While speculation continues about whether Microsoft will acquire the company, Xobni is pressing on with its development work.

According to Erik Schonfeld over at TechCrunch, Yahoo has a working prototype (not yet in beta) built in to Internet Explorer that integrates email from Yahoo Mail and Outlook into the Xobni sidebar for both applications. Reportedly, emails from Yahoo Mail are visible and searchable as conversations in the Outlook plugin and vice-versa.

No word on when the Yahoo Mail work may actually be available to Xobni users, but it’s nice to hear evidence of Xobni’s oft-repeated claim to be working on platforms other than Outlook. I just wish that Xobni for PINE was more than an April Fool’s Joke …

Michael Arrington has provided independent confirmation of Laurent Féral-Pierssens’ earlier speculation about Microsoft acquiring Xobni. Looks like your comments may have been right on the money, Laurent (pardon the pun!).

Arrington claims that two independent sources have noted that the deal has legs (presumably one of these being Féral-Pierssens?), although he also notes that “yet another source says the LOI hasn’t been signed by Xobni yet”.

Regarding acquisition price, no-one seems to have any idea yet; Arrington notes that:

I have not yet been able to track down the price, but a previous offer of sub-$20 million was supposedly rejected by Xobni.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this is all just a storm in a tea-cup, or whether MS is really going to bring the Xobni technology in-house. If so, let’s just hope the innovation shown by Xobni so far isn’t swamped by the inertia of such a large company.

Speculation is again surfacing that Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire email innovator Xobni. Self-proclaimed technology entrepreneur Laurent Féral-Pierssens is reporting on his blog:

Yesterday, Xobni finally came to an agreement with Microsoft to be acquired. An official announcement with the details has yet to be made.

Unfortunately, Féral-Pierssens offers no source for his information, and refutes claims of misinformation with a hollow, but dismissive "We’ll have to wait for the official details".

Of course, a Microsoft buyout isn’t out of the question: Xobni is a Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program member, and obviously has generated excitement inside Microsoft, leading to Bill Gates’ enthusiastic demo of Xobni in his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in February.

Does anyone else out there know anything more?

Thom Holwerda over at OS News has nominated his top-ten most beautiful computers. Amongst worthy company including the SGI O2 and the NeXT Cube, I was very happy to see the BeBox right up there at number two. First place went deservedly to the PowerMac G4 cube.

Thom notes:

The PowerPC BeBox’ most distinctive feature was its front bezel, designed by Mark Brinkerhoff. Brinkenhoff said in an interview: [Be, Inc.] wanted a bezel designed that had, ah, a look of power, as well as one that displayed both CPUs running.”

And so it did: the two ‘columns’ at the sides of the bezel represent the power element Gassee was after. These two columns also house two series of LEDs (the Blinkenlights), one in each column, that indicate processor activity. Each of them was connected to a processor, and the series of LEDs would light up according to actual CPU activity. You cannot seriously say you would not want that on your machine.

Totally agree with you, Thom. The BeBox really was a ground-breaking design for a personal computer in the mid-nineties. I’m yet to find a geek who doesn’t drool over the BeBox when they first see one in the flesh.