It's not every day that Bill Gates mentions a company co-founded by a Penn State alumnus.

However, when giving the keynote address Feb. 11 at the Microsoft Office Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., Gates showed off Xobni Insight as part of his speech.

Gates, co-founder and chairman of software behemoth Microsoft -- and the long-running world's richest man -- called Xobni, a plug-in for e-mail software tool Microsoft Outlook, "the next generation of social networking."

Xobni's goal is to not only revolutionize its users' inboxes, but also organize personal information, said the company's co-founder Matt Brezina, Class of 2002.

"Our goal is to organize information around relationships," he said. "We want to be the Google of personal information."

His company's first product, Xobni Insight, is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that extracts information from the e-mails stored in Outlook.

With the information, Xobni's toolbar automatically creates profiles of each e-mail user, displaying a sender's different relationships to the recipients, attachments sent, a history of e-mails sent between the two parties, as well as a time graph showing at what time of day the most e-mails were sent.

While Xobni is focused for now on e-mail organization for Outlook, the company wants it to be able to aggregate information from different e-mail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo and others, Brezina said. He said it also wants to bring in instant messaging and aggregate information from social networks such as Facebook.

Xobni, which is named after the word Inbox spelled backward, was founded by Brezina and Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus Adam Smith in 2006.

Although Xobni is making waves in several major tech blogs, especially among some of the millions of Microsoft Outlook users, it didn't start out on an easy path, Brezina said.

In 2006, Smith had an idea for data mining e-mail and helping increase productivity by allowing users to find information faster. Through craigslist.org, the popular online classifieds, Smith recruited Brezina, who was studying for his master's degree at the University of Maryland.

Brezina, who holds a degree in electrical engineering, also did research for the Naval Research Lab in Maryland, moved to Cambridge, Mass., and slept on Smith's floor while their idea took shape.

That summer, Xobni received help from Y Combinator, the entrepreneur-mentoring program that invests anything between $15,000 to $25,000.

Y Combinator was also the force behind Penn State startup Weebly, a user-friendly Web page creator.

The Y Combinator program led to an early investment in the company from Paul Bucheit, renowned for creating Gmail, as well as other investors. Xobni went on to receive more than $4 million in funding from several investors, after which the founders went sky diving to celebrate.

Although it currently isn't generating revenue, Xobni was recently added to Microsoft's Startup Accelerator Program.

Brezina, however, has no plans of his company turning into a normal job. "It's what I've always wanted to do," he said. "I've always wanted to build a company ... I've never been that interested in a 9-to-5 job."