Webware

IT pros will often tell you that a lot of consumer technology isn't ready for the enterprise. It's not secure, it's not priced correctly, it can't be administered, yada yada. That doesn't stop businesspeople from using consumer tools in their jobs, though. It just stops the people who make the tools from profiting from their use.

Where there are IT administrators, there are budgets, and where there are budgets, there's market opportunity. And I'm not surprised that two very solid personal productivity tools are getting business versions this week and business models to match.

Xobni provides a heads-up display for e-mail.

(Credit: Xobni)

The Outlook add-on maker Xobni on Monday released Xobni Enterprise, a new version of the product with links into traditional business data sources. While the free and Plus levels of Xobni will search Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to give users more information about the people who are e-mailing them, the enterprise version will also tap into Salesforce.com, Sharepoint, and corporate directory services. It can also be extended to work with proprietary business apps. This could be pretty cool: users will be able to see latest internal database info from people they're communicating with them, automatically when they're doing the communicating.

And to help IT teams keep their users in line with whatever (ridiculous and restrictive) policies their companies have on employee access to outside data, Enterprise Xobni admins can also turn off access to the app's Twitter features and other parts of the product.

Admins, of course, can provision employees' computers for access to Xobni data from a central console.

Xobni Enterprise starts at $30 a user a year, with prices going down with volume or up for access to enterprise data sources.

The Business edition of SugarSync lets admins pool storage and control access.

(Credit: SugarSync)

On Tuesday, the cloud file synchronization product SugarSync gets a business version design for teams. The Business version of the product features pooled storage and central IT control. Customers pay for each user ($10 a month) and for the storage they want, in 100GB increments. Admins have access to all this storage, too. If an employee leaves the company, they can disable access, and then sign on as that person, and recover data. There's no "remote wipe" feature to remove company data from an employee's computer, but CEO Laura Yecies told me she's thinking about it.

A useful feature lets users send files to other people via the SugarSync service, instead of through e-mail. This could compete with the useful, but single-purpose and somewhat expensive product, YouSendIt, except that SugarSync's single-file transfer function can't password-protect files.

In the cloud sync category, SugarSync lagged its major competitor Dropbox in releasing of a free, limited version of the service. There's one now, and Yecies says, "We're finding that free is a good business." She bases this on "conversion" to the paid product, which she says is 5 percent to 10 percent, depending on the offers presented to users.

I use and pay for my own SugarSync account and highly recommend the service. Compared with geek favorite service Dropbox, it's got more flexible configuration options and better mobile device support. The business version freaks me out, personally--I don't want any IT manager getting access to files my hard drive--but this sounds like a good product for the security-conscious IT exec who wants to provide a team file-sharing product along with off-site backup to users.

Sure, Google Voice is cool, but it's not necessarily the best Web-meets-phone service one can imagine, is it? The field is still open, and switchboard-in-the-cloud company Ribbit (a division of BT) will stir things up when users get their hands on Ribbit Mobile, a new telephony service for consumers.

Like Google Voice as of last week, Ribbit Mobile adds services to your existing mobile phone number, using a standard telephone company service called Conditional Call Forwarding. You set up your phone service to route to the service when you don't pick up the phone, and it gives you all its features on the calls it then grabs: voicemail, forwarding, routing, and so on.

Ribbit Mobile isn't purely a mobile app, name notwithstanding. Rather, the "Mobile" means that your phone number becomes nomadic, moving to and temporarily setting up residence on whatever voice platform you want to use at any moment, be it a mobile number, a landline, or a VoIP system. Users set up their Ribbit Mobile features on a Flash-based Web site. Smartphone apps are coming, as is, most likely, another Apple app store approval drama.

Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs doesn't seem to want Ribbit compared directly to Google Voice, since Ribbit is a telephony platform company with ambitions well beyond the consumer app. Ribbit's revenues to date have come from its platform business. But Ribbit Mobile will be compared with Google Voice, and it's a fair and interesting battle.

Ribbit Mobile does a lot, but the Flash app is a little busy.

