Xobni – the social extension of Outlook™

While reading my usual feeds, I came across this wonderful add-in for Outlook introduced in NY Times article.- “Xobni” (it’s funny that it is the word  “Inbox” spelled backwards 🙂 )

Xobni basically claims itself as a Email Search tool, much like Windows Search and GDS. But it is very much more than what it says it can do. People call it “Next generation of social networking”, etc.

When I installed it the immediate change I appreciated was it worked on ‘cached exchange mode‘. Then quite intelligently even while indexing it showed lot of interesting facts like my frequently mailing friend, my fastest replier and gathered everyone in my network into a list and started ranking them based on recent conversations. yet, it didn’t stop there, since I was working it was good enough to tell me that it would index the rest of my mail (those present in the local archive folders) in later time.

One of cool thing to note is the interface it has. The Xobni itself installs as a side bar in the outlook mail box, with various sections which includes Email analytics (frequency of mails received), Phone numbers (yes, it actually extracts phone numbers from the email), network contacts, past conversations and files exchanged in the mails. Apart from extracting individual statistics, Xobni can also give a complete analytics for the mail communication like average response (reply) time, mail traffic graph, etc…

Well so much for it’s additional features, but the search itself is quite impresive, enabling me to just view the message within the sidebar and do all my work within that space on the search lists.

You should take a look at the product video for a tour of all it’s features. They have launched a public beta just now. An old news but need a mention here: even BillG demoed Xobni in last Office Dev Conf during February, 2008.

I think this is worth a try! Hope the guys at xobni will keep on innovating!!

Summer Shopping spree – New Trinitron and Phillips

Oh boy!, It’s practically been a busy shopping time in my home past 2 weeks. But I should admit it was not just like any other times.

We have been holding on to a standard Onida 21″ TV which is quite out of date now. We have been longing since several months to ‘upgrade’ it but was just looking for some excuse (since the Onida was in excellently good form even after about 18 years of operation 🙂 God, I love the quality of the products of those times :|).

Well at last the wait was over, one fine day, my mom and dad decided to make the move. They call me up on that day (it turned out to be a Friday) evening and asked if I was fine with a ’29” Sony flat TV’. and, they continued if I was okay with a ‘Phillips DVD player’. I thought “well fine, since the names are well known and I know there would have been a research went on behind the scenes, it should be okay”. and I wouldn’t do less than agreeing to that, but I was too curious to play with that in detail. I traveled to home immediately without any hesitation.

When I reached home I could see a majestic ‘Sony Wega 29″ (Trinitron)”‘ sitting on the table. The reason i’m excited about this is because of the legendary Trinitron technology which you would appreciate if you have come across this brief history.

Next comes the ‘Phillips DVP5150 with Progressive scan‘ which is quite state of the art with excellent support that extends till DivX, Xvid, etc… Now I don’t have to worry about converting my DVD rips to again DVDs, but just could play it with this beauty!

All this happened two weeks back (during my last visit to my hometown) From then on, it’s quite different experience I get when I watch shows/ movie in our new TV. Yes, I know these are the ‘top class’ available in the market but who cares, as long as you fulfill your delights and you are happy – it should be fine! Though there are aspirations for a LCD + Home Theatre setup 😀 , I would have to resist that decision myself till sometime in the future.

Rest assured, seems this summer will be ‘well spent’ at home! 😉