Boxcar

Jul 26, 2012

Posted Introducing The Croon Audio Original, A Gorgeous Bluetooth Table Top Speaker We’ve been watching Kwaga grow since we first saw them pitch in Paris about 4 years ago. Then it was a system to improve your experience of Gmail, but gradually they found it was contacts that people needed help with. So duly Kwaga pivoted into automatically updating your address book so you didn’t have to. Thus, WriteThat.name is Kwaga’s very useful service. And now the company looks set to expand into notifications after announcing it has acquired the Boxcar.io service. Terms and the price have not been undisclosed but Kwaga Founder Philippe Laval confirmed to us that the deal was a mixture of cash and shares. Kwaga says they will will keep the service running and improve on it. Jonathan George, founder of Boxcar, will join Kwaga as advisor. Boxcar raised $150k this past March to create a service for developers. Laval told us the deal is because there are “synergies between our services” and both have a “common vision on attention management… We both raised money in the last 6 months, and I guess it gave us time to think about where we should go.” Boxcar centralizes push notifications on the iPhone and we’ve been a fan of it at TechCrunch for some time, though recent updates to iOS have made it harder for the startups to compete with Apple’s own pull-down screen of notifications. Launched in 2009 in Kansas, Boxcar.io provides real-time notifications to “hundreds of thousands” of users via their iPhones or Mac desktops, keeping them up-to-date on social network interactions and changes in their applications. WriteThat.name, automatically updates the address book of emails and CRM systems by identifying contact information in the signature of emails received. It currently works with Gmail/GoogleApps email, IBM Lotus Notes and MS Outlook and is compatible with the main CRMs in the market (SalesForce, Highrise, etc. ) 0