Matt, co-founder of Xobni here. Adam and I started Xobni with the basic idea that google organized the world's public information, yet no one had done that for personal information (Adam's insight - not mine - he was in grad school looking for huge data sets to do stuff with). Not only are the personal data stores much larger than public data (most of which is in email), they also have to be treated different. Google (and products like gmail, google desktop, etc) don't get this. What we discovered after pounding our heads at this problem for 6 months was that Email Is About People and no current email clients understand that. Xobni was born.

We took that concept, and with $12k of YC money in the bank, we realized we would get Zero adoption if we asked people to switch to our new email client. We also realized the largest group of existing valuable email users are on Outlook (it has grown from 500M to 600M since we started Xobni).

So, we took our vision to Outlook via a plugin. People liked it. We solved some existing problems for people like keyword search (note: it is easier to acquire users when you solve a problem they know they have), and sprinkled in features that produce our true vision of organizing information around people and relationships.

Individuals pay for our premium Outlook product (Xobni Plus) and companies license it for their employees (Xobni Enterprise).

However, we've finally started to stretch the vision to new areas. We launched Xobni for BlackBerry - an app that takes our people-centric vision of personal information to the blackberry. And Xobni One, our cloud service that connects the xobni service between Outlook, BlackBerry, and upcoming new platforms.

Add onto that other cloud services (Salesforce.com, linkedin, etc) that you want to access and view from Xobni profiles on Outlook, BlackBerry, and everywhere else you maintain and manage relationships.

Would you like to be on your friend's Facebook page and see the phone number that Xobni extracted for you last time that friend called you on your BlackBerry? I would.

So, Outlook plugin can be seen as a means, not an end. Meanwhile, the plugin is damn useful :)

With Xobni One, they could be Dropbox for contacts.

Having all contacts from a range of services well organized in one place plus having it synced over a number of different devices would take a ton of pain out of everyday communication.