This startup raised funding to better tell you when and where to send your newsletters

Image credit: Pixabay

Ever tried talking about your work to someone you just met at a big, crowded party somewhere? More often than not, you’ll have to repeat yourself two or three times, while the other person squints and leans in, trying to hear you over the noise that only a throng of 100-plus people in an enclosed space can produce. Sooner or later, your conversation buddy changes the subject or wanders away in search of more drinks.

Now multiply the noise several thousand times, and that’s you trying to talk about your work to the internet. Only the people you’re trying to reach are already constantly bombarded with unrelenting volleys of information. So how do you get through?

Singapore-based Ematic thinks it has a solution for your voice to rise above the din. The three-year-old startup provides applications and insights on email marketing, specializing in ecommerce. Its products are aimed at marketers who want to increase their company’s visibility and attract more customers, by streamlining their marketing methods.

Channeling the message

Paul Tenney, Ematic founder and CEO

“The way I look at marketing technology, it’s between campaign and channel,” Paul Tenney, founder and CEO of Ematic, tells Tech in Asia, talking about the methods available to marketers for reaching their intended customers. “There are tools that are great for campaigns and tools that are great for managing channels, and there have been attempts to do both with the same product. I don’t think that works very well.”

Paul founded Ematic in 2012, after coming to Singapore as the Asia-Pacific person for Silicon Valley email marketing firm Yesmail. The Stanford graduate had previously been a director for the company’s California-based business, working with clients like Hewlett-Packard, Macy’s, and eBay.

Once in Asia, Paul noticed that existing digital marketing solutions for local companies couldn’t work the same way as in the US; they were expensive and complicated, and took too long to implement. Paul wanted to start his own company to provide a better way to Asian businesses. Being in this space since 2004, he had considerable experience to bring to the table, as well as the help and expertise of a lot of his former colleagues. And so Ematic was born.

Hello, see you again soon

Ematic’s solution is a set of software tools that can plug into a company’s chosen campaign management method or its website. For example, a company may be using Mailchimp for its marketing needs. Ematic’s tools connect to it and provide recommendations and actions based on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

There are currently two apps made by Ematic that tackle different sides of its mission.

HiIQ is a tool that suggests when is best to say hi, and to whom. The system works with the user’s database to determine when to fire off emails and to which addresses, targeting (hopefully) the right people with the right message. This results in less time and energy wasted by the marketer, and less noise for the people the message is trying to reach.

ByeIQ is a piece of software that determines what messages and calls to action to display to a user about to leave your website, and when. The idea is to get the user to either subscribe to the website’s mailing list or to become a customer and make a purchase. Paul says this is done in a way that’s seamless and does not interrupt the user’s experience.

Image credit: Ematic Solutions

“We basically boil down email marketing to a three-metric approach,” Paul explains. “How many new subscribers you can add to your database, how much engagement you are able to drive, and how many conversions you are able to drive.”

Raising money

Ematic announced today it has raised S$1.5 million (US$1.07 million) in a seed round led by venture capital firm Wavemaker Partners. 500 Startups and Convergence Ventures also joined in. The startup says it’s continuing to seek additional investment in this round.

Most of the funding will be put toward product development, Paul explains. The rest will be used for “strategic growth” within Southeast Asia. Other markets will follow later through subsequent funding rounds, as Ematic aims for more territories around the world.

Paul is pretty happy with these particular investors. Wavemaker has the desired expertise on how to help a business-to-business-focused company like Ematic, he explains. As for 500 Startups and Convergence, he finds there is a strong culture fit with the startup, while the latter offers a valuable local contact when it comes to partnerships within Indonesia.

The startup won’t disclose numbers, but Paul says it is ahead of its targets in terms of revenue at the moment. It has cleared the 50-customer mark throughout Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, boasting clients like cosmetics ecommerce website Luxola.

Editing by J.T. Quigley and Terence Lee

This startup raised funding to better tell you when and where to send your newsletters

Marketing start-up Ahalogy pins its future on Pinterest

Search for oat-based recipes on visual bookmarking site Pinterest, and it will bring up a screen of oatmeal porn.

Images of gooey oats covered in strawberries, chocolate chips, drizzled with glistening honey take over the screen.

Click on the top results and the majority probably will have something to do with Quaker.

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The images, or “Pins,” as they’re referred to on Pinterest, might redirect to a recipe on Quaker’s site. They might go to a food blog post sponsored by Quaker. Or, subtly, in the background of an image, there might be a big tub of Quaker oats, hovering behind an enticing bowl of oatmeal.

Coincidence? Not exactly.

Quaker’s ubiquity in those oat-based search results is largely the effort of Ahalogy, a marketing start-up that specializes in Pinterest. The company exists to help brands like Quaker, Kraft and Toms shoes get their products in front of Pinterest users, while also not annoying anyone.

Unobtrusive advertising? It’s a tough one. That’s why Ahalogy co-founder Bob Gilbreath has created a company of nearly 50 people working exclusively on Pinterest. Nothing else.

Some marketers might call Gilbreath and Ahalogy crazy. He would say his company is ahead of the curve.

Some marketers might say he’s taking too big a risk. He would say Ahalogy is primed for the reward.

And some might ask: What on Earth is Pinterest, let alone a Pinterest-focused marketing firm? Gilbreath would laugh, sigh a little, then laugh again.

Pinterest is an image-based search engine. Type in anything you want — 2007 Ferraris, knee-high boots, Thanksgiving ideas and, yes, oatmeal recipes — and it will pull up hundreds of pins that people have uploaded. Some might lead to other websites. Some might just be images. If you want to save a pin for later, you can click the “Pin it” button, which saves it to a board. It’s like Google and scrapbooking rolled into one.

And Ahalogy believes that there’s big money to be made from it. The Cincinnati company has raised $7 million in funding from investors such as Hyde Park Ventures and CincyTech.

It doesn’t do other forms of marketing. There’s no Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat team. There’s no backup plan. If Pinterest ceased to exist, Ahalogy wouldn’t exist. At the same time, it does not belong to, nor is it part of Pinterest.

How’s that for an existential threat?

Gilbreath laughs. Maybe he is crazy. He’s pretty sure he’s not.

“I can see this movie playing,” he said, spinning his index finger in the air like film going through a projector; someone peering into Ahalogy’s office could have easily mistaken his gesture for “crazy,” though. “I’ve seen the same model repeat again and again.”

A marketing veteran who got his start at Procter & Gamble, platform skepticism isn’t new to Gilbreath. He saw it with the Web in the 1990s, when television advertising was king and “Internet” marketing was thought to be a joke.

He saw it with the rise of Facebook, when marketers were hesitant to figure out social media because they thought it was a fad.

And now he’s seeing it with Pinterest, which recently cracked 100 million users.

But Gilbreath knows there is more to it than being first.

Early players in the Facebook game, like marketing firms Buddy Media and Wildfire, were successful (and later acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars by Salesforce and Google respectively) because they bet on the right horse. Being first to, say, Bebo or the now-defunct Piczo wouldn’t have helped them much.

A large part of Ahalogy’s confidence comes from the belief that, in addition to being first, the firm is betting on the right platform. And, judging by San Francisco-based Pinterest’s $11-billion valuation, they’re not alone in thinking that.

“In general, I would say it’s not a good idea for a company to focus on one platform,” said Betsy Sigman, a professor of social media and technology at Georgetown University.

“But I don’t think this is risky for [Ahalogy] because Pinterest is an unusual social media company,” she said. “It’s a premium company in ways, because people go there looking for something; something to do, something to buy.”

Pinterest knows this, which is why it created its Marketing Developer Partners program (of which Ahalogy is a member) to point brands in the direction of marketing firms that “get” Pinterest.

The platform is about discovery and the future, said Pinterest’s head of marketing developer partnerships, Michael Akkerman, and “Ahalogy produces authentic and compelling content that’s beneficial [i.e., not annoying] to both the Pinner and the brand.”

And Pinterest really is a game changer, said Raman Sehgal, Ahalogy’s vice president of marketing.

Ahalogy’s 2015 media consumption study found that 89% of people who use Pinterest daily have bought something they saw on the platform. And 85% of daily users also said they open Pinterest on their phones and look at items they’ve pinned when they’re in a bricks-and-mortar store (Buying oats? Try Quaker!).

More than half of the platform’s most active users said they have not seen or noticed ads — “promoted pins,” as they’re called — on Pinterest. And those who have seen them largely don’t mind.

“That’s unheard-of,” Sehgal said. After all, people hate ads. A 2014 report from PageFair and Adobe found that around 144 million people in the world use ad blockers. Undocumented millions more probably wish they did.

But on Pinterest, it’s a different story.

“It’s more about the inspiration,” said Kim Johnson, an early Ahalogy hire on the client success team. “People use Pinterest like they’re curating a personal magazine, so they’ll save things from around the Web onto their boards.”

Around half of Ahalogy’s business is in the software it sells that helps brands optimize their images, track how certain pins are performing and schedule pins to publish at times of high traffic.

This part isn’t unique. Other companies have created similar analytical tools, and many digital agencies also offer Pinterest marketing.

Toni Box, senior director of social media and content services at agency PM Digital, said that for some brands, it just doesn’t make sense to invest heavily in Pinterest.

“It’s really about having that broader view,” said Box, whose agency’s work includes Pinterest and email marketing. “Working with an agency like ours, you’re going to have knowledge from all different verticals instead of just one.”

Ahalogy is so far the only firm to offer a singular service: to help a company “win” at Pinterest.

“Say Kraft [one of Ahalogy’s clients] wants to advertise its cream cheese on Pinterest,” Johnson said. “Putting a picture of a tub of cream cheese on Pinterest isn’t going to help.”

“Lots of people might see it,” Sehgal added. “But then what?”

“So maybe we’d do a dip recipe pin, because that’s useful, that’s something people would actually save,” Johnson said. “And when you click through, it’ll take you to a recipe on Kraft’s site.”

“Or we’ll find a blogger who has already created a dip recipe that has gotten really popular on Pinterest, and see if Kraft can sponsor it.”

Ahalogy has 40 clients, including Kraft, Kellogg’s Town House crackers, Toms and Quaker. For each brand, it will create as many as five to 10 pins per day. Its designers will try them in every variation: a pin with text, a pin without text, swapping out images, tagging them differently, adding a logo, removing a logo.

The company’s early results have been promising, driving product sales and raising brand awareness unseen on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. More telling is the fact that many of the big brands that signed up with Ahalogy when it launched in 2012 have stuck with it.

“They’ve been an extremely valuable strategic partner,” said Zachary Wyer, Kellogg’s brand manager on Town House Crackers, which has worked with Ahalogy for more than two years and has seen most of its user growth and engagement happen on Pinterest.

“The cracker business is more than 85 years old, and even recently consumers still think of us as a formal, oval cracker,” he said. “We’re hoping to change that perception of the business, and we think Ahalogy is the perfect partner for it. They have the savvy on the platform few agencies do. That’s part of the reason we chose them.”

tracey.lien@latimes.com

Twitter: @traceylien

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Facebook's Chris Gomersall Departs For His Marketing Startup Atomized

Chris Gomersall has spent the past three years working with brands and agencies at Facebook, where he was the first creative strategy leader. Now he’s leaving to run his own startup, Atomized.

Gomersall told me that he’s trying to solve a problem that he saw again and again in meetings with marketers — when they needed to bring out the creative assets for a campaign, that usually meant looking for a folder full of papers, pointing to art on their cubicle walls or saying, “Let me pull up this email, I think I have a PDF, but it might be old …”

At the same time, those assets are being used in an increasingly wide variety of channels and platforms. Even if you just look at social networking, there are new products taking off, existing networks remain important, meaning that marketers face pressure “to add more and more.”

“It’s becoming atomized, with your content or your creative execution broken into thousands of little pieces,” he said.

Hence the name of the startup. Atomized tackles these problems by giving marketers shared calendars to manage all their campaigns across different media, including print, TV, outdoor and online. It allows those marketers to see how their photos, videos and other creative assets will look in each medium, and customize the presentation accordingly.

While Gomersall just left Facebook, he’s actually been working on Atomized for more than a year — with the permission of his bosses at Facebook, naturally. He admitted that there was some skepticism when the company found out he was working on marketing software on the side, but he got approval “when they realized I wasn’t an engineer.”

Atomized remained a nights-and-weekends project until recently, when Gomersall realized it was time to commit to the startup — both because he was starting to feel “maxed out” between his two roles, and because marketers aren’t eager to work with startups that don’t have a full-time CEO.

Asked where the product goes from here, “We want this to be a calendar you can send to your CMO and to your most junior intern. It’s going to get stronger and we’re going to build more features, power features, but they’re going to stay hidden. We want the clean version to be front-and-center.”

Featured Image: Atomized

Facebook"s Chris Gomersall Departs For His Marketing Startup Atomized

Online Startup ePuppets.com Opens Retail Toy Store on July 4 in Downtown Mt. Shasta, California

MT. SHASTA, Calif., July 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — EPuppets, Inc. opens its first brick-and-mortar store on July 4, 2015 in honor of Independence Day. Located in the heart of downtown Mt. Shasta, California, ePuppets, Inc. sells toys and gifts from around the world including puppets, marionettes, dolls, robots, remote control toys, educational toys, and more than 600 items from other well-known brands.

Take a virtual tour of the new store by visiting https://goo.gl/maps/qUygD

The company, which is an online retailer of puppets and educational toys, plans to expand the franchise throughout California to include locations in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Also in the works are plans to spinoff an entertainment division called ePuppets TV featuring original content, characters, cartoons, feature films, and merchandising opportunities featuring the ePuppets’ brand.

“The ePuppets’ brand inspires creativity and imagination. Our goal is to create a global franchise that brings the magic of puppets to a whole new generation,” said Cofounder and CEO Daniel Bryan.  

“We chose Mt. Shasta as the home of ePuppets because it’s a magical place that offers an incredible lifestyle surrounded by majestic beauty. We look forward to working closely with the city’s chamber of commerce to help promote trade and tourism in Mount Shasta,” said Bryan.

As part of the company’s online marketing strategy, ePuppets has integrated an affiliate marketing program powered by Impact Radius. Website owners and online marketers can promote ePuppets.com and earn commissions on sales they refer by joining here: http://member.impactradius.com/advertiser-advertiser-info/ePuppets-Inc.brand

“Affiliate marketing is a smart way to boost brand awareness on a pay-for-performance basis,” said Stephan Gunning, cofounder and vice president of operations for ePuppets.  “We chose to partner with Impact Radius because of their strong reputation as an industry leader in the performance marketing industry.”

Toys as tools for learning

“Part of ePuppets’ magic is how we are incorporating art, music, and educational items into our product mix,” said Simona Bryan, also a cofounder and creative director. “Educational toys help develop creativity through play. At ePuppets we are always looking for ways to inspire children.  Educators can benefit by using these tools as part of the teaching process.”

Take a virtual tour of the new store https://goo.gl/maps/qUygD

Images to accompany this story:

ePuppets Exterior
https://goo.gl/bX4TUY

ePuppets Interior
https://goo.gl/wkGTm2

Sock Monkey
https://goo.gl/eRucss

Orangutan Puppet
https://goo.gl/rMasB0

Contact: Daniel Bryan
CEO, ePuppets, Inc.
press@ePuppets.com
Phone: 650-209-6313
Website: http://www.ePuppets.com/about-us

This release was issued through The Xpress Press News Service, merging e-mail and satellite distribution technologies to reach business analysts and media outlets worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.XpressPress.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/online-startup-epuppetscom-opens-retail-toy-store-on-july-4-in-downtown-mt-shasta-california-300108084.html

SOURCE ePuppets, Inc.

Copyright (C) 2015 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Online Startup ePuppets.com Opens Retail Toy Store on July 4 in Downtown Mt. Shasta, California

Marketing tech startup Vidgyor raises USD 500K funding from AngelPrime

Bengaluru-based video advertisement platform for Internet TV, Vidgyor has announced the $ 500K funding round from the seed-stage venture capital fund AngelPrime. The startup enables broadcasters to monetize live TV streaming on the Internet by replacing standard TV advertisements with personalized video ads. The funding will be utilized to expand Vidgyor’s target user base, increase marketing efforts and further develop their technology.

Vidgyor was co-founded last year by Mahaboob Khan and Parth Desai who were earlier working in online video space and MNCs like Yahoo! & STMicroelectronics. The company is also one of the seven alumni of the fifth batch of startups from the Noida-based T-labs. At the moment, it has already signed up with leading broadcasters and aims to achieve a positive growth in the near future.

What the problem Vidgyor is addressing?

Currently, Internet TV features the same ads, which run on broadcast TV. Video publishers are unable to monetize live TV streams delivered over Internet, as the advertiser has not paid for showing them online. On the other hand, advertisers are unable to reach out to the online audience who prefer watching TV over Internet through a mobile device.

Vidgyor enables broadcasters and content distributors monetize live TV streams delivered over internet by auto-detecting original broadcast TV ads and replacing them with different set of targeted mid-roll ads. The organization has developed a technology platform that can effectively provide incremental revenue through deployment of mid rolls. The solution integrates with no disruption to the current digital workflow and works with any Internet connected devices – be it Desktop, Mobile, Tablets IP Set-Top Boxes etc. It also seamlessly works with any CDN, Video Player, or Encoder.

Bala Parthasarathy, Managing Partner, AngelPrime believes that personalized advertising for live TV over Internet has largely been an untapped market in the country and Vidgyor aims to address this effectively.

How does the platform benefit advertisers and users?

Vidgyor enables personalized ad targeting and provides high quality user experience to the end user. Advertisers also benefit more from this model, as they will now be able to reach out to the right audience and user base. The Vidgyor platform can integrate with any VAST compliant video ad network and also provides a dashboard to track revenue and manage campaigns in real-time. Vidgyor claims that its solution can help increase video publisher’s inventory by 5X to 10X on Live TV feeds across devices thereby increasing scope for monetization.

Vidgyor’s innovative solution has enabled IndiaTV to generate revenue from our Live TV streams. We are exploring synergies to use the solution with our global content distributors.

Website

  

Alok Soni

Follow @aloksoni

Alok Soni prefers to keep his bio short owing to a dearth of creativity. Feel free to reach out to him at alok[at]yourstory[dot]com or follow on twitter @aloksoni

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Marketing tech startup Vidgyor raises USD 500K funding from AngelPrime

Start-up of the week: Social proof digital marketing company Taggstar

Start-ups in retail technology are growing and Retail Week is highlighting some of the best. This week Taggstar is in the spotlight.

Taggstar is a digital marketing company that provides shoppers with real-time information on online products as a means of increasing sales and customer engagement. Taggstar’s UK managing director Marjorie Leonidas explains more.

Key facts

Founded: January 2012

Investment: Taggstar has received £2.2m investment to date from investors including crowd-funding platform Funding Tree.

Retail partners: Shop Direct and Argos

What it does

Taggstar is a digital marketing company that uses cloud-based software to improve the shopping experience of online customers.

The start-up’s software delivers real-time messages to customers on retail websites’ product pages, such as how many items are being purchased and the number of online shoppers looking at said product.

“Online shoppers are compelled to purchase when they can see the popularity of an item or that it’s selling fast” says Leonidas.

Taggstar provides relevant and up-to-date information to online shoppers while encouraging them to purchase, simultaneously increasing customer engagement and sales revenue.

What problem does the technology solve for retailers?

Taggstar’s digital marketing technology gives online retailers an innovative way to drive better customer engagement, loyalty and revenue growth.

By showing what is trending with other shoppers Taggstar’s technology creates a word-of-mouth shopping experience, encouraging customers to purchase based on peer recommendations.

Giving this real-time information to online shoppers allows Taggstar to add a sense of theatre to the online shopping experience that can be otherwise difficult to achieve without a store presence.

“By providing real-time trends, social proof of what is popular and how many items have been sold Taggstar creates the excitement that online retail can lack without the buzz of a bricks-and-mortar environment” says Leonidas.

More information: www.taggstar.com/

Start-up of the week: Social proof digital marketing company Taggstar

SEO For Startup Companies: How One Tech Company Nailed It

Many in digital media continue to underestimate the influence of Google. It’s no longer just a cool tech company; Google is now part of the global economic infrastructure. While many people are caught in the hype of social media, the plain fact is that Internet searches are what drive purchase decisions. You create demand in social media, but you capture demand and steal market share via SEO and your website. Yet even to this day big companies and tech companies often overlook SEO fundamentals.

No matter how innovative or a disruptive a new product may be, it’s more than likely solving an old problem. With old problems there is existing traffic – specifically, organic search traffic. If you can structure your website, content marketing strategy and user communities around the problem you are trying to solve, your startup website can be structured in a way to cultivate SEO value very early and get the traction you need earlier than later.

Yet, in the world of early stage startups, SEO is almost never considered in the pre-launch phase and rarely addressed post launched. In the tech startup arena, where Non-Disclosure Agreements and stealth modes still prevail, the secretive nature of high-tech startups doesn’t pair up well with look-at-me style of content marketing that dominates the digital landscape today. It’s a pity, because sometimes in those early days of being new, most startups get at least some form of spotlight. It’s in that critical time period when a lot of SEO value can not only be secured, but also positioned in a way to attract SEO rank as a startup ages.

Meet Parcel Audit Pros
One startup tech company, Parcel Audit Pros, got it right. Simply put, they developed an online solution that automatically tracks and processes UPS refunds and FedEx refunds. Money-back refunds from these shipping providers are “by request only.” So many companies unknowingly leave thousands of dollars on the table. While this may be a new concept to you, the niche is quite competitive online, and there are many large freight companies and shipping consulting companies that have offered parcel auditing for years. The business model is unique, because Parcel Audit Pros’ fees are contingency based. They only charge you a percentage of the fees recovered, and their fees are the lowest in the industry.

In this example, the founder and CEO of Parcel Audit Pros, Adam Call, was way ahead of the curve on search engine optimization. He knew early on that SEO and search engine marketing would be an important component of a successful launch and necessary to gain market traction. He knew what questions to ask SEO service providers and met with many before finding a good fit. In just a few short months Parcel Audit Pros has secured first page rankings for targeted keywords. As a rare tech company that focused on Internet marketing early on, they are getting the same organic visibility as other parcel auditing companies that have been in operation for years.

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From a search engine optimization standpoint, they are still very early in the process. Yet the results of an effective SEO campaign are undeniable:

With higher rankings come more search engine page impressions and visibility:

If you have a new company or are in the early stages of launching a new tech company or web application, consider the following to get a jump start on SEO.  There a many ways you can protect the confidentiality of your startup venture while still laying the groundwork for search engine performance:

1. Get a website up and running sooner than later.


2. Start blogging on topics about your industry and problems you are trying to solve.  In other words, start building your industry authority and credibility well before launch.


3. Get your social media accounts setup and active as soon as possible.


4. Work on creating content and establishing a content distribution channel early on.


5. Start the outreach process early so that you can find highly targeted and strategic guest bloggers for your website, as well as opportunities for your team to get published on other industry sites relevant t your niche.

SEO For Startup Companies: How One Tech Company Nailed It

Google Acquires Toro, an Innovative Facebook Marketing Startup

The king of search engine Google has acquired Toro, a Facebook Mobile Marketing Startup based on San Francisco, California. Toro is developed by Red Hot Labs in March 2012, and its founders Amitt Mahajan, Joel Poloney and Dave Pekar worked really hard in last three years to make this startup a huge success in its niche. Toro helps app developers to market and promote their apps by offering best-in-class mobile marketing solution. Toro’s app marketing plans of setting up and optimizing the campaigns run only on the Facebook advertising platform. In short, Toro is a Facebook Marketing company exclusively for the app developers to help them promote their apps in Facebook in best possible way.

The parent company of Toro is Red Hot Labs, and its prime founders Amitt Mahajan and Joel Poloney previously joined hands in setting up MyMiniLife, and you may know that this is the company which played a very crucial role in the development of popular Facebook game Farmville, and this startup was later acquired by Zynga.

Toro helps its clients to optimize their respective Facebook Ad campaigns by creating and testing hundreds of different variants for each and every campaign seamlessly. Mobile App developers can run and manage their Facebook promotional ad campaign in a very easy way with the help of the service provided by Toro. Now, as Google acquired Toro, we may be able to see a much better version of Toro in upcoming days.

CEO and Founder of Toro Mr. Amitt Mahajan announced this Google acquisition via a blog post. He wrote, 

“With greater resources and distribution now available at our disposal, we’re excited to join Google and continue our mission of making the lives of app developers easier.”   

Toro has already raised $1.5 million fund from various investors like SV Angel, Andreesen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, IT-Farm, Keith Rabois, Chris Dixon, Bill Tai, Matt Ocko and a few more. However, the financial terms of this Google-Toro acquisition is yet to be disclosed, and we’ll update this post if we get this information in coming days.

In that blog post Amitt Mahajan added, 

“For our existing marketing customers, we will continue to optimize your campaigns and update your dashboards, though campaign creation has been suspended for the time being. We recommend working with an alternative Facebook PMD for new campaigns going forward.”

It means Toro might be shifting its prime focus away from Facebook. Rather it wants to work on creating many new products while staying under the big umbrella of Google Inc. What’s your view point on this Google’s new acquisition of Toro? Let us in the comments section below.

Source: TechCrunch

Google Acquires Toro, an Innovative Facebook Marketing Startup