Today Adam Smith, the mastermind behind Xobni’s mission of “fixing email,” deserves a pat on the back; Adam has been named one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Young Innovators Under 35. Adam joins the ranks of previous winners such as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Kevin Rose (Digg) as well as this year’s winners including Jack Dorsey (Twitter), JB Straubel (Tesla Motors), and Dries Buytaert (Drupal). Adam is only 23, so he has 12 more years before he hits the 35 y/o limit for this award. I’m betting they’ll make it an exception and give it to him twice before he is old enough to run for president.

Read Adam’s profile here: http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?Cand=T&TRID=740

Adam’s profile was written by our good friend Om Malik from gigaom.com.

The Xobni team is very proud of Adam and excited by this outside recognition of the accomplishments we see internally every day.

We are happy to announce that Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and the #1 product review guru in the country has given Xobni a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal

See the article and video here

We had a great time meeting with Walt in DC last week. It was quickly obvious that he understood the size of the problem Xobni solves and he was excited about our approach. We couldn’t ask for for a bigger endorsement.

Some choice quotes:

Xobni turned my Outlook experience from one that was organized by messages and dates into one that was organized by people, relationships and histories.

I’ve been testing Xobni and I like it.

I found that it made Outlook much faster and more useful

Xobni is a smart addition to Outlook that makes email much more useful

As many of you saw (we know because usage has been crazy!), we recently announced a deal with LinkedIn where you can seamlessly receive important information and photos of your contacts directly into your Xobni sidebar. Our mission is to help our users get the information they need right into the inbox.

Today, we’ve expanded on that effort. We’ve been working with Facebook and are announcing today that we are among the first participants in Facebook Connect, which brings Facebook profile information right into the Xobni sidebar. Once implemented, Xobni will be leveraging Facebook’s massive global user base and development platform to automatically show your contacts’ Facebook profile pictures, status, recent photos, mutual friends, location and online presence inside Xobni. Now that is a handy use of your social graph!

This integration speaks to the ever-increasing importance of social networking data and Facebook’s prominence in the space with over 70 million users around the world. The Xobni sidebar in Outlook will display public data from Facebook profiles and will also offer the user an option to sign into their Facebook account through Xobni and view private data like photos and status messages for their Facebook friends. By leveraging the profiles of Facebook users, Xobni provides greater context around emails by seamlessly informing you of what else is going on in your contacts’ lives.

Facebook has become a killer social app for tens of millions of people, serving as a new kind of address book for keeping track of contacts. A recent Washington Post article on the future of address books spoke about Facebook, LinkedIn, and the value of the data trapped in social networks. The article also spoke about how Xobni is advancing the address book for email: “The best you can get is a free plug-in for Outlook called Xobni.” We believe that combining data from social networks like Facebook with Xobni will make us all better at personal and professional relationship management.

We’ll be sure to announce here on our blog, to our mailing list, and in our forums when Xobni with Facebook integration is available. To signup for this and future announcements, please do so on our download page (look for the “Keep in Touch” box where you can type in your email).

Focus, experience, skill, passion, and fun – these are the things we look for in hires. We’ve found these traits in the two latest additions to our product team.

We are pleased to announce that Josh Jacobson will be joining Xobni as our Director of Product Management and Brian Kobashikawa will join Xobni as our Principal Designer.

Both of these guys were part of the Yahoo Messenger team that supplanted AOL Messenger as the #1 instant messaging platform in the United States. They were also both part of the product team that released the Yahoo Messenger Vista client to rave reviews. Their skill and experience will translate perfectly to Xobni; they are great at building products that fit into narrow rectangular boxes!

Josh headed product management for all of Yahoo Messenger including the Vista, XP, Web Messenger, and Mac Messenger clients.

Brian brings a rare combination of visual design and user experience design. He was a principal designer at Yahoo, the highest title held by individual contributor designers at Yahoo.

Both have worked for big companies as well as multiple startups and are excited to return to the startup life. We are excited to have them!

The Xobni race car is about to hit 3rd gear.

Today we’re are announcing some additions, changes and opportunities for the Xobni team.

Engineering excellence is in Xobni’s DNA. We are on seeking teammates who will help us extend our technical and product ambitions.

The key open roles for Xobni today are QA Automation Engineer, software developers, and a VP of Engineering to lead our band of merry engineers.

Ryan Gerard, our QA engineering lead, seeks an QA Automation Engineer. Ryan wrote a great blog post that gives a good perspective on the value quality engineering. If you are interested in this position, please email jobs@xobni.com with the subject “QA Automation Engineer”. 

This week we just had an offer accepted for a Sr. Software Engineer position. Great news, but we have more roles open, and it took us months to find this candidate. We are seeking more fantastic software developers, so if the problems Xobni is tackling inspire you, send us your resume at jobs@xobni.com. You will find our software engineering job description here.

And finally, at the end of this summer Gabor Cselle will be leaving Xobni to work on his very own startup. Gabor has filled the role of VP of Engineering admirably for the past year and half. We will capture some great Gabor moments in a future blog post, and maybe we can inspire one of the team to put together a “Best of Gabor” video And while we are sad to see Gabor go, his departure is a big opportunity for Xobni.

Today we kick off a search for that perfect engineering leader to come join Xobni for the next set of challenges. The right person will champion our engineering ethos, while delivering a fantastic product, on-time. The team will be growing quickly, so a candidate should be an able manager who excels at rapid company growth. They must know how to ship desktop software, particularly with today’s tools and challenges.  They must know how to add or remove process as a company grows, and they must command the team’s respect through their hard work and character.

This is a key role for Xobni, reporting to the CEO with board of directors visibility. If you are or know the perfect engineering leader for Xobni, drop us a line. You will find the full job description for our VP of Engineering here.

Today we’re launching a new version of Xobni that we’re very excited about. Early during the life of Xobni we realized that email is about people, but no existing email clients gave people the priority they deserve. We quickly seized on what we believe is a huge opportunity to build a more socially aware email environment. We’ve long believed this idea extends beyond email to other sources of relationship data, both on the desktop and on the web.

For our users, Xobni has become both a way to organize an overloaded inbox and a way to manage relationships. Xobni’s capacity as a relationship management tool is greatly enhanced by today’s announcement that LinkedIn profile data is now visible in Xobni profiles. Integrating data from LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network, will dramatically improve Xobni’s utility as a relationship management tool and further integrate email with data from the web.

See the official press release here

This new version of Xobni (version 1.4) is being automatically updated on existing users’ machines and is also available for immediate download at www.xobni.com/download

What you will find in version 1.4:

LinkedIn integration

Xobni users will now see LinkedIn public profile data automatically displayed in Xobni profiles. You will see the job title and the employing company of the person you are emailing with. Clicking on the LinkedIn logo will take you to that contact’s LinkedIn profile. Also, LinkedIn profile pictures will be automatically displayed in the Xobni sidebar. We’ve been using this feature internally for several weeks, and having this information at your fingertips when you are interacting with a new person is immensely powerful.

We have plans to extend this feature with more information from LinkedIn that becomes available when you are logged-in to their service. Make sure to verify that your LinkedIn profile and picture are set to “public” so that other Xobni users can see your pretty LinkedIn picture when you send them an email.

Keyboard shortcuts

This feature is for our power Xobni users – thanks for your
feedback! We have implemented the
following keyboard shortcuts for use with Xobni.

Folder selection

Another feature many of our users want is the ability to select or deselect folders or outlook data stores that you want included in Xobni’s search results and person profiles.

Do you store important data in the deleted items folder? Do you want Xobni to index that folder? Now you can. Do you have a ton of old PSTs that you don’t want searched by Xobni? Now you can deselect those folders from our index:

After you’ve selected or deselected a folder, and only after we re-indexed your machine, the xobni search index will reflect the changes. Remember re-indexing occurs during idle times or when you manually force an indexing in the Xobni menu.

Performance improvements

We are constantly working to improve the performance of Xobni. We also work hard to limit our interaction with the native Outlook email client. We have made two great steps in improving both of these areas. We have improved the way by which we index new messages as they are sent and received. This improves the responsiveness of Outlook for users that experienced a slowdown when they were sending or receiving new messages. Also, we’ve made an improvement to the Xobni UI rendering. Xobni profiles that contain long histories of conversations and attachments now load much faster.

Xobni has lightening fast people search. But you can also search on company names to find employees within that company with whom you have exchanged emails, or who have been copied on an email with you. So if you are looking for people from Apple Inc, you can search apple.com and you will find people with emails name@apple.com in the search results. Very simple and very powerful.

Let us know your tips on using Xobni. If we publish them, we’ll send you a Xobni t-shirt!

Today we have launched xobni.com/fan. This site will serve as a resource for Xobni fans to express their love for Xobni.

At xobni.com/fan you can invite friends to use Xobni and get a unique Xobni badge to put up on your blog or social network profile page. However, today’s addition is the Xobni store. Now you can get your very own Xobni t-shirt to wear around the office and show off to all of your colleagues and friends.

We are selling these t-shirts at cost, so don’t go mistaking some t-shirts sales for our web 2.0 business model.

Xobni is much cooler when your contacts have photos. Recently we added the ability for Xobni to import photos from the Outlook address contact book. But you can also add a photo directly to Xobni, which has a great image cropping tool. Here is how you do it:

1) Right click on grey holder image of a person’s contact card in Xobni
2) Select Edit Info
3) Click Change below the photo placeholder. You can choose a photo from your PC, or there is a cool trick to grab an image off the web. Here it is:

a) Use something like Google Image Search or Flickr to find a picture of the person on the web
b) Copy the location of the photo. You can do this by right-clicking on the photo in your browser and selecting “Copy Image Location”
c) Paste the image location in the File Name: field and click on the Open button.

Viola you are done. Xobni will grab the image off the internet and you can crop from there.

Kevin Tofel over at PC World posted a great review of Xobni today. See here.

Xobni has been featured in PC World several times both in print and online, but today they released their official PC World review of Xobni. These reviews have been known to make or break products and companies. Today’s review made Xobni.

Xobni received a score of 93/100 and a superior ranking. This is a higher score than any other software product I was able to find on PCWorld.com in 10 minutes of browsing. Very Exciting!

Some choice quotes from the article:

“This free application is a must-have for anyone who lives in Outlook”

“It provides functionality that Outlook should deliver natively, and does so without affecting the e-mail client’s performance.”

“Instead of treating mail conversations, contacts, and calendars as separate entities, Xobni weaves them together in a responsive, intuitive interface.”

That last quote is my favorite. That is EXACTLY what we like to hear!