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Check Out The Xobni App For BlackBerry

At the BlackBerry Developer Conference, I got a chance to sit down and talk with Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte about the upcoming application for the BlackBerry platform. While it's still a few months away, the Xobni mobile app looks like an excellent way to easily manage thousands of contacts. Keep reading for some more details and a video demonstration.

If you're not familiar with Xobni, the company makes corporate and consumer-grade plug-ins for Outlook that organize and searche e-mails to find connections between senders and recipients. The BlackBerry version will essentially create a secondary address book that scans a user's e-mails for contact addresses, phone numbers, social networking accounts, and more. It pulls out contact information from the e-mails, and it's intelligent enough to know when a contact number changes.

There's a sophisticated data-mining algorithm that gives relevance to your contacts. For example, the contacts won't be listed alphabetically, but rather by how many times you've had a connection with them via e-mail. There's a search bar on the face of the app that can help eliminate the need to scroll through hundreds (or thousands) of contacts.

It looks like some very interesting stuff, and it's actually quite powerful because it allows you to find and receive contact information even if they're not on your phone's address book. Bonforte said it was a natural step to work with Research In Motion because nearly 50% of Xobni's customers use BlackBerry handsets. Unlike other platforms, he also said RIM is giving developers a ton of access into core functionalities like the address book, and this is leading to an environment that is enabling powerful new programs. The company is also working hard to make sure the app is smooth and quick because even a few hundredths of a second delay can irk users, Bonforte said.

Xobni's aiming for an early 2010 release, and there's no word on the exact pricing model yet. Watch the video below for a better understanding of what it does. I have a feeling this will be a hit.

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