(Credit: Ribbit)

Ribbit Mobile bests Google Voice in a few key ways. Its voicemail transcription feature will be better, although users won't get that feature for nothing. Free users will get machine speech-to-text, with likely the same quality of amusing and borderline-useless transcriptions as in Google Voice. But paid users will also have the option of using human-assisted transcription so their voicemail-to-text messages are actually sensible and useful.

Ribbit can also connect to VoIP services like Skype or SIP phones (Google works with phone-company phones and SIP, but not directly with Skype), as well as voice-chat features in some IM services, and you can transfer calls between phones while you're talking.

... Read more

Xobni streams contacts' tweets.

(Credit: Xobni)

Microsoft Outlook search extension Xobni (Windows) gets a new extension of its own this week: Twitter.

Best known for speedily hunting down e-mail contacts and conversations in Microsoft Outlook, Xobni also has a social networking aspect. It includes photos courtesy of Facebook, phone numbers via Skype, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn profile information, corporate information from Hoover's, and now, a Twitter stream.

Click on the Twitter icon in the contact view to see a list of recent tweets. Icons below get you started on a reply, retweet, or new post. You can also follow, unfollow, and view the person's profile. Note that tweets may not be available for every Xobni contact. If they're not public and you're not an approved follower, you won't see much in the updates stream.

Associating a Twitter account with a contact isn't automatic. For each contact whose account you want to see, Xobni will trigger a search for matches. It will remember associations once you've approved them, making this a one-time process. You can also manually link a name to the contact you're viewing. We wish the Twitter extension were as smoothly integrated as the Facebook extension, which takes no legwork at all.

But if you do take the time to set up Twitter for some contacts, you'll be rewarded with a more intimate portrait of people in your casual and business circles. Instead of just a name, you might also see a face, a Skype number, and, with Twitter, a sense of your contact's personality and interests. Even if you're not attempting to humanize people you've never met in real life, Xobni's Twitter integration can also be a convenience tool that lets you post a tweet without having to close or hide Outlook.

While Twitter in Xobni covers the major bases, it won't replace dedicated desktop apps for heavy-duty tweeters. For that, see our roundup of five desktop Twitter helpers.

The latest update--Xobni 1.8.3 build 8559--also includes back-end adjustments to improve search speed, Windows 7 compatibility, and a handful of other tweaks and big fixes.

Seventy new products will be announced at the DemoFall 09 conference Tuesday and Wednesday. Looking over the lineup one finds, as usual, some companies refreshing existing product lines, many entering into crowded markets with marginally better if unexciting technology, and others having solutions for very specific vertical markets. But some, thank goodness, do sound more generally interesting. Some are trying to solve big problems in new ways, or are addressing emerging technology or business issues that other companies haven't yet even recognized as markets. And then there are those that sound too weird to work.

Those are the companies that I will be paying special attention to at Demo. Here they are, and why. Note that some of these write-ups are based on incomplete information from the companies, so the descriptions may not be exactly right. Watch CNET's DemoFall coverage for the latest updates and on-the-spot reviews.

Opportunity: Combating e-mail overload

Nubli EmailSmarts helps you wade through your in-box.

(Credit: Nubli)

Liaise and Nubli EmailSmarts are both showing products to combat e-mail overload. Liaise, for which I got an advance briefing, watches what you type in Outlook and when it sees you creating what looks like an actionable message ("Pam, I need those copies today!"), it creates trackable items flagged by person, date, and task. You can easily modify how the system flags items, and mark off items as they're done. More importantly, when you're going into a meeting with people, you can print out a list of everything you've committed others to. It works with Outlook so far, other systems to come later -- including, possibly, instant-messaging apps.

EmailSmarts works the other way. It prioritizes incoming e-mails to you based on some presumably brilliant algorithm that takes into account how you reply to people as well. Both Liaise and EmailSmarts are Outlook plug-ins. See also: Xobni (from the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008). Microsoft business development people are sniffing around at these apps, so there is an exit strategy for good e-mail add-ons.

