Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

feeds.feedburner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#21

Post by jgrahamc »

greatapps wrote: post #10
jgrahamc wrote: post #6

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 t…

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?

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.

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#22

Post by bigtoga »

josefresco wrote: post #20

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 cou…

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.

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#23

Post by cstejerean »

bigtoga wrote: post #22
josefresco wrote: post #20

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 cou…

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.

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#24

Post by wumi »

greatapps wrote: post #9
wumi wrote: post #3

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 wa…

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 al…

"'information' thrown up about email traffic."

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)

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#25

Post by parker »

systems wrote: post #18
Tichy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what could it be?

its obvious, just look beyond the UI 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 S…

So then, if Bill Gates has ever complimented his dog for bringing him the morning paper...... is his dog the next Google?

Hot. Scoop.

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#26

Post by greatapps »

jgrahamc wrote: post #21
greatapps wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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, P…

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.

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#28

Post by utnick »

pg wrote: post #27

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 think most people didn't read the article... its just a topic that everyone wants to discuss and see discussed

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#29

Post by kirubakaran »

utnick wrote: post #28
pg wrote: post #27

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 think most people didn't read the article... its just a topic that everyone wants to discuss and see discussed

True. I always read the comments first. Comments make the main article fall under one of these three categories:

1. Not worth reading the whole post. Here is the summary.

2. Inflammatory / Trollish. But here is a good discussion.

3. Must read the article. Here are some great insights.

Re: Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m

#30

Post by greatapps »

wumi wrote: post #24
greatapps wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

"'information' thrown up about email traffic." 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 mes…

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].

Post reply on HN