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One of the most underrated email plugins is Xobni, the Outlook plugin enhancement that adds some much-needed fantastic features for office professionals. Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) creates an information profile for every person you interact with and displays information that is directly related to what you are working with right now – including threaded conversations, attachments, related people, email statistics and so on.

As with many plug-in tools Xobni has so far only been available as a download purchase but the company believes they are seeing enough demand to put their product on shelves, in a box. This is quite a shift for a plugin tool starting life as an internet start-up and goes to show how a well-developed plugin can become a mainstream product. The shift is especially interesting from a business perspective – clearly the goal is a matter of outreach as Xobni tries to puts its product on a shelf right next to Outlook 2010.

A second point is the way in which Xobni-in-a-box bypasses the free version, available online, which already contains a big chunk of the useful features of the Xobni plug-in which discourages some people from buying the more advanced version. Then there’s the simple matter that many people prefer to buy a physical product even if it is exactly the same as the online version. Xobni believes 80% of its users would be at least somewhat likely to purchase the product in a retail store.

Outlook 2010 includes a number of features of the free version of Xobni and the question is whether the developers at Xobni will be able to stay far enough ahead of the curve to make their plugin a worthwhile purchase – their plans to put their product next to Outlook 2010 shows a degree of confidence. Nonetheless Xobni’s translation to a packaged product is good news for hard working plugin developers.

Microsoft will be releasing a new XBox device sometime this fall, that up until now has been codenamed “Project Natal.”  The device is a video chat and user body movement sensor that sits on the television or XBox and not only allows you to transmit video for chat over XBox Live, but also senses your body movements for various games such as the much-anticipated Star Wars coming this fall.

The new device is being called the Microsoft Kinect.  The unit uses lasers and form-recognition software to recognize the body of the user.  It then translates this to movements for in-game play, such as swinging a Jedi sword or doing yoga exercises.

The Kinect has no price tag yet and Microsoft has not been specific about it’s date of release, but most are guessing this fall for the holiday booster sales season.  The Kinect can handle up to four people at once in video conferencing, but only recognizes (by all accounts) one person’s movements at a time, so head-to-head play is out unless you’re playing over XBox Live.

Microsoft held a celebrity-filled unveiling and showed off the device along with half a dozen or so new games coming to shelves soon.  Everything from the new Star Wars to yoga, a baby tiger pet simulator, and an MTV-developed dance simulator.

The Kinect is a unique device and is Microsoft’s answer to the Wii motion-sensing paddles.  Very interesting.

Based in the North East of England, the Difference Engine is a seed accelerator program that is publicly funded. Each year the Difference Engine selects ten startup companies and supports them with advice, mentorship and £20,000.

This year, the first participants graduated and the program showcased the nine start-ups to angel investors and VCs in London this week. These companies are three months or more old and have three or four founders. According to their website the program is open to ‘anyone from anywhere’ and is supposed to provide the sort of intensive support that businesses need at an early stage.

One of the first graduates is Geogoer. Geogoer is a social media transport network where ‘anyone can find passengers, cars and public transport, or publish their own journeys’ – in short, offering the public or a private network the ability to share rides. Plans to sell Internal Travel Networks for employers is in the mix and personal users have a fair say as to who has access to their profile, with 5 levels of security limiting access to references or recommendations.

Also amongst the graduates are Curated.By and Wishlist. Curated.By offers to provide curators (anyone) the tools to created cherry-picked streams of updated, tagged and categorised content which is sorted into bundles of information to be shared by others, a sort of live Wikipedia. Wishlist lets Facebook users create ‘wishlists’ of gifts in order for their friends to know which ‘virtual gifts’ to buy them, as opposed to the random gift-giving a lot of Facebook friends face. It also offers e-mail birthday reminders.

The Difference Engine has opened applications for their September 2010 intake ‘with immediate effect’, the deadline is 23 July 2010.

Linden Lab is laying off 30% off its staff according to a press release issued this week. The company behind the virtual world Second Life claims the reduction in staff is due to ‘restructuring’ involving the consolidation of its North Americas development team as well as the ‘reconfiguring’ of its customer support department.

Rumours of the reduction in staff surfaced earlier this week. According to sources the company is closing its enterprise group which served companies with a customised version of Second Life that sits behind an internal firewall, a move that makes sense as Second Life moves from a downloadable client model to a browser-based service. The UK and Singapore offices are now closed while the Linden Lab head count in Seattle has been halved.

Second Life launched on June 23, 2003 and currently has around 900,000 active users. Users are represented by avatars in a world where they can own land, build homes and buy and sell goods with Linden dollars. The virtual world has long grown past a geeky curio with virtual version of companies, universities and even embassies populating the Second Life world. Companies can generate US dollar earnings from services they render in Second Life with some entrepreneurs having grossed in excess of $1m a year.

The user base of Second Life had been dwindling but by estimates the company was valued at up to $700m just a year ago. With plans to implement social media features there may still be plenty of life left in the original virtual world.

Today is the official launch of Apple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference, where the company usually showcases it’s next-generation hardware and traditionally releases the next iPhone and its operating system.  This year, people are expecting something else.  Apple is usually pretty sly about pre-releasing teaser data through various outlets to get the buzz going and it seems that this year is no different.

Speculation on various websites is that Apple will be introducing a “Magic Trackpad.”  This device will be an alternative (or complementary) input to the Magic Mouse that will allow for iPhone/iPad-like finger gestures to be used on the Mac.

Engadget broke the story early this morning and several others jumped on board with claimed photographs and other data on the pad.  Apple Insider showed several photographs of the device (including that above), all coming from Engadget, but the real, verifiable information this time comes from 9to5Mac which has a YouTube video showcasing the “10 Finger Multi-touch User Interface” as patented by Apple:

What we’re seeing in this video is a possibility not for a trackpad, but for a full keyboard replacement as well as a total change on how the GUI would be seen on screen.  While this may not be exactly what Apple has planned, it is a nice window into the possible future of user interfaces.

Very interesting.

Launched last year, Boku is a payment platform for Android phones that uses carrier billing to charge payments. Boku does not require users to own a bank account or credit card: users enter their mobile number into the payment gateway and then reply to a text message from their mobile operator, which in turn charges the payment to the user’s mobile phone bill instead.

Now, Boku has launched an in-app billing library which lets Android app builders monetize their own app by utilizing the Boku Payments SDK.

The iPhone platform has supported the idea of in-app purchases for over a year now, but until now there has not been an Android equivalent. As consumers are increasingly buying Android phones there is clearly a profit opportunity – PayPal just launched its Mobile Payments Library for the Android operating system. Boku differs from PayPal in that it bills straight to the user’s mobile phone account so users don’t need to sign up for a PayPal account, which you can only do if you have a bank account or credit card.

The flipside of carrier billing, unfortunately, is the high fees that mobile phone operators charge on any billing done by text message on behalf of a third party. This operator’s fee can be anything from 10% to 50%. This is a huge obstacle for app developers but Boku’s marketing chief Ron Hirson believes that the company will eventually remedy this issue – it is currently undergoing negotiations with mobile phone operators.

Boku’s SDK can process payments in over 60 countries, covering over 200 mobile operators worldwide. This, coupled with the fact that carrier billing provides app builders access to almost all mobile phone users across these networks should give it the critical mass it needs to build an essential payment system – but the high fees mobile phone operators will skim off the transaction value remain a huge hurdle.