Did you know that most people have hundreds (and thousands in some cases) of photos sitting in their inbox either forgotten or simply archived, with many going untouched for years? Did you know that email is the primary photo sharing and communications tool for over half of US households?
When Xoopit set out to reinvent the inbox, they were humbled by the realization that while it is still the primary form of online communication between people, it was also in need of a creative “r”evolution in order to help people stay connected to not only their contacts, but also their valuable content.
Despite the explosion in the popularity of social networks, email continues to remain a primary entry point to the online world for most people. Radicati Group projected nearly 1.2 billion hosted email inboxes worldwide as of October 2007 and its is expected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2011.
At the very least, the inbox is the largest untapped social network in the world has remained relatively unchanged for two decades, until now.
I’ve written about the concept of Inbox 2.0 over the years describing it this way, “To be honest, Inbox 2.0 is going to be the system that places less emphasis on the social graph and focuses more on helping me leverage and organize my relationships and contacts, follow up, tasks, calendar, etc., gives me anytime, anywhere access, but also integrates my other content and digital assets all through one management-rich hub that’s worthy of keeping open all day long.”
Xoopit is bringing the Social Web to the inbox. Some refer to the socialization of email as “Inbox 2.0.” The company simply thinks about it as helping people more effectively manage their relationships and also the content that’s important to them.
And, they have some pretty influential supporters. In addition to launching in Private Beta today, the company also announced a $5 million Series A led by Accel Partners and Foundation Capital.
Xoopit is the first application for Webmail to help people discover, organize and share rich media in the Inbox.
It brings the power of the social web to email by combining the benefits of social networks and media management within the email environment. Xoopit finds the pictures, videos, and files that ar buried in webmail’s gigabytes of free storage and allows users to share, comment, and post them to their contacts on other social networks and blogs.
The Private Beta provides initial client support for Google’s Gmail and automatically imports shared media from the top photo and video sharing networks such as YouTube, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly, and Picasaweb.
Xoopit Benefits:
- Makes email more social
- Xoopit unearths the pictures, videos, and files and helps people share, comment, and post them across social networks, without leaving the inbox
- Initially, we support Google’s Gmail and automatically import shared media from the top photo and video sharing networks such as YouTube, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly, and Picasaweb
- The Xoopit private beta is also available as a Gmail plugin for FireFox, on iGoogle, and on the web.
The company is also working on integrating support for the top web mail systems including Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL and popular social networks.
“Email was designed 35 years ago to function as a messaging tool. Today, it’s become the de facto media sharing tool for 1 billion + consumers around the world, “ said Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, Partner at Accel, lead investors of top social network Facebook. “Xoopit is about bringing the engagement and discovery of the social web to email.”
“We understand that solving the email problem at Internet scale is going to take some serious infrastructure. Xoopit has developed a powerful new personal indexing platform capable of making email systems more useful and connecting the mail systems to the rest of the web.” said Charles Moldow, General Partner at Foundation Capital.
You can apply for the Private Beta here (invitation code embedded in link). First come, first served.
PLEASE DIGG!
Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.
xoopit email inbox2.0 inbox+2.0 2.0 web+2.0 private+beta beta social+network social+web social+media social media network web bub.blicio.us
{ 3 comments }
