As I was skimming through technology articles this week, I noticed a company that has put what seems to be a new twist on email. But unlike a subject I am typically familiar with, email marketing, this product hits a different topic regarding business email. For those of us who have struggled with Outlook to manage our email correspondence, a new software plugin called Xobni has created an interesting approach on good old business or even personal email. Xobni, which is “inbox” spelled backwards, provides a robust analytics tool for your Outlook inbox.

While I haven’t tried Xobni myself, as an analytics aficionado, I am interested in anything that attempts to bring a story to numbers. The plugin extracts contact information (telephone numbers, addresses, etc.) automatically and provides an enhanced inbox search feature. Xobni uses a social network approach by giving Outlook a nice dashboard showing who is connected to whom. Some of the coolest features promise to display patterns regarding the time of correspondence, frequency of contact, and also social/business groupings of related contacts turning your regular inbox into an intelligent inbox.

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