From time to time, Microsoft has announced its intent to build its Outlook component of Office into a more fully-featured system for organizing personal contacts, as well as doing some automatic background research into those contacts on the side. Last year, the company very nearly concluded a deal with a San Francisco-based company called Xobni that would have given Microsoft that functionality in one fell swoop, but that deal collapsed.

As it turns out, that's where the good news actually began for Xobni. It managed to obtain startup funding from such top-tier venture capital sources as Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Cisco, and now BlackBerry Partners Fund. Now, the company is prepared to remove the little piece of sticky-tape that says "Beta" from its principal product, which now becomes "Xobni 1.7" for the first time, though it remains a free download.

Xobni's panel shows up on one side of Outlook, and effectively replaces the e-mail program's Contacts panel. In its place is a much more direct and replete system that shows contacts' pictures, along with their personal bios, their various locations on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and also links to the contacts of those contacts through those networks. During the testing period, Xobni users actually reported general Outlook use was sped up, probably by way of no longer using Microsoft's clumsy database for contacts.