Xobni
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| Private (venture-backed) | |
| Industry | Mobile and email applications |
| Fate | Acquired by Yahoo! |
| Founded | March 2006 |
| Defunct | July 3, 2013 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, U.S. |
|
Key people
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Jeff Bonforte, CEO Adam M. Smith, Co-Founder Matt Brezina, Co-Founder |
| Website | www |
Xobni (inbox spelled backwards; pronounced /ˈzɒbni/ ZOB-nee) was a San Francisco-based company that made software applications and services including products for Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices. It was founded in March 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina from Adam's dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Y Combinator summer founder's program. In late 2006, it relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Silicon Valley. It was acquired by Yahoo! in July 2013 for more than $60 million and shut down one year later.
Xobni's first product, was announced for private beta testing on September 18, 2007, at the TechCrunch 40 conference. It offered search and people-based navigation of Microsoft Outlook email archives. The company hinted at plans to offer the same functionality for other email clients. When the Outlook product was first launched, it was called Xobni Insight, and was soon changed to Xobni for Outlook, or simply Xobni.
Xobni received mostly positive coverage, although initial versions had performance problems on large inboxes. Many users found that the pre-installed version of Xobni (and possibly the manually installed equivalent) could not be removed. Some anti-virus software has also flagged Xobni as malware.
In February 2008, Xobni hired Jeff Bonforte, a vice president at Yahoo! and founder of defunct I-drive, as their CEO. In the same month, Bill Gates gave a demo of Xobni at the Office Developers' Conference. This led to rumors of a US$20 million acquisition by Microsoft, which the company reportedly rejected.
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