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If David Koretz hasn’t trademarked the term (or patented it!), he should. His company Bluetie.com started with a free online suite of email, spam filter, calendar apps, but instead of running text or banner ads, he offers seamless integration with these functions to selected advertisers. Orbitz was first: drag the time and route you want to fly onto your calendar, and Orbitz will deliver the results right onto your calendar. (Etickets are taking a little longer to integrate — but they’re coming.) My first notice of Bluetie was in Advertising Age, August 13, 2007, but a ZDNet blog entry from February  reported a handful of clients active now and 19 in the pipeline. Bluetie also offers “tagline” advertising through a partnership: “Tagline advertising from Adknowledge provides the ability to insert tagline ads into user-generated peer-to-peer e-mail, weather alerts, flight notifications, e-cards, and newsletters.”

This is a promising second act for a company that was one of the first to offer ad-supported online services, in 1999, but which has never quite caught fire like some of its competitors. Next up is API-platform tools for featuretisements to be offered elsewhere.