Trend: Crowdsourced traffic data

TrafficTalk sounds basically like a voice chat room for people who are driving, with a focus on traffic. Obviously it'll put people in a room based on location and direction of travel, and possibly based on destination. (I can't help but think of CB radios.) Sounds a lot safer that using a screen-based traffic-reporting tool, although how drivers are supposed to monitor this and have their usual mobile phone conversations at the same time I don't get. See also: Waze, which will be showing an update at Demo.

Trend: Price pressure on cloud computing

The space you get is equal to the space you make.

(Credit: Symform)

Symform is an online data backup service for business, but instead of hosting its own storage servers, Symform give subscribers only as much online storage as they make available on their own network to others. Since Symform isn't actually providing storage, it can sell its service more cheaply than a standard online backup provider. Of course the data is encrypted. And since it's based on business-class servers, it sounds more reliable than Crashplan, which is a similar service for consumer PCs. But it'll be a tough sell. I expect that most businesses will pay the extra money to know who is storing their backups. (This is the "too weird to work" concept I was talking about in my intro.)

Opportunity: Modernizing online dating

DateCheck will make it easier to stalk, I mean, check out, prospective dates. The clever motto says it all: "Look up before you hook up." Of course everyone who uses the Internet checks out potential dates first via Google and Facebook. This just might make it easier.

Gelato is supposed to make creating a believable, sorry, I mean compelling, online profile easy. It scans your existing accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix to piece together a profile of what you're interested in, and it keeps it up to date for you. It also might be more accurate than what people say about themselves.

Emerging business: Personal data aggregation

OrganIP from Digitrad has a compelling pitch: It is supposed to connect you to the people you want using just their names. I have a feeling, though, that it will require that users register their names, possibly on the .tel top-level domain, since Digitrad also runs Yes.tel, which is a contact management service that connects your personal domain to your personal and social services like Skype, Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter.

... Read more

Tech blog TechCrunch is hosting the third iteration of its annual startup show next week, where 50 brand new sites and services are slated to be launched. The show was started in early-2007 by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and entrepreneur and Weblogs Inc. co-founder Jason Calacanis as an alternative to the DEMO conference series. Instead of paying to be on stage (once selected) as is done at DEMO, companies selected by Arrington and Calacanis get to present for free.

Next week at the TechCrunch 50 conference, 50 new companies will take the stage and make a pitch, while about a hundred others--some new, some retreads from prior TechCrunch events, fight for attention on a paid show floor called the "Demo Pit."

How many of these companies that launched at a TechCrunch event have gone on to fame and glory? It was hard enough for these companies to make a mark when they were fighting for attention against dozens of other start-ups. It's even harder to continue momentum from a conference after the dust settles. Below are five that have done quite well, and five that haven't.

The good

Mint

Mint made its public debut at the TechCrunch40 in 2007, where it won the audience choice award, netting it $50,000 in cash (that it didn't really need).

The site presents users with a bold option: give us your bank account, mortgage, and credit card information and we'll help you track how you're spending your money and give you tips and tools on how to save.

Since 2007, it's since gone on to raise two additional rounds of funding, bringing the total past $30 million. The site also has 1.4 million registered users. and claims to be "tracking $175 billion in transactions, $47 billion in assets and has identified more than $300 million in potential savings for its users." It's also won numerous awards, including a Webware 100 award in 2009, a "50 best websites of 2009" recognition from Time Magazine, as well a nod from PCMag's "Top 100 websites of 2009"

Postbox

Postbox, a Mozilla-based e-mail client that launched at last year's TechCrunch50 show, has done well for itself inside a year. For one, it's publicly available and fully out of beta--which is more unusual than it should be. It's also a paid and license-based product, meaning the company isn't just giving it away for free.

Earlier this year Postbox won a Webware 100 award in the communications category as voted on by CNET readers. It was also picked as Lifehacker's "Top 10 Up-and-coming products" shortly after its release.

Xobni

Another e-mail utility graduate, Xobni, came from the first TechCrunch show back in late-2007, when there were just 40 companies presenting. The product, called "Insight," was a plug-in for Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software, and could replace Microsoft's built-in search tool, as well as show users details on the frequency of those they were e-mailing with.

