Xobni has new premium offer

According to the Bits Blog at the New York Times, Xobni has expanded their offerings to help clear a busy inbox to a premium version of their services. As of Tuesday night, they were offering Xobni Plus, and the premium service would include the normal tool box with search capabilities. To read the other capabilities offered, read the article here. They're looking for the number of free users to increase, because they have more confidence is in the business due to the offering of a premium product.

Cisco invests in Xobni

According to the New York Times, Xobni has received a $7 million of funding from Cisco. This is Cisco's latest venture in to Web 2.0 tools, following Jabber, Postpath, and WebEx.

Collaboration is a key focus of this investment, both between companies and the software that Cisco has been investing in.

“Cisco and Xobni actually share a very similar vision of using collaboration,” said Sandhya Venkatachalam, director of corporate development at Cisco. They both “center the experience around the people one wants to communicate with.”

Read more here.

Xobni Adds yet another tool

In an article at EWeek, we find out that Xobni has added yet another way to turn your Microsoft Outlook inbox into a social networking tool. We’ve already reported on their desire to make the inbox 2.0 worthy, and now, they’ve added LinkedIn tools to the inbox. They will now host LinkedIn public profiles in the left hand tool bar. The information detailed will be the person’s current employer, job title and it will link to their LinkedIn public profile. This announcement came a month after they ended testing their tool with beta.