Xobni

Xobni, the social Outlook plugin, is finally leaving their beta phase. The company is also announcing a new version that contains some new features, including additional user controls which will allow users to better customize Xobni's behavior. This feature is designed to help people with "underpowered" computers to take advantage of the plugin. The controls let you customize the indexing times and configure a delayed load when Outlook starts, among other things.

Xobni, a San Francisco-based maker of software for email services, has raised $7 million in fresh funding led by Cisco Systems. Existing investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures and Atomico also invested in this round of founding. In a blog posting, the company said that their Outlook add-on software has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. They are currently conducting product trials with Fortune 500 companies.

Xobni, the email startup that we’ve described as “The Superplugin for Outlook”, has partnered with LinkedIn to automatically pull contact information from the popular professional network. Xobni will now draw from public profiles on the LinkedIn network, displaying information about contacts’ employers, job titles, and pictures as part of the plugin’s sidebar.

It might not be as sexy as Xobni, but Outlook users who find that plugin useful should check out ClearContext Personal. It too intends to make email more manageable, albeit with a greater focus on projects than people (you won’t find any attempt to turn email contacts into a social network here).

E-mail startup Xobni may or may not be in acquisition talks with Microsoft (they say no), but they do have a nifty project up their sleeves that Microsoft would be interested in, especially if its proposed Yahoo deal ever goes through. Xobni makes a plug-in that super-charges Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail software by organizing conversations and people in ways that are much easier to find them. It also shows users their social network based on who they email the most.