In the months prior to 2007's TechCrunch 40, Xobni had picked up a little more than $4 million in funding. The product, however, remained in private beta until mid-2008, after which it was opened up to the public. Then, in early January of this year, the company announced another round of funding, totaling $7 million, including Cisco Systems as one of the investors.

The company also released a paid version of its service in mid-July that costs $30 a year and adds extra features on top of the free product. It remains a product for the desktop version Microsoft Outlook only, although... Read more

A few months ago, CNET Editor Rafe Needleman lauded Xobni, an e-mail search plug-in for Outlook, but wondered where the money would come from to keep the company afloat. On Tuesday night, Xobni responded with a version update, Xobni 1.8, and the introduction of a new premium service, Xobni Plus.

The free version of Xobni 1.8 features a slightly revamped interface that loads faster thanks to a switch from a slightly draggy custom UI (built using C#) to HTML rendering. More important to most users, Xobni's sidebar has gotten richer on the whole, searching the subjects of e-mail attachments in addition to contacts and messages, and stuffing more details into the pop-up box you see after hovering over an item. Xobni now also displays thumbnails of Facebook images in the search results in addition to the profile screen--but you'll only see these for contacts who have enabled third-party extensions in their privacy settings.

You also can't fail to notice that a new Google search bar at the bottom of the sidebar replicates the contents you type into Xobni's search. If you launch Google's search, Xobni will open the results in a new browser tab. You can hide the feature in Options to reclaim more screen space.

Microsoft Outlook, by Xobni Plus--screenshots

These new features, while nifty additions for regular Xobni users, are dwarfed by those introduced in Xobni Plus. The one-time fee of $29.95 for one computer (and $9.95 for each additional) gets you search access to appointments and your Outlook task list. It also opens up the search bar to let you search phrases in quotes or type in Boolean search terms. A new Advanced button flanking the search bar lets Plus users build granular searches for contacts and messages, including flagging e-mails with attachments. This Advanced button is also visible in the free version as a marketing tool, but won't be operational.

Searching the full text in a conversation is another useful, often-requested feature that takes life in Xobni Plus. (The free version will let you see conversations and filter e-mails by subject, but does not provide a filter for full-text search.) Another filter helps you wade through bulky e-mail threads by stripping out all but the direct messages. Then there's this subtle, but terrific, help: Xobni Plus adds its index of incoming and outgoing e-mail addresses to the To field of every message you compose. Even if Outlook hasn't captured the sender's info, you'll be able to quickly e-mail them without hunting through your in-box for their address.

Advanced search and the thumbnail search result are two additions to Xobni Plus.

(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)

Xobni continues to handily and speedily find messages and contacts. Searches still aren't instantaneous, especially if you're working from a bloated in-box, but they're zippier than Outlook's default. Our greatest complaint is that Outlook's program window must be enlarged for you to see many of these new features. Since the profile window in Xobni's sidebar doesn't give you a scroll bar, people who work with Outlook condensed into a small window may miss the extra features until they expand the application interface.

Xobni 1.8 is free for use, but will have some features, like Advanced Search, disabled. You can use Xobni Plus free for 14 days. Get started by activating Xobni Plus from the sidebar (you can't miss the prompts) and scrolling to the bottom of the sign-up page.

Hewlett-Packard, maker of printers and other stuff that sits in your office not being terribly interesting, is working on an intelligent social-network application for your mobile phone, called Friendlee.

Friendlee keeps track of who you interact with the most, and organizes your friends list in that order. Status updates show what those contacts are up to, as well as the local time and whether their phone is on, off, or set to silent. You'll even be able to see where your contacts are, similar to Google Latitude. You, like your contacts, will be able to control who can see your information. The idea puts us in mind of Xobni, an e-mail plug-in that shows all sorts of fascinating--i.e. useless--stats about your e-mail contacts.

A BlackBerry prototype of Friendlee was previewed at this year's Wireless Enterprise Symposium, and the app is currently being tested at HP's Palo Alto, Calif., social computing lab, according to the BBC. The research team, headed by Professor Bernardo Huberman, analyzed interaction via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and came to the conclusion that your phone is more interested in direct, reciprocal contact than building a giant circle of friends. We could have told you that--can we have a research grant to mess about on Twitter as well, please?

Huberman and friends will present the app at the Mobile HCI conference in Bonn, Germany, in mid-September. Friendlee currently runs on Windows Mobile and Google Android. One of the most interesting-looking features is a recommendation engine that lets your close contacts recommend and give advice on businesses and people. Yes, people, "both socially and professionally." Now that sounds like fun.

(Source: Crave UK)

After making a splash helping Windows users quickly search for conversations and contacts in their endless Outlook in-boxes with Xobni, the e-mail organizer company shared its plan on Monday to make the same service available for BlackBerry.

Xobni wouldn't elaborate on any program details, like how exactly it will look and work on the BlackBerry, but they did say that it will involve integration with the phone's address book.

"The app will be focused on contact and relationship management and bring a lot of the relationship features people like from Xobni in Outlook to the BlackBerry," added Xobni's co-founder, Matt Brezina.

If I were to take a stab at what's in store, I'd guess that Xobni's BlackBerry debut will include the Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, and statistics information found in Xobni for Windows. The emphasis on relationship management rather than e-mail organization and search hints that shortcutting to e-mail messages from your BlackBerry contact list isn't an immediate part of Xobni's mobile plan--but we just don't know.

What we do know is that Xobni's BlackBerry version is expected to be available sometime in the summer. It won't be tied to corporate policies, and the download will be available through BlackBerry App World. It's not yet clear if the app will be compatible with phones whose operating systems predate version 4.2 of the BlackBerry device software.

Until more details trickle out, you can sign up in advance here.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicks off the Technology Tasting event:"We believe the majority of the sharing that's going to happen in the world isn't going to be on just one site."

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

After announcing Monday morning that it's opening up more of the Facebook API that will allow the creation of new stand-alone applications that use more of the Facebook data stream than they could have previously, the company hosted an event in the afternoon where developers demonstrated their use of the new expanded feed.

Plaxo and Seesmic CEOs showcased their new Open Stream-using apps. A Facebook developer showed a new "demonstration" Adobe Air app. Microsoft showed off a whizzy user interface experiment (video near bottom of post). There was also a surprise announcement about OpenID.

Plaxo showed an enhanced two-way link between the Facebook social network and the Plaxo system. Once a user connects their Plaxo and Facebook accounts together, then their Facebook friends become Plaxo contacts, and updates on the Facebook activity stream also show up in Plaxo. Likewise, when the user updates his or her Plaxo status, it can (optionally) get reflected to their Facebook account. Marketing guy John McCrea told me, "You shouldn't have to re-friend people," when you move from one network to another, and he said he's looking forward to other social networks opening up so he can make Plaxo an even more utilitarian social connector. In particular, he said he'd like to have Plaxo recognize LinkedIn for business contacts and Geni for family connections. But their APIs aren't open enough for that to work yet, he said.

Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur showed off the next release of Seesmic Desktop.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur showed off the upcoming beta of Seesmic Desktop, the company's new TweetDeck competitor. It gives users full two-way integration to their Facebook accounts from within the app. It can, optionally, intermingle your Twitter and Facebook alerts into one activity stream in your Seesmic interface, or separate them into different streams. (As before, it supports multiple Twitter accounts and lets you save searches and user lists, which feature-wise, gives it an edge over Tweetdeck.) It's also worth noting that since we first saw Seesmic Desktop, the interface seems to have been cleaned up a bit. The new version should be out this week.

Facebook's own Justin Bishop showed a proof-of-concept Adobe Air app that lets you interact with your Facebook account without firing up a Web browser. Bishop said Facebook will continue to develop the app, but at the same time the company does not want to compete with other Facebook Air app makers (like Seesmic). You can get the app from a link on the Facebook blog.