Declutter Your Inbox

“Slice and Unroll.Me are attacking the same problem—our inboxes are so cluttered that it’s nearly impossible to find the information that’s important."

Since Slice’s recent acquisition by Rakuten, Slice has made its own acquisition of the popular declutter New York based app ‘Unroll Me.’ The app allows users to unsubscribe from bulk or spam emails / newsletters all at once. People are fed up with inbox clutter and even resort to creating multiple inboxes just to hold spam and sales promos. The ability to re-organize and re-prioritize one's inbox is a big need in the US, at least...

With only 100,000 subscriber in late 2013, Unroll.Me now has over 1 million users and did not take on any outside investors, until now. 

Seems like the new strategy with so much growth in e-commerce markets is to alleviate the user experience while at the same time  serve relevant discounts in the process. It will be interesting to see how Rakuten expects Slice to manage Unroll.Me as both offer a similar service. Most likely there will be a sharing of customer information to combine the two databases.

As Unroll.Me founder explains, “The opportunities for us to improve people’s lives by creating value from the information in email are limited only by our imaginations.”

Rakuten is taking charge of acquiring prominent American companies that will impact digital marketing strategies for years to come. Its portfolio now includes the huge  Ebates, which it bought in September for a whopping $1 billion. The SF based Ebates offers cash back opportunity to over 2,600 online stores including Amazon.com, Macy's and Best Buy. It's a huge cross border move to gain entry point into the US for the Japanese based Rakuten. According to Wiki, Rakuten is a Japanese e-commerce and internet company founded in 1997 and have over $5billion in revenue. It began M&A activities outside of Japan starting in 2005 and since invested in Pinterest, Buy.com, Aha Life, as well as investments in several other countries.