• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 3, 2013

Yahoo’s spending spree continued unabated Wednesday with the acquisition of San Francisco-based Xobni, which could it help to further enhance Yahoo Mail.

The company’s Smartr product line indexes a person’s emails from all their accounts and creates a unified address book with a profile of each contact. The profiles can include a photo, job title and email history along with a contact’s post on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Smartr apps or plugins are available for Android, Gmail, and iOS. Xobni also provides contact management tools for Outlook and BlackBerry.

Yahoo didn’t disclose terms of the deal, but AllThingsD, which first reported the acquisition, estimated the purchase at $30 million to $40 million. The Web portal said Xobni’s 31 employees will join Yahoo, which earlier this year overhauled Yahoo Mail and last month pushed all users to the updated version.

In a blog post confirming the Yahoo acquisition today, Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards) promised “soon you’ll be able to use Yahoo products with Xobni goodness baked right in.” If they can help Yahoo keep existing mail users and attract new ones, it could help it compete better with Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.

Earlier Wednesday, Yahoo announced buying video app Qwiki as the company continues to build up its mobile offerings and in-house talent under CEO Marissa Mayer through a series of strategic acquisitions.