
Khosla And RRE Lead $16.2 Million Series C In Xobni - jasonlbaptiste
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/khosla-and-rre-lead-16-2-million-series-c-in-xobni/
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ShabbyDoo
I presume there's a lot more to their business model than just an Outlook
plugin (albeit a very good one!)?

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brezina
Matt, co-founder of Xobni here. Adam and I started Xobni with the basic idea
that google organized the world's public information, yet no one had done that
for personal information (Adam's insight - not mine - he was in grad school
looking for huge data sets to do stuff with). Not only are the personal data
stores much larger than public data (most of which is in email), they also
have to be treated different. Google (and products like gmail, google desktop,
etc) don't get this. What we discovered after pounding our heads at this
problem for 6 months was that Email Is About People and no current email
clients understand that. Xobni was born.

We took that concept, and with $12k of YC money in the bank, we realized we
would get Zero adoption if we asked people to switch to our new email client.
We also realized the largest group of existing valuable email users are on
Outlook (it has grown from 500M to 600M since we started Xobni).

So, we took our vision to Outlook via a plugin. People liked it. We solved
some existing problems for people like keyword search (note: it is easier to
acquire users when you solve a problem they know they have), and sprinkled in
features that produce our true vision of organizing information around people
and relationships.

Individuals pay for our premium Outlook product (Xobni Plus) and companies
license it for their employees (Xobni Enterprise).

However, we've finally started to stretch the vision to new areas. We launched
Xobni for BlackBerry - an app that takes our people-centric vision of personal
information to the blackberry. And Xobni One, our cloud service that connects
the xobni service between Outlook, BlackBerry, and upcoming new platforms.

Add onto that other cloud services (Salesforce.com, linkedin, etc) that you
want to access and view from Xobni profiles on Outlook, BlackBerry, and
everywhere else you maintain and manage relationships.

Would you like to be on your friend's Facebook page and see the phone number
that Xobni extracted for you last time that friend called you on your
BlackBerry? I would.

So, Outlook plugin can be seen as a means, not an end. Meanwhile, the plugin
is damn useful :)

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samratjp
This is exactly why I love HN. Nowhere else could you expect the founders to
take time to excite (and educate) us in such detail :-)

Congrats Matt & Xobni. I hope that fund means that we'll get an Apple Mail &
Thunderbird Xobni soon. I bet Xobni will good on the iPad.

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snowmaker
Congrats to Matt & Adam! It is amazing to watch Xobni achieving its dream.

