(This is a post I originally wrote for IST Building)
It’s not every day a Penn State co-founded start-up is mentioned by Bill Gates. Now, that same company, Xobni (zob-nee) founded by PSU ‘03 Electrical Engineering (and Schreyers) alumnus Matt Brezina, whose email capabilities Gates called “the future of social networking”, is featured in one of the top publications in the United States — the New York Times.
Xobni is featured in today’s New York Times as the service finally opens up to public beta use. With 50,000 users and 140,000 more on the waiting list, it seems plausible that the fledgling company that just turned down Microsoft’s acquisition offer (this wasn’t as high profile as the Yahoo bid, of course) will see some significant traction.
This, a follow-up to fellow Y Combinator alumnus Weebly(self-described as web page creation that ‘doesn’t suck’), which was ranked in Time’s 50 best websites of 2007, and this may be the (good) writing on the wall, forecasting the future direction of Penn State start-ups.
So what is Xobni?
From a previous article:
Xobni’s goal is to not only revolutionize its users inboxes, but also organize personal information, Brezina said.
“Our goal is to organize information around relationships. We want to be the Google of personal information,” he said.
His company’s first product, Xobni Insight, is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that extracts information from the emails stored in Outlook. With the information, Xobni’s toolbar automatically creates profiles of each email user, displaying a person’s relationship, attachments sent, a history of emails sent between the two parties, as well as a time graph showing at what time of day the most quantity of emails was sent.
While Xobni is focused for now on email organization for Outlook, it wants to be able to aggregate information from different webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and others. Brezina said it also wants to bring in instant messaging, and aggregate information from social networks.
Brezina gave the example of a friend who remembers a story another friend related about a ski resort in Vermont. A user will be able to search Xobni’s database for “Stow,” the name of the ski resort, and instantly find all the related threads , conversations, and media traded with friends.
Venturebeat’s Editor-in-Chief (my boss) Matt Marshall gives a bit more insight on Xobni’s future plans:
Notably, Xobni is also working with third party developers to let them build applications with Xobni. By allowing third party integration for its APIs, Xobni becomes a trojan horse for those third parties to access Outlook integration through a plugin. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t offer a friendly set of APIs for people to plug into Outlook, and so Xobni hopes to become the place developers come to for such access. Salesforce is a good example. If you’re emailing someone, Xobni could show you — through an integration with Salesforce — how many sales calls you’ve made to the person, and how many dollars in computer sales you’ve made to them. Xobni will announce such partnerships over the coming weeks.
VP of engineering Gabor Cselle, such a geek (respectfully I say this) that he wrote his thesis on organizing email, has a much more technical analysis of the email nightmare Xobni seeks to solve:
Experts say that there are two types of email users: Cleaners and Keepers. Cleaners receive only a few emails a day, and they meticulously file each email into a specific folder. Keepers, on the other hand, receive copious amounts of email, and although they may start out with a good organizational system, it is quickly abandoned. We designed Xobni for the Keepers — the everyday people who need a product that will help navigate their flooded inbox.
The average Xobni user deals with a whopping 30,000 stored emails and communicate with some 1,900 people. For many, this means sifting through several hundred messages every day. It’s only going to get worse: the Radicati Group estimates that by 2009, people will spend up to 41% of their workday dealing with emails. We are experiencing bona fide email overload, and the challenge for us “power users” is to find a way to process and organize large volumes of information over a short period of time.
If you’ve read my blog, you’ve probably seen countless post after post hailing Xobni as King — but then again I’m biased. Matt graduated from State High, and I knew his sister years before I knew him or his email-revolutionizing company. That being said, he’s a pretty cool guy to know, regardless of whether or not he ever started Xobni.
Many PSU students don’t even use Outlook, but Xobni has plans to integrate not just with other webmail clients such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, but also services such as Facebook (which has a horrible UI to search/store messages), LinkedIn and Salesforce.
Liz Kisenwhether, Director of the Entrepreneurship Minor here at Penn State, has brought Matt in to speak with various classes and meet with students as part of the Spring 2008 Bishoff Entrepreneur in Residence program. Although I’m not sure when he’ll be back next (as a State College native I’m sure this will be quite frequently), I highly advise any students interested in technology start-ups to speak with Matt as he gives some pretty insightful feedback on everything from refining your vision, to investment pitching.
News like this would be probably pretty standard for a Berkeley, Stanford, or MIT alumnus (which coincidentally, is where Matt’s co-founder Adam Smith graduated from) — so this shows Penn State has a ton of work to become a major player in Technology start-ups, but this University is clearly on the right path. (Although I wonder how many more start-ups could come out of this place if they didn’t horde Intellectual Property like Gollum and the ring)
Congratulations to Matt and co. for the exciting news — it’s currently the 5th most popular technology post on the NYT (unfortunate if it is overshadowed by the Microsoft-Yahoo battle, which (temporarily) ended on Saturday) , certainly in part to the support they get from the Y Combinator community.
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