Xobni: Hey Nokia, snatch these people up before Microsoft does
By Stefan Constantinescu on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 11:50 AM PST In Services
I don’t care what anyone says, email is still a killer app and many businesses wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t invented. Yes social networks are cool, but they all fail to be transparent. Anyone can call or text me, anyone can email me, I shouldn’t have to join Facebook to contact you, nor should I have to spend time I could be working inputing my life story into MySpace. The social networks I join are based on interests I have: A BMW forum, a S60 forum, a Nintendo DS forum, etc. Email is still, at the end of the day, the way a majority of people interact with everyone else. This is where Xobni steps in, an Outlook attachment that makes email powerful again:
While this is a fantastic plugin for Outlook, what about for people on the go? Don’t they deserve this kind of data with them at all times? Xobni is more than just a little panel on the right of your inbox, what makes it kick ass are the algorithms inside that analyze the way you use email and presents the data for you in a more convenient way. If Nokia (NYSE: NOK) integrated this with Intellisync and their mobile phones then it would have the most attractive email solution on the market with the devices to match.
What do you guys think?
looks fascinating. I’m assuming you’re using it? I’ll give it a go, as well. Good find, dude.
Now all Nokia would need is a real e-mail client that supports an add-in architecture, runs on Symbian, and has a small footprint. Xobni is a cool Outlook add-in. Whether they can reproduce the same level functionality for other clients or OS platforms (they say they’re working on it) remains to be seen.
All of its problems notwithstanding, Outlook is a great platform for building this kind of stuff (see ClearContext IMS Pro for another example). Other e-mail apps? Not so much (although there a couple of great extensions for Apple’s Mail.app too).