Corporate e-mail users looking to leverage Web 2.0 functionality in Outlook may have an answer in startup Xobni, which presented its flagship solution, Xobni Insight, at the TechCrunch40 conference on Tuesday in San Francisco.“That is a dumb-ass name,” Guy Kawasaki offered during the feedback session. “Luckily it’s clever, ‘inbox’ backwards, but man, if you paid 25 grand to a name lab for that, if I were an investor, I’d just shoot you.”Slavery to frivolous Web 2.0 naming conventions aside, Xobni expands on the admin assistant replacement proposition of Microsoft Outlook by filling the gap between current Outlook functionality and end-users’ e-mail and contact management desires. Improving and automating integration between messages and contacts, Xobni Insight puts a social networking twist on the Microsoft e-mail client in the hopes of surfacing hidden value in historical messages and improving Outlook users’ ability to stay on top of their e-mail communications game. In addition to providing much needed message body search, the solution automatically extracts phone numbers from messages, threads conversations, organizes attachments and conversations by contacts, and, in the words of company co-founder Matt Brezina, “uses CCs to expose e-mail’s hidden social network.” The concept expands the notion of the address book beyond Outlook’s Rolodex-of-business-cards metaphor and infuses it with profile information and statistics aimed at leveraging and developing relationships.What is intriguing about Xobni Insight is that, rather than allow content — i.e., messages, categories, and projects — to be the de-facto engine driving messaging organization, it offers a contact-centric model of e-mail management that will likely prove highly beneficial to those who find Outlook’s project functionality less intuitive than correlating communications with the people who send them. Xobni is also part of an important shift in introducing social-networking technologies in the workplace in that it automatically exposes an already existent network personal to and inherently functional for the user. Rather than having individuals sign up for a profile platform that offers e-mail functionality and requires a forced transition period of social network aggregation and toolset adoption, it allows communication itself to drive networking organically, using a platform that — for better or worse — most corporate users are already bound to. Where the solution may take the Web 2.0 model too far is in providing e-mail analytics for contacts. Meant to give users insights into how they and their contacts use their e-mail, such as providing fever charts of messages received throughout the day, the analytics functionality, merged with automated contact profiling, will likely blur the all-too-familiar border between productivity enhancement and invasion of privacy in the workplace — especially given the inescapable hierarchical structure of corporate culture, as opposed to the more peer-based feel of opt-in social networking. But what could be an intriguing development for Xobni is the promise of future functionality for integrating data from IM and the Web. The upside of a central repository for varying modes of communication is easy to see. And if data associated with Web-based productivity apps can be pulled into the e-mail client in a worthwhile and intuitive way, e-mail as the hub of relationship-based collaboration, including hooks into workflow, documentation, and collaboration tools, could be inviting. Especially to organizations already appropriating their e-mail platform as an under-featured work portal anyway.For all its promise, Xobni is, however, one clever Outlook upgrade away from the toilet of intriguing startup ideas. And though the company road map includes support for additional e-mail platforms in the future, the end game here appears to be to keep far enough ahead of Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration development efforts to force an acquisition. More TechCrunch40 coverage:• TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild• TechCrunch40: Learning from legends • Mobile virtualization gets smart• Google rep glib on enterprise play Technology Industry