. Xobni was featured as one of these products.

“These people are in pain,” says Matt Brezina, the 26-year-old co-founder of Xobni, which has received $4.2 million in funding from venture capitalists. Xobni’s product places a set of features on top of a customer’s email inbox, such as “profiles” of online contacts complete with photos, and quick links to set up appointments. The nine-person company says it has about 1,000 people globally testing the product — including salespeople, recruiters and marketing managers who use email frequently — and expects to release it broadly early next year.

We designed Xobni Insight to give our users context surrounding email conversations and relationships so that they can make better decisions faster. With lightening fast search, threaded conversations, and quick attachment discovery Xobni makes the task of working through 200 daily emails a lot less painful.

Xobni is thrilled to announce that a few highly anticipated features have been included in the latest release as well as more performance improvements. These features and product improvements will appear in any currently installed Xobni Insight programs after automatic updates have taken place and Outlook has been restarted.

Perhaps the most fun feature is the ability to easily add any desired picture to Xobni person profiles.

1. Simply right click on the profile to begin the changes.

2. A built in crop and resize tool allows the user to highlight any portion of an image and use the selection as the new profile picture.

3. Super easy! The picture shows up each time you look at a the person’s Xobni profile.

Contact names and phone numbers can now also be changed by right clicking anywhere in the profile. Xobni will recognize that the new name you have created corresponds with the actual contact name and email address. A drop down box is provided to conveniently add a unique phone number for cell phones, FAXes, home numbers, and work numbers.

On the more technical side, Xobni has also added these features:

• Xobni now opens HTML attachment files directly.
• Users can contact Xobni for help from within the application. Just go to the Xobni menu in the Outlook panel and click ‘contact support’ to compose an email. Xobni even adds the system’s specifications so the user doesn’t have to type it in!
• Xobni is more compatible with a wider range of Outlook plug-ins.
• Also watch for faster start up speeds and more efficient email synchronization.

More features will continue to roll out over time so make sure to keep checking our blog.

As usual we want to make sure we are providing as much “email happiness” as possible, so please, let us know what you think of our new features! I’ll be waiting at the other end.

Beta Update: For those of you waiting on the Xobni beta list for your chance to download Xobni, we haven’t forgotten about you! We are working hard to make our software ready for prime time. We currently have enough users for this initial testing phase, but we are excited to include more users in the beta as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.