We heard earlier today that Y Combinator-funded Etacts shut down its CRM-like email contact manager after less than a year in service. We subsequently learned that Salesforce has bought Etacts, and have confirmed the acquisition with Salesforce. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Etacts, which launched in February of this year, connects with your Gmail account (using oAuth), and integrates with your inbox to build out your list of contacts. The service also allows you to connect your mobile phone will track who you talk to frequently over the phone or SMS. Etacts will then rank contacts by how often you communicate with them, the total number of communications, how long it’s been since you’ve corresponded with contacts and will send you reminders of when you should reach out to contacts, and prioritize messages.
In terms of funding, Etacts raised $700,000 in angel funding from on Ron Conway, Joshua Schachter, Jawed Karim, Ashton Kutcher and others. Etacts also developed EmailOracle, a Gmail plug-in that tracks your messages, provides analytics, and sends you reminders.
The Salesforce acquisition makes sense considering how useful Etacts’ technology could be within the CRM giant’s flagship product. Clearly, since it is shutting the service down, Salesforce is looking to integrate the technology into its own applications.
This is the company’s sixth acquisition of the year. Salesforce just bought Heroku for $212 million and earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw.
Etacts is a CRM for people — it helps you keep in touch with people in your address book.
Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, and went public in June 2004. Salesforce has been a pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through its innovative AppExchange directory of on-demand applications, and its Force.com “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) API for extending Salesforce.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
