PR Newswire Acquires The Fuel Team
PR Newswire has announced the acquisition of The Fuel Team, a Denver-based website software company whose award-winning technology has powered PR Newswire’s online newsroom and investor room tools since the two companies entered into a strategic partnership in 2004.
Today, hundreds of small, medium and large organizations including Bank of America, AON, Dow Jones Enterprise, and Siemens, among others, use PR Newswire’s MediaRoom to engage their audiences online, making it one of the most widely used media relations website hosting tools in the communications industry. In 2008, the partnership also extended to the creation of IR Room, an investor relations focused web-based engagement tool, built upon the same technology as MediaRoom.
The Fuel Team co-founders Dee Rambeau, Karen Meyer and Jason Keller will join PR Newswire. They will assume responsibility for enhancing the core public relations and investor relations website products, extending the technology to attract new customer bases and engage new audiences, and identifying additional ways to leverage the platform to enhance other PR Newswire products such as MultiVu’s Digital Center, a multimedia archival and content management system also built upon The Fuel Team’s robust technology. The remainder of The Fuel Team staff will also have the opportunity to join PR Newswire.
“The acquisition of The Fuel Team is a natural extension of our business,” said Ninan Chacko, chief executive officer, PR Newswire. “PR Newswire is committed to investing in partnerships or acquisitions of best-of-breed businesses, and today’s acquisition represents the next step in a very successful partnership.”
Chacko continued, “The Fuel Team has spent eight years building out their proprietary content management technology and becoming experts in online audience engagement practices. When we partnered together to bring this technology to public relations professionals in 2004, it marked the first time that professional communicators had access to an integrated offering that both pushed their messages out to their audiences via the wire and gave them full control over how they engaged with their audience online and in real-time. We’ve made significant enhancements to the technology since then — adding search engine optimization tools, social media capabilities, interactive features and more — and this acquisition will enable us to put even more resources behind building out this technology to help communications professionals further engage their key audiences online.”
“When we built the technology powering MediaRoom and IR Room, we knew we were filling an immediate need in the communications industry for an easy-to-use, non-technical content management system,” said Jason Keller, co-founder, The Fuel Team. “This technology gave PR and IR professionals the ability to leverage the Internet as a communications tool much more nimbly. Our partnership with PR Newswire gave us a platform to introduce the technology to the greater PR and IR community, and now, with this acquisition, we can take it even further.”
In addition to the MediaRoom and IR Room tools, The Fuel Team’s technology also powers websites for CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiatives, non-profit organizations and physicians/hospitals.