Loud Thoughts

Today I read about Xobni , a pretty good Outlook plugin that extends Microsoft Outlook's functionality in many ways. Xobni maintains a profile for the user's contacts and keeps track of his/her email usage, statistics etc.
When you click on an email conversation in Outlook, Xobni displays the following information about the sender in the sidebar in Outlook:

• The sender's profile
• Profile of the sender's contacts
• All threads of the conversation with the sender
• All attachments sent by the sender

In addition to this, this plugin provides a nice and fast search feature with search-term highlighting in results pane. And what's more, Xobni does all this without degrading Outlook's performance and more important, without crashing it.

Another interesting news is that Microsoft had tried to buy Xobni sometime back, but it didn't work out (yeah, not all MS deals work out these days). Xobni CEO just walked away from the deal. Wonder why? Apparently, Xobni is more of a platform than a simple email helper application. The Xobni platform has hooks deep into Outlook which enables them to even integrate with Outlook's default search. The platform is their trump-card and they know that they can make more money if they make the platform available to third-party vendors. This means that other vendors can use Xobni toolkit to seamlessly integrate their applications with Outlook.

By the way, Xobni claims that it can even extract phone numbers from the email; but I am not sure how effective this would be. The demo video shows that it extracts a phone number from an email message which contains the simple text 'my cell number is 99999'. But how intelligent their content extraction and pattern-matching algorithm would be if the text is grammatically or contextually different? Let's wait and watch.