Dan accused me of giving most of this blog over to SaaS. With this in mind I thought I’d post about Xobni. Jon Beattie posted about it so I thought I’d take a look and see what it’s about. It’s an add-on for Microsoft outlook (and after all the majority of the world’s corporates still use Outlook) that allows for;

• Lightning fast email search
• The email or person you’re looking for appears as you type Contact details pop into the sidebar – never search for a phone number again
• Email analytics.Rankings, graphs, and statistics detailing how you and your contacts use email
• Quick attachment discovery.Historical attachments available instantly without searching
• Navigate your inbox by people.Discover email’s social network – quickly identify a contact’s manager, business partner, or assistant
• Threaded conversations.Email how it was meant to be read, with conversations in context
  Your personal assistant.Schedule appointments with a click of a button – Insight automagically finds open slots in your busy schedule.

I like what I’m seeing – seems to take diverse information (social networks etc) along with existing stuff (email, contacts) and package it up in a user friendly, fast and searchable format. Now what would be really smart would be for a Telco to buy Xobni and utilise its add-on to generate more network revenue from all the little value-adds that would port people to the telco networks – click to call, click to IM etc etc.

Smart!