

Those Xobni guys are ballsy - zellunit
http://zellunit.com/those-xobni-guys-are-ballsy/

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aneesh
> _1\. Support a whole range of email clients and become the de facto email
> analytics plug-in across the board._

Yes, this is a good direction for Xobni to go in, and they're already making
moves in this direction with the Yahoo! Mail "leak". There is great value in
aggregating a user's contacts and relationships across accounts, and being a
central platform for relationship management.

> _2\. Produce an email client themselves when their value proposition gets
> good enough._

I doubt it. Their core competency is email analytics, and there's not really a
reason for them to create their own email client. Why create Xobni webmail and
get a 10% market share of power users, when you can create a Xobni plugin for
Outlook, Yahoo, hotmail and Gmail and get over 50% of email power users.
Eventually Xobni will expand beyond power users.

> _3\. Don’t build a social network, just make email fun to use and make it
> easy for people to see what their email graph looks like._

Yes, it's fun, but that fun is hard to monetize. This could be a cool feature,
but not the focus of Xobni's efforts.

> _4\. Become the all-in-one contact threshold tool, and by that I mean users
> should be able to see their activity across all aspects of communication and
> set personal alerts for when their interaction level with somebody drops
> below or goes above a certain level._

Becoming the all-in-one contacts & relationships management tool? Yes. But, I
think the idea of completely automating interactions with "Level 1" and "Level
2" contacts is taking it a bit too far. Being genuine is hard to fake, and
Xobni shouldn't try to fake that.

> _5\. Sell employee analytics to HR departments via the huge amount of
> mailbox data that they can parse and interpret._

Lots of potential here. The value is less in the data, and more in the
interpretation -- HR departments aren't statistical consultants. One option
would have to develop a consulting arm to maximize the value here. Another,
more scalable, option would be to develop a killer product that does the
analysis for the employer.

> _6\. Attack other verticals on the local machine_

Maybe. But there's more money in email analytics than in file system, IM or
iTunes analytics. As for gathering data from other consumer activities, email
is still a far from solved problem (and offers far more valuable data). Let
Xobni focus on that!

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kogir
The choice not to sell may very well have not been theirs. No VC I know would
want to sell a company that's doing well for a 2.5 to 5 times return.

This has been mentioned before: <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=361>

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sant0sk1
"They have already started doing this with Pine and I am sure others are to
come"

I thought that whole pine thang was an April Fool's joke... Was I fooled, or
were you?

~~~
zellunit
of course it was. per your post i added the (joke acknowledged) in case people
took that to heart. :)

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nextmoveone
If I was the xobni guys...

I would make email a platform; as in, make it easy to develop apps for e-mail.

Like To-do lists, contact lists, crm's, etc...

~~~
nradov
Which is exactly what IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has been since 1989.

~~~
nextmoveone
> _Which is exactly what IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has been since 1989._

No, like gmail, yahoo & hotmail.

~~~
nradov
Those are applications, not platforms. Platforms are intended to make it easy
for independant developers to build value-added applications. For example:
MySQL, MS Office, Common Lisp, Amazon EC2, etc.

~~~
nextmoveone
Yes, and I was saying that xobni should build out a platform for developers to
create VALUE ADDING applications to gmail, yahoo & hotmail, like To-do lists,
contact lists, crm's, etc...

Kind of like how facebook is a platform...

~~~
nradov
It's generally unwise to a build a platform on top of something controlled by
third party. Any little change that third party makes is likely to break your
platform.

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rwebb
thanks for the ballsy urban dictionary definition link. that really made the
post for me.

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sanj
Getting people to switch email client is tough.

~~~
zellunit
yea completely agreed. but keep in mind they can wean them off it it since
they have access to all the data, and they can instantly port it over. they
could even let you use their client and your existing client in the interim,
or just use each in different cases. obviously this poses new technical
challenges, but not out of the realm of possibility.

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Fuca
I would have sell, MS can just get someone to work on those widgets.

~~~
SwellJoe
If so, why haven't they? There is a common misperception about how well large
companies can respond to threats to their cash cow products (and thus many
people opt not to enter markets where they will be competing with those
theoretical products from the large company).

That said, I definitely believe the single biggest threat to the growth and
success of Xobni is their absolute dependence on Outlook in the current
iteration. But, by the time MS releases a tool that does some of what Xobni
does, Xobni will (I would hope) have a multi-platform version with a dozen
additional features. Xobni obviously doesn't plan to stand still waiting for
MS to catch up to them.

