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Unified Inbox racks up another acquisition; pushes into Asia
Wed, 14th May 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Kiwi social communication and collaboration company Unified Inbox is looking to include ramp up it's offering with 'LifeModes', thanks to a planned acquisition of Smak.

The Auckland-based company announced it has entered into agreement to acquire Boston-based Smak (secure messaging alerting and knowledge) – previously available as mysmak.com, for an undisclosed sum.

Unified Inbox, a communication-as-a-service platform which centralises external conversations, social engagement and internal team collaboration into a single experience across desktop and mobile devices, is still in its closed beta phase, with the company saying it plans a global market rollout in 2015.

Toby Ruckert, Unified Inbox founder and chief executive, says depsite still being in beta, the company has secured top tier telco companies, ISP and media partners for the 2015 rollout.

Meanwhile, Smak is a cloud solution to help executives and professionals sort incoming information from email accounts and social media and increase their productivity by applying so-called LifeModes.

Ruckert believes some of the Smak ways of handling 'the overwhelming flow of information in modern life' are 'revolutionary'.

Ruckert says since the launch of the Unified Inbox iPhone app, users have indicated the need for better tools to juggle incoming message streams and filter their inbox for messages that fit their current 'LifeModes' such as work, home, holiday.

The proposed acquisition comes just weeks after Unified Inbox announced its expansion in Asia with the establishment of an international headquarters in Singapore. The company says it also has operations in Germany, India and the United States.

In February, Unified Inbox announced it had entered a definitive agreement to buy HelloInbox, an app which checks and sends email and socoial network messages.