Smartr inbox for Gmail
Smartr inbox for Gmail by San Francisco tech company, Xobni makes your inbox and address book smarter. After being founded in 2006 and launching publicly in 2008, Xobni now offers the Smartr app (for Outlook, Gmail, Android, BlackBerry or iPhones) which makes everyone and everything you have ever emailed, called, or texted from your Google Voice account instantly searchable. Each contact has a visually appealing profile with their photo, job title, email history and social networking updates from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, calling themselves the smarter address book.
The extension reminds us of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that makes using Gmail for business a bit more practical and efficient. Smartr is helpful for having a complete profile on a contact right from inside your Gmail account and because you can search by company name or other details, it is extremely useful for linking people together or doing follow up emails when you can’t quite remember a contact’s name. Additionally, the extension is useful as it offers a history chart of your communications with each contact, so you can see when your communication spiked or dipped and measures can be taken to correct either.
Xobni is expected to continue to grow as they have garnered funding by leading venture capitalists and angel investors including Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, RRE Ventures, Cisco Systems, BlackBerry Partners Fund, Baseline Ventures, Atomico Investments, and several angel investors with a total investment of $31.8 million.
Although it does not appear a vast amount of product improvements have been made since their 2010 launch, Xobni competitor MailBrowser, the free Gmail browser add-on offers a variation of Smartr inbox but focuses more on searching attachments and contacts than displaying social media updates, so both have their place for different types of business professionals.
Introductory video to Smartr:
