BOSTON, MA, PowerInbox, the open app platform for email, made its service available to the public after raising $1.1 Million from prominent venture capital and angel investors. The service enables users to run apps from inside their email messages.

Today, notifications from Facebook, Twitter and Groupon are received in email messages, but each website must be launched separately in order to use them. With PowerInbox, the apps for these services runs right inside the email messages themselves. Users can access their walls, reply to posts, view photos and more on Facebook; follow, read and post Tweets; and check expiry and review stats for Groupons -- all without leaving their inboxes. A 52-second PowerInbox video introduction can be accessed at http://vimeo.com/27427184.

At its debut, PowerInbox works on Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail with Outlook coming soon. These four email providers have a combined user account base of 1.5 billion.

"This is just the beginning," explains PowerInbox Founder and CEO Matt Thazhmon. "We have built a unified open platform on which any developer can write their email app. Our vision is to empower users to play games, book travel, complete financial transactions and more, all from their email program."

PowerInbox has raised $1.1 Million funding from Atlas Venture (Jeff Fagnan), Longworth Ventures (Jim Savage), Correlation Ventures (Trevor Kienzle), and angels Alan Phillips (where.com), Chris Lynch (Vertica), Joe Caruso (Bantam Group), Leslie Murdock (MurdockMartell), Mark Rose (SpareChange), Mike Santullo (RocketMail) and others. PowerInbox raised most of these funds through AngelList, the community of startups and investors.

"PowerInbox will do for email what Apple did for mobile phones -- make any app accessible on it," said Jeff Fagnan, Partner at Atlas Venture.

About PowerInbox

PowerInbox makes email better by running useful apps inside email messages. The PowerInbox open app platform lets developers create apps that run on all email using HTML5. For more information, or to get the free service, visit www.powerinbox.com.