Last Blog of the Semester

Before this class I had never blogged before. I think that I barely knew what a blog was and I didn't really understand what the purpose of them was. Now, about 16 weeks later, my prospective on blogs has totally changed. Having to complete a blog each week has really shown me the value that blogs have in many different facets of life; keeping people updated on happenings in the news, providing advice for consumer products, providing opinions about various trends and occurrences. Personally, I found the task of having to find something new to blog about every week that no one else might previously have blogged on, though it was often not my activity of choice, was valuable because it kept me up to date on various technology products and services that were coming out and being developed.

The most important thing I learned through the process was how and where to find information about new technologies that are out or that are coming out. I learned that things never stop moving and as fast as you can think of how cool a tool might be if it did this or that, someone is already working on making it a reality. I also learned that technology is everywhere and is really becoming something that the world is relying on more and more. The pace of technology is so evident in everyone's blogs from class it is hard to pick just one that stands out as the best or most interesting because I think they all show just how cool, and crazy, and somewhat creepy technology is.

Xobni

I was at a field visit for a class last Thursday and the man speaking to us casually mentioned a new system he was trying to interface with his Outlook. The name of the product is Xobni. At first I thought, "what the heck kind of name is that for a product?" Then I thought, "it down, Chan, so you can remember it for your blog this week!" So here I am, writing about this tool called Xobni. The program was developed by a San Francisco based start up company. It was founded by two men, Adam Smith and Matt Brezina in the spring of 2006. The company believes hat people spend too much time searching for conversations, attachments, and other information stored in their inbox.

Xobni is the tool to solve this problem. As you might have already noticed, Xobni is inbox spelled backwards. This was done to demonstrate the companies mission to "take back the email inbox for users." Xobni helps emailers by creating a profile for each individual that emails a person. The profiles contain relationship statistics, information regarding the contact, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. Xobni can be downloaded right from the website. Once downloaded, users will see the Xobni toolbar appear and when a new email arrives, the senders full communication history appears in the Xobni sidebar. The tool also do things such as extract contact information from emails and keep track of the users busy schedule.

This tool could prove to make industry people, like those in the events industry more organized, and help to keep track of contacts that maybe people don't think they need, and then realize they suddenly do and have to searching back through their emails from weeks past to find that one particular number. I know I personally hate that! If I was cool enough to have a job and an outlook email address at work right now, I would definitely think about downloading Xobni to help keep me organized, it looks really cool!