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Albeit all the preaching we do and all the common sense you think people would/should apply, Outlook is today the most popular e-mail tool in the world. And some Frisco based guys think that the program is so poorly suited for most people’s intensive e-mail habits that they have founded a company, Xobni, intended to fix it.

Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) has produced free software that indexes all Outlook e-mail and makes messages quickly and easily searchable.

You might think Google Desktop would do the same for you (does for me for years now), but Xobni, which its creators call an “intelligent filter,” adds a few more features. When it scours the inbox, it extracts phone numbers it thinks are associated with the sender. So when a user searches for a person, Xobni presents the number in a side panel. The software also interprets the social relationships between people who are sending messages to each other by interpreting the to: and cc: headers of each message.

In addition, the data collected are visualized during normal action per user or per object, and can also be analyzed in details through Xobni Analytics. Interesting stats like most frequent mailer or mailee, fastest responder, mails per timeframe etc. can be easily and in a Google Analytics type way be retrieved for whatever purpose you might have.

The company raised $4 million from the investment funds of Vinod Khosla, a Sun Microsystems co-founder, and Niklas Zennstrom, one of the creators of Skype. In February, Bill Gates demonstrated the program at Microsoft’s San Jose developers’ conference and called it “the next generation in social networking.”

The idea is to sell the tools to companies later in time and Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlooktowards the popular Web-based services Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well as social networks like Facebook and Linkedin. Apple Mail is also on the list.

While discussing Xobni I was also pointed out to ClearContext, which seems to do similar things. Did not try it though.

My colleague Gregor pointed me out to some interesting news around Google Analytics:

Apart from hiring tons of developers, Google has also hired/bought some fantastic designers. Jeffrey Veen (formerly of Measure Map) and his team have completely redesigned Google Analytics. The new version was unveiled today, though it will be a few more weeks until folks like us can actually give it a go. In the meantime, have a look at the most important features, described in this longish blog post.