This all based on a ton of speculation. There are three big unknowns as I see it:
-Nobody really knows the details of the offer.
-Nobody really knows what Xobni has in store.
-Nobody really knows how much say the VC's had.
Most companies start with a feature that becomes a product which becomes a company. The Outlook plugin could be the tip of a much bigger spear. I have never used xobni b/c I don't use outlook but I can see a bunch of possible directions for them. Who knows though? Maybe it is a minor feature. But anyone in a startup knows enough to know how little they know about the inner workings of another company. And anyone who's tried to raise money knows how thoroughly you have to explain your long term plans and revenue models. If you can't say I'm going to be a $100 million dollar company in X years b/c of Y and Z reasons, you're not going to get a series A. You'd also know that $20 million is a small offer after a series A.
Re your point on having to thoroughly explain your revenue model to investors, there are some VCs/investors who are happy to let this emerge, odd as that may sound. For instance, I believe that Fred Wilson [of A VC blog fame] has commented along these lines about his investment in Twitter. In some of these instances, the plan appears to be to focus on building a large active user base, preferably one that gets "locked in" via a network effect and then figuring out how to monetise.
I am interested to hear about the "bunch of possible directions" you can see. Can you elaborate?
People need to do some math before they say this was a good opportunity for Xobni (and the investors-- who likely have the power to veto any acquisition).
When you take 4.35 million in investment, you are giving away a percentage of your company. Say it's 1/3rd for the sake of argument. That creates a post-money valuation of $13m. Which means that a $20m buyout (once the lawyers get their slice) is, what-- a 1.5x return on investment? The only way an investor would approve that is if the company was tanking (Xobni isn't-- they are buried in good press).
Outlook (and email) is the #1 technology time-sink on the planet (RescueTime has the data to prove it-- someday we'll publish some interesting stats).
If you could walk up to any enterprise and propose to make email 10% more efficient, that's worth a TON of money.
How on earth did this troll post get 17 votes? There's only one paragraph in it that's even new, and that doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said.
I'm starting to get the feeling that there's a big jealousy factor developing here. The formula is simple: find something that's getting traction and getting talked about, and then bash it. This bashing is very appealing to people whose own efforts are less successful (or more likely have never started), because it reassures them that the other people's efforts and success aren't "real" or legitimate. The same thing can be seen in the comments on TechCrunch (along with the jealousy of failed competitors).
I think the "never have started" is probably the crux of the matter. People who don't actually build things tend to look at the world from a very different perspective. The focus is more on "how is this thing different from anything else I have seen" and not on "is this thing actually useful to a non-trivial set of people out there". When they focus on the first part, it is very easy to bash almost all things out there. Google? That's just search. Gmail? That's just webmail. IPhone? Just a smartphone - doesn't even have 3G and GPS!
I think it's more a distinction between "people who have problems" and "people who don't have problems". When you don't have a problem, you're in browse mode - open to new ideas, but only if they're substantially different from everything you've ever seen and trigger some flicker of recognition, some reason to think it's a good idea. When you do have a problem, you're actively looking for something to solve it, and get really excited about the solution. So if you happen to have the particular problem that Xobni solves, it's great, but if you don't, it's just ho-hum.
To confirm your explanation, I never could understand the appeal of jottit until I attended a meeting where I was able to put up a site of what was being discussed before the end of the meeting using jottit.
It's lame to pretend the reactions of potential clients aren't important. Even if there is a jealousy factor, a good founder would take it into account and act accordingly.
"But isn't xobni just an outlook plugin?"
Clearly people have that idea in their head. Now what is xobni going to do about it?
Many of the people who're objecting - at least on these TechCrunch and FeedBurner stories - would never have bought it anyway. It's better to concentrate on the folks who will buy it (I assume they're out there, though I'm not one of them...) and make something that they'll use, love, and tell people about.
"Drowning in Email?
Find Email & Attachments Instantly"
"Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox"
It looks to me like they're focused on reaching people who have a problem to solve, and aren't concerned about being viewed as "just an outlook plugin."
A vote up, to a lot of people, is not "this is a great post", but rather "I like this topic".
It'd be interesting to know how many people vote up an article BEFORE ever reading it. I'll bet you a nickel that the majority of votes happen that way... Or at least a significant minority.
How disappointing that your only contribution to this discussion is to be snide and rude. I've offered an opinion about an application and the utility I derived on my blog. Thereafter I've commented on the price offered for a company. By definition these are subjective matters. Isn't the point of this forum is for you to articulate where you differ and why, rather than offering childish playground insults.
I agree with michael_dorfman's comment below and think it's unfair to call him a troll... Not everyone will be positive and taking that into account is important.
Just in case I am missing features from the version I have installed, here's what I can access in Xobni from the top
- emails received time summary graph.
- count of emails sent/received and resultant ranking
- request for phone number / phone number captured from email
- "schedule time" which opens a blank email
- create email
- listing of other people that were included on emails received from the contact, and ability to hop onto the email profile for that person if they too are one of your contacts
- list of emails from the contact which you can navigate to
- list of file exchanged which you can navigate to
Anyone got anything different? I ask only because as I'm evidently missing something in the app, based on some of the comments made towards me.
Let's be clear, if you love the app then that's great and I want to hear how it has helped you. If I am missing a trick, then perhaps others are to and so help us to be believers. If you've spotted where this app is heading, explicitly clue the rest of us in, don't simply allude.
I tend to agree with the analysis here, and think that Xobni missed a nice chance. I'd be surprised if Microsoft comes knocking again, and I don't see any reasonable way that they can build their tool into anything that is not parasitic on Outlook, much less effectively monetize it...
They could license their product to large businesses for more money than you think it's worth. Even if they save users 10 minutes a day, do you know how much an executive is willing to pay to save 10 minutes of frustration?
Any extension to the Microsoft Office suite should just be marketed straight to enterprise customers. More hours are spent looking at Microsoft Office every day than probably any other activity save sleeping. It's a huge market filled with deep-pocketed customers.
Then the best business model available to them is to get bought by Microsoft.
This is not a bad business plan, by the way-- there are quite a number of folks who have made good money filling some gap Microsoft missed, and getting acquired.
From TFA: "What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook?"
The core problem with this commentary is that the writer doesn't understand that Xobni can be more than just an Outlook feature. I think he has a hard time seeing beyond the UI that's been presented.
I am reminded of VitalSigns that many people saw is just a toy for looking at how well your dial up connection was working. Others realized that the underlying technology was interesting, that it applied in the business environment and VitalSigns was bought out for a good price.
Please elaborate on the many things you evidently think it could be, highlighting how easily and in what timeframe they could achieve this, thereby "educating" the rest of us?
It may be time to put down the hatorade for a minute, and consider that the guys who walked away from $20m may be intelligent enough to value their own product.
Amen. I'm not eval'ing their move one way or the other, but I would suspect that they have more inside info about their company, product, the deal and business plan. By definition, you know.
I can't tell from your reply if an obnoxious personality is coming through, or if it's just the problem with ASCII communications.
---
Email is a very target rich environment, I've done quite a lot of work in this area and I think there are two key things to realize about email:
1. Mining the content of emails can give you information about what's in them and the person who wrote them. Examples are any spam filter, POPFile, GMail ads., automatic email response systems.
2. Email also contains relationship information. And this information doesn't need to be gathered by forcing the user to 'friend' people.
If you have access to the email box of a user you have all their email which means all their relationships plus all the subjects they are interested in. If you then do that across a company (or another group) you have a great deal of information for clustering (both by relationship and by content).
You also have IP addresses which leads to physical location (with some degree of error) and time information (including time zones).
That's a great deal of information to have (for example, companies like Facebook would love to know as much about you as possible but only really get the friend relationship; email gives you that effortlessly with content th analyze).
The obvious follow up on this is 'how are they going to make money'. I don't know Xobni so I can't answer for them, but if you look at the areas where money as been made analyzing content or relationships, it's not hard to see that Xobni could be a trojan horse (an Outlook or other email pluging) that gives the user some value while providing greater value behind the scenes.
My comment wasn't intended to be either obtuse or obnoxious. I was merely asking for an elaboration - its too easy to say there are lots of xxxxxx, but without evidencing what they are.
On your point about the aggregation of such data across a company, I concur. In a thread above, I did note that their current offering may be prelude to looking at the corporate market. However, this is not virgin territory as there are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target".
Surrendering such data to your employer is one thing. However, you allude to an interesting notion, namely Xobni perhaps aggregating and making use of data from the individual in the personal market. That could be a very tough sell amidst probable privacy concerns, but of keen interest to an advertiser at the very least.
Bill Gates, himself, once the richest man in the USA and the richest in the world, said he liked XOBNI, this alone means XOBNI is like the new MS or the new Google! Which makes it worth at least 200,000,000 dollars ... at least, not just the peanuts they wonna throw at, 20 mil is nothing
XOBNI makes email fun again ... and easy ... and those are values.... see values not feature
So outlook without xobni is lame, and nobody wonna use it, not add XOBNI and suddenly everyone wonna jump and spend the whole day inside outlook, ore more specifically XOBNI
Sayin XOBNI is just a feature is like saying RoR is just a lib for Ruby ...... nooooooooo, Ruby is just a feature of RoR, want proof .... DJANGO and Grails both Rails like,
see the tables are truned, the language is the feature ... notthe other way around
python is a feature in DJANGO and Groovy is a feature in Grails, but rails is the way ... man, rails is the way
Tomorrow you will see XOBNI for GMAIL , XOBNI for Yahoo Mail , XOBNI for Mutt even... and when this happens Outlook becomes a feature of XOBNI and not the XOBNI a feature of Outlook
And again Bill Gates HIMSELF complemented Xobni, this alone makes Xobni worth more than 20 mil
Xobni is the next google, those guys are gonna be billionaires, just like how Linus Torvalds became one for inventing Git ... okay so Git may not have turned Linus into a billionaire, but than its not as revolutionary as XOBNI ... and most important Bill Gates, the richest man thant he once was, never compliment Git or said it was any good
1. It's obvious that Xobni has more stuff planned, whether or not they're "features." I'm sure the "leak" just happened to be timed before the acquisition rejection.
2. "especially since there is no clear revenue stream opportunities with the product - do you really want ads inside Outlook or would you really pay in order to get the "information" being thrown up about email traffic?"
I'm pretty sure there are more ways to potentially monetize Xobni than advertising or b2b/b2c SaaS.
Than again, if I remember correctly, this guy didn't really do his homework last time either, so why should I think he's done it this time?
Homework? In the last blog post to which you refer I gave a personal account of the usefulness of Xobni to me, and wasn't presenting a research paper.
I'd be delighted to hear the ways you think they can monetise the product/feature, partly to demonstrate the amount of thought you've given the matter.
In its current incarnation, Xobni is a tool aimed at the individual user. Obviously, the company/product can go in all sorts of directions but so can anyone given time/money/effort.
Let's consider the possibility that their current offering is a prelude to looking at the corporate market. There are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target".
You should also consider that many CRM tools already enable emails to be automatically incorporated into the communication profile/history of a contact, supplemented by richer tools than Xobni presently offer [task mgt, workflow] e.g. salesforce, zoho crm, siebel.
you clearly still consider just the analytics part of the email, which shows you STILL probably haven't really used the product if that's all you think it is.
"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. 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."
sounds a bit like useful social search to me.
and since you've already nixed advertising, and a saas model -- again based on apparently never trying the product
there's also freemium, support & service behind the product a la open source, cross-sales/ partnership with a CRM package (read: salesforce or zoho)
I got my invite to trial the product on Dec 14 2007 and tested the Xobni service over a few weeks using Outlook 2003. I've also re-installed it recently, just in case there were new features which would change my views - not so far.
Several people have mentioned the requirement to aggregate across multiple webmail clients - I confess that I'm not affected by this as I consolidate multiple email accounts in one location and avoid the need to check separate email services individually. If operating on multiple webmail clients is common practice, then I confess to having been ignorant of this gap in the market - of course, people could consolidate their email in either Outlook or Gmail.
As for search, does Google Desktop search not work on your PC? It searches both within your email [certainly Outlook and Gmail] and across the filing system, whilst being free. This should go some way to addressing your example of locating conversations. As for the media attachments, I concede that I've long since stopped using my email inbox as a filing system, saving them off to file directories if they are important enough [Pst files in particular always seem to react badly].
Wow, it's a good thing that Xobni couldn't integrate with GMail or Yahoo! Mail and play off the monstrous business interests against each other.
Also, it's a good thing that the information they mine from the social structure of your contacts is useless. (Moreso, the joint distributions of contact networks among multiple employees in a large organization, or the temporal patterns therein... nothing to see here, move along now)
But most of all, it's a good thing that everyone commenting on the deal knows all there is to know about the product, its futures, and their value to Microsoft and other companies, due no doubt to vast, deep expertise in the field.
Because if the above were not true, well, then it would be just a windbag yelling into an echo chamber, and that simply would not do!
Yes, it's a great thing that everything has already been invented, cannot be improved, and is already maximally efficient. We're done now, let's go get a low-paying service job (or, worse, program Java for a big company)
"More than a feature." - My guess: [Forward Looking Statements]
Xobni is able to be integrated into 'all' email clients.
Lots of people do this because its FREE and provides some immediate benefit (enhanced information, etc.).
When you use Xobni, your 'information' is synced back to Xobni's servers. From this they create a social network-like thing that is sort of a hybrid between Plaxo (contact management) and LinkedIn. [Even if you only try out Xobni, they still extract your 'email social structure' to add to the big picture]
Suddenly Xobni is a Social Productivity Network riding on top of Email that is super useful to businesses and that people are willing to PAY FOR to get enhanced networking capabilities, productivity tracking, spam filtering, mobile directory[People include their cell phone nums. in emails all the time]. It requires almost no effort from people to establish 'connections', email is ubiquitous, blah social, blah networking, blah aggregate, blah circle jerk.
> Duh? What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook?
Everyone can criticize all they want, but this is a clear case of asymmetric information. Xobni knows a lot more about their value than you or I do. But even with the limited information I have, I have to say they are a lot more than just a feature.
With the Yahoo! Mail release (and I'm guessing GMail/hotmail/other client releases in the pipeline), what they're really doing is being a hub for all your contacts, attachments, and online interactions, INDEPENDENT of your email client. I use 4 different email addresses, and at least a couple different email clients for various reasons.
With this synchronization across mail clients, Xobni has transformed itself from an analytics feature to a full-fledged network to manage your contacts and interactions. I could see this integrating powerfully with, for example, Salesforce.com.
You don't value your own company, value is set by the market, and in this case the market said 20 mil.
Will it increase or decrease depends on the actions of Xobni and the market.
The arguments that the founders "know their potential value" better than us is completely irrelevant. Don't you think MS investigated the company first, it's offerings and it's future before making an offer? I own a startup and think it could be worth billions someday... does that make it so?
Huh? One company valued xobni at $20m - how is that the be-all, end-all of valuation? If I value my company at $500,000 and someone offers me $100,000, am I wrong or are they wrong (or are we both right) when I turn them down?
Answer: you don't have enough information to make a decision.
until someone else gives you a $500,000 valuation your company is not worth 500k. So far Xobni is only worth 20 million. They are hoping that one day they will be worth more.
-Nobody really knows the details of the offer.
-Nobody really knows what Xobni has in store.
-Nobody really knows how much say the VC's had.
Most companies start with a feature that becomes a product which becomes a company. The Outlook plugin could be the tip of a much bigger spear. I have never used xobni b/c I don't use outlook but I can see a bunch of possible directions for them. Who knows though? Maybe it is a minor feature. But anyone in a startup knows enough to know how little they know about the inner workings of another company. And anyone who's tried to raise money knows how thoroughly you have to explain your long term plans and revenue models. If you can't say I'm going to be a $100 million dollar company in X years b/c of Y and Z reasons, you're not going to get a series A. You'd also know that $20 million is a small offer after a series A.