Yahoo buys email and address book management app Xobni

Yahoo Inc, the once Internet powerhouse, yesterday acquired email and address book management app Xobni, for an undisclosed sum, its third acquisition this week.

Yahoo did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but technology blog AllThingsD said that Yahoo paid between $30 million to $40 million, while TechCrunch disputed the figure and said the consideration for the deal was about twice that amount, somewhere in the $60 million-plus range.

Xobni ("inbox" spelt backwards), a San Francisco-based start-up was founded in 2006 in an MIT dorm room by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina.

Xobni, Smartr Inbox, and Smartr Contacts apps automatically find all the people with whom a user has exchanged emails, calls, or SMS messages. They instantly provide a full view of each contact, complete with their photo, job title, company details, and email history - as well as updates from Facebook and Twitter.

Xobni is available for Outlook, Smartr Inbox for Gmail and Smartr Contacts for Android and the iPhone.

Xobni has raised about $42 million over the years in three rounds of funding from leading investors including, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Cisco, BlackBerry Partners Fund, Atomico Investments, Baseline Ventures, and RRE Ventures, as well as several angel investors.

Xobni's 31 employees will join Yahoo, including its CEO, Jeff Bonforte, an ex-vice president of Yahoo.

Yahoo said it will integrate Xobni's technology into its communications products, including the mobile and PC versions of its email and instant messaging services.

Under its new CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo has made more than 12 small acquisitions in the mobile and media space this year, as the ex-Google employee tries to revive growth in the flagging company.

Apart from Xobni, Yahoo this week acquired Bignoggins Productions, a mobile app to help players of fantasy sports teams, and Qwiki Inc, a mobile app that creates videos in Apple Inc's iPhone.

Yahoo has also acquired Alike, Stamped, Snip.it, Summly, an app designed by a British teenager, GoPollGo, PlayerScale, and GhostBird Software.

For all these acquisitions, Yahoo has paid way below $100 million each, but it did splurge $1.1 billion in buying popular blogging platform Tumblr.

It is now in the race to buy online video website Hulu, after the French government in May scuttled its plan of buying a majority stake in Dailymotion.