It has been rumored since December that Research In Motion Limited (NASDAQ:RIMM) would be acquiring professional contact management company Gist.com. Now it is official: RIM is acquiring Gist. Gist raised $10.8 million in funding and launched in 2008.

Research In Motion Limited (NASDAQ:RIMM) is in talks to acquire Gist. The deal is rumored to be nearly complete. Gist is a service that creates a profile for your friends in your business network from public information. Gist is led by CEO and former Microsoft employee T.A. McCann. The company has funding from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.

Gist is a startup that takes a client and aggregates all the pertinent information about them.  This includes news about their company, recent links, blogs posts, e-mails from them, and attachments.  Paul Allen’s company Vulcan Capital is incubating Gist.  Gist’s engineering team is comprised of people from Jobster, Microsoft, Go2Net, Infospace, and Whitepages.com. 

“Gist is all about simplifying and focusing attention and giving you the ‘gist’ of what you need to know about your key contacts and companies,” stated T.A. McCann, CEO of Gist.  McCann used to work at the Exchange Server Group division for Microsoