More TechCrunch: New Approaches to E-Mail

I'm back for the second and final day of the TechCrunch 40 conference, and two of the first demos onstage involve fresh approaches to e-mail.

Xobni--which is Inbox spelled backwards--introduced Xobni Insight, a plug-in for Outlook that provides a whole bunch of new functions related to the people you communicate with via e-mail:

Some of the features in Insight look like they might be overkill even for hardcore e-mail users, like elaborate graphs that chart how much mail you've gotten from people. But a lot of it looks really useful, like a window that aggregates all the attachments you've gotten from one person in one place, and one that figures out the connections between people whose messages are in your inbox, creating a sort of ad-hoc social network.

I'd use Xobni Insight if it worked in Notes, which we use at PCW; Esther Dyson, who's an onstage "expert" here, just asked the Xobni folks if they'll make it work with Eudora. The company says it has plans to support other e-mail clients; a beta of the Outlook version is available now.

Then there's Orgoo, which ambitiously aims to merge all your e-mail, IM, SMS, and other communications into one service that's available both on PCs and your phone. I've seen enough all-in-one inboxes come and go over, oh, the past fifteen years or so that I'm instinctively skeptical when new ones come along. And Orgoo is still in private beta. But it looks like it'll be worth checking out when it goes live...

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