A Xobni Alternative for your Microsoft Outlook

Xobni, if you are new, is a popular Microsoft Outlook plugin that lets you know more about the sender of an email. You get to see the sender’s picture, Linked profile, tweets and, if public, their Facebook profile right next to the email message. Xobni probably uses the sender’s name and email address to bring this information and it is quite efficient at that.

If you write the word Inbox backwards, you get Xobni. If you write Evil Xobni backwards, you get Live Inbox – that’s exactly the name of a new Outlook plugin which is showcasing itself as a better alternative to Xobni. The feature set is similar and so is the UI - compare the screenshots of Live Inbox with Xobni below to get an idea.

If you have used Xobni before, you’ll have absolutely no trouble getting to speed with Live Inbox as this new program has lot in common with Xobni.

Once you install the plugin, you need to connect it with your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. It then offers a rich profile of the email sender in the sidebar, much like Xobni, and if there are multiple matches, you can pick any of the matching profiles manually.

The bottom half of the Live Inbox sidebar displays a list of email messages and file attachments that you have exchanged with the sender in the past. Xobni does this as well. There’s a unified instant search box to help you quickly find contacts or one of your old emails. The Live Inbox website says that it returns search results “50 times faster than Outlook” though I did not experience that difference in my testing.

Live Inbox is expected to become available for $29.95 though you may use this link to download the free 30-day trial right now. Xobni is available in both free (that’s what I use) and paid edition that costs $9.99 per month.

Live Inbox does mostly work as advertised - I tried it on Microsoft Outlook 2010 running on a Windows 7 machine - and, because of the one-time fee, it may appeal to Xobni Pro users who otherwise have to pay $9.99 per month. If you are using the free version of Xobni, I see no reason for making the switch. That said, I find it amusing that the company, which has only created an almost exact replica of another successful product without much innovation, is still calling their inspiration “evil.”

Here’s an ET Now video where Mahesh Murthy and Sudhir Syal discuss Live Inbox from the funding perspective. The website has no information about the founders but it looks like a product of Instacoll, the same team that worked with Sabeer Bhatia in the past to create Live Documents, an online office suite.

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Microsoft Has Sold 450 Million Copies of Windows 7

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7, its flagship OS, has sold 450 million copies worldwide.

Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft’s Windows division, also announced that Windows 7 is now (finally) being used by more people than Windows XP. Sinofsky made these announcements at the Microsoft Build conference in Anaheim, Calif. Tuesday.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Launches Windows 8 [LIVE]

In addition to announcing 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold, Sinofsky also boasted that 542 million people are now using Windows Live.

While the growth of Windows 7 must be pleasing to Microsoft executives, the big show today is the unveiling of Windows 8. Stay tuned for more on Microsoft’s next-generation operating system.

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Microsoft Unveils Un-Photogenic Patty Stress Test Robot

In what would amount as a historic occasion over at Microsoft Surface HQ, a team member officially blogged about Patty. There’s even a video of it in action. Wait, who’s Patty? Patty is a wonderful robot that conducts stress tests on the screens of Microsoft Surface units. See, with lots of touching and pressure involved when using a platform like the Surface, it’s important that the exterior can withstand the wear and tear.

Unfortunately due to repeated technical errors, a full embed is not possible at this time. For best results, open the source link down south for the good stuff.

Okay, all it shows is Patty going about her work. Not exactly a Michael Bay epic in the vein of those awful Transformers sequels, but certainly a rare glimpse into a real live machine. This reminds us of a recent development over at Foxconn, the Chinese company that’s the world’s leading maker of electronic gadgets: apparently a large percentage of the workforce will be replaced by robots. That would be interesting to see.

In the accompanying brief blog post, the author hinted at the Squiddy, which is another testing device kept under wraps at the moment. Though watching a robot at work is fascinating, we do lament the fact that robots are still pure function these days. When will form be as important? In other words, when can robots start getting sexy? After all, they’ll be part of our everyday lives in a matter of years.

Source Microsoft Square blog

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Windows 8 Will Feature An App Store Reveals Microsoft

Microsoft has today revealed that their new Windows 8 OS will indeed have its own “App Store”. Confirming the rumours that have been circulating since a number of Windows 8 development documents were leaked in the middle of 2010. Together with a few leaked Windows 8 screenshots earlier this year that idicated a navigation tab for an “App Store”.

Microsoft will now be matching Apple who has already launched it own App Store for its OS X software announcing the new App Store ins a list of features within a blog post by Microsoft’s Windows president, Steven Sinofsky called ” Introducing the Team”.

Even though Microsoft has confirmed a team is now working on the new Windows 8 App Store no other details about the feature were disclosed within the blog post. But as always when we hear anything else we will keep you updated.

You can read the full Steven Sinofsky blog post titled “Introducing the Team” on the Microsoft website.

Source: CNET : Microsoft

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