Twitter Acquires Person...

Twitter has just finalized a deal to acquire RestEngine , a developer of personalized email marketing services, which could help Twitter deliver email digests of great tweets you’ve missed. The acquisition fits well with Twitter’s recent talent acquisition of Summify, which creates these kinds of personal news digests. The boostrapped RestEngine had spent the last few years generating and distributing re-engagement emails for social game companies like Crowdstar. The emails often enticed users to start playing again by telling them what their friends had been accomplishing in the game. Three of four founders will be joining the flock, and the company’s technology will come along with them. Co-founder Joe Waltman won’t be moving to Twitter, though, as he tells me his entrepreneurial spirit is too strong and he’ll be working on new projects after a vacation. Waltman tells me RestEngine will shut down, and has already begun assisting clients to migrate to other email providers. Here’s the full-statement RestEngine is showing on its homepage: “We’re very excited to announce that the RestEngine team is joining the Twitter flock! Just over two and half years ago we founded RestEngine to help social app publishers send targeted one-to-one emails based on a subscriber’s social graph. It’s been an incredible journey where we had the opportunity to work with some of the leading social app publishers. With our customers, we’ve iterated on our social marketing automation platform while defining a new set of best practices for this brand new world of outbound social marketing. We’re thrilled to now focus our email skills and marketing automation know-how on a much larger scale at Twitter.” As for details of the deal, Waltman tells me it was signed two weeks ago but RestEngine just got confirmation that everyone who wanted to join Twitter would be hired. He wouldn’t tell me what Twitter paid for the boostrapped company, but these deals are typically structured to give anyone joining the acquirer some cash but more equity in order to retain them, while paying out a mid-size lump of cash to founders who are going their own way. Waltman says his engineers are very excited about the move, especially because they hadn’t worked at a big company and are looking forward to the mentorship and advice Twitter will give them. As I wrote when I first covered RestEngine back in July 2010 , the company helped Facebook game companies in particular to deliver high open-rate emails. They’d include a recipient’s score, energy level, which friends were playing, and their next in-game tast to create a sense that a user was already invested in the game, and they’ll have plenty to enjoy when if they return. With time it expanded from serving game companies like Kaboom and RockYou to serve other web services like Ustream and SocialWeekend. I’d heard Twitter was interested in surfacing the best content from a user’s network, but didn’t want to move away from the unsorted firehose stream it’s known for. Summify and RestEngine could help it accomplish this through the email medium rather than cluttering Twitter’s clean interface. Those emails could show the most retweeted, @replied, or favorited tweets by people you follow. Until now, emails from Twitter have mostly been dry “this person followed you” alerts, but soon they could become something you actually want to open.

Fila selects 89 Degrees...

Athletic apparel and footwear company Fila has appointed marketing solutions firm 89 Degrees to develop an email marketing strategy, said Lauren Mallon, global marketing manager for Fila. 89 Degrees will work with Demandware, the e-commerce solutions provider Fila hired in July 2010, and SEO/SEM provider Adept Marketing

Experian CheetahMail an...

Experian CheetahMail announced May 3 that it has entered into a preferred agreement with Movable Ink, an email application designed to allow marketers to stream email content in real time, said Daniel Schotland, VP of client services at Experian CheetahMail.

Responsys emphasizes de...

To drive email response rates, marketers should be mindful of the little things such as colors, hierarchy, balancing text and images and mobile optimization said executives at the Responsys Interact conference in San Francisco, Calif.

Pop Chips’ Brown-...

Ashton Kutcher-played character drew racism charges on Twitter yesterday.

Yahoo Looks to Help Sma...

One gets the sense that with all the turmoil that has beset Yahoo in the past several years there may still be hope for the company. Unfortunately, there have been cuts in both product offerings and thousands of employees of the company and thus there has been a lot of pain. The company that once stood as an Internet icon even removed an iconic billboard from the San Francisco landscape last year. So why have hope? Well, today the company announced a marketing dashboard for small business that looks pretty interesting. From the Yahoo corporate blog we get Today, Yahoo! Small Business launched the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, a free tool that helps entrepreneurs discover new marketing opportunities to grow their businesses, while getting a comprehensive picture of their marketing results, online reputations, and website performance, all in one place. Designed specifically with the small business owner in mind, the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard provides a clear, consolidated picture of a business’s marketing results and reputation, making it easier to discover new insights and develop new ideas for growth. With key business metrics from across the Web accessible in one location, small business owners with limited resources can spend more time focusing on their core businesses and less time buried in multiple interfaces and spreadsheets. Since Site Explorer was put to rest in November of last year many wondered if this side of Yahoo, the one that can provide actionable data, had gone away completely. Although not an SEO centric tool the new dashboard gives some insight as to where Yahoo thinks they can find business in their brave, new world. As listed in the post some of the key features include Search engine and directory listings : Enables monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, covering over 100 sites (including Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and more) Online reputation management : Pulls information from up to 8,000 sources (including Facebook and Twitter) Site traffic analysis : Enables users to understand key website performance metrics (including Google Analytics) Small business-focused news and advice : Provided from Yahoo! Small Business Advisor Campaign tracking : Provides email marketing, SEO, and SEM campaign tracking (must subscribe to these services) Support: 24/7 in-house free customer support It may be a stretch but it looks like Yahoo feels they can get a foothold in the large yet hard to corner SMB market. This elusive beast has been the target of every company in the world it seems. The trouble is that most SMB’s don’t have a lot of cash to throw around at services despite the fact that in the US they comprise a large portion of the total businesses. At least Yahoo’s offering is free but there are paid upgrade options like that included in the reputation monitoring option. Now, the question remains, how many businesses will take advantage of it and draw closer to Yahoo in the process? There are a lot of other dashboard type products and services vying for the SMB’s attention in the marketplace. Can this offering be enough to put Yahoo back on the map? Will SMB’s pay for additional services? What’s your take on Yahoo’s position in the marketplace these days? Do you think that the SMB’s of the world will be interested in this offering? Will they even know about it? Let’s get your thoughts in the comments.