14 DAY TRIAL // Google is on a roll when it comes to acquisitions, just days after acquiring social search startup Aardvark comes the news of another buy. The company has just bought reMail, creators of an iPhone email app. The announcement came from reMail founder Gabor Cselle himself who said he would be joining Google as Product Manger for Gmail. As for the app itself, it is no longer available in the App Store and will be phased out soon enough, so not good news for everyone.
"I'm thrilled to announce that Google has acquired reMail! I will be joining Google in Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team," Cselle wrote. "Gmail is where my obsession with email started as an engineering intern back in 2004, and I'm thrilled to be coming back to a place with so many familiar faces... Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo on how people communicate and share information."
Cselle has worked with Google before, as an intern, and has had some pretty strong ties with the company since. After working as VP of engineering for Xobni, makers of an Outlook plugin, he went on to start his own company with the aid, and money, of Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, creators of Gmail and cofounders of FriendFeed.
reMail is an iPhone app, which aims to make all of your emails easily searchable, even without an internet connection. From most accounts, it succeeded, offering a much better experience than with the default iPhone email app. It also had a couple of other interesting features, so there should be quite a few people upset by its cancellation. The app isn't available in the iTunes App Store anymore but it will still work if you have it installed. All the paid features will be activated for free as well.
This is obviously a talent acquisition so the end result, from the user's perspective, may not be entirely visible. Clearly, Cselle knows a thing or two about email, so Google wanted to have him on its side but it's unsure whether any of the technology used in reMail will end up in Gmail, either in the mobile version or the full-blow one.