Destination CRM
Digital marketing firm WhatCounts has integrated its email marketing platform with Salesforce.com as part of its Winter 2014 product release. The update now brings Salesforce.com to its Publicaster Edition users. Salesforce users can now send email campaigns to contacts and leads using the WhatCounts platform and check out metrics in Salesforce. In addition, WhatCounts' app is now available in the Salesforce.com AppExchange.
NOLA.com
The International High School of New Orleans was temporarily shut down for two days after the school received bomb threats via email. Yesterday a threat, caused the school to shut down for about three hours and again today school sessions were delayed for a while after the school received another the threatening email.
SFGate
President Barack Obama has come out saying that he will end the government's spying on the phone calls and email records of hundreds of millions of Americans. Obama said that government agencies like the NSA would require court approvals to access these private communications. He defended some of the NSA's practices pointing out that security professionals are aware of citizen's personal liberties.
Forbes
Facebook has a tool that lets you find your account if you forget your Facebook profile name, others can use the tool to discover personal data. Essentially you can enter your name, email or phone number into the Find Your Account page and access your Facebook profile as well as a partially obscured email address such as h***@gmail.com. You can try this on other people and get some clues about their name, photos and part of an email address.
Mac Rumors
Mail Pilot, an email app that lets users organize their email inboxes, is now available from the Mac App Store. The tool is already available as an iOS app. The app marks all incoming emails as incomplete and callous users to deal with these emails from the bottom menu bar: Complete, Remind, Set Aside, and List. Read emails are automatically archived.
Business Insider
Target sent out an email to millions of consumers over the past couple of days, informing them that their personal information may have been stolen in the recent data breach and offering a year of free credit monitoring through Experian and identity theft insurance. The email is a response to the retailer's major data breach that happened over the holidays. The problem is that many consumers thought that the email was fake and took to Twitter to point out its flaws including having the email address TargetNews@target.bfi0.com.
Nieman Journalism Lab
Developer Rusty Foster used his prowess for Twitter to land in Newsweek. Foster did so by creating an email newsletter called Today in Tabs, which is powered by TinyLetter. The snarky newsletter tells subscribers who to hate on Twitter. The newsletter has about a thousand subscribers and includes tons of links and funny messages about Twitter conversations on a daily basis. Newsweek is now republishing the newsletter daily.
TechCrunch
Cobook, a company that provides a universal address book app that allows users to track the emails, phone numbers and street addresses of their contacts, has been acquired by FullContact, a Denver-based contact management solutions company in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. Cobook's six person team will relocate to the Denver office. Cobook CEO Kaspars Dancis will become the Product Manager for the FullContact Address Book.
TechCrunch
Microsoft revealed today that a "small number" of its employee's Outlook accounts were hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. The news comes after the group also reportedly compromised Microsoft's social properties. The online group tweeted out screenshots of emails supposedly coming from Microsoft staffers.
Internet Retailer
Seventy-seven percent of e-commerce consumers that have signed up for email marketing messages from a retailer said that they are likely to purchase from a company that personalizes messages based on their shopping and browsing behavior, according to a new report from Harris Interactive. The study, which was conducted online between December 11th and December 13th on behalf of marketing company Listrak, found that 82 percent of shoppers are likely to purchase more items from companies that personalize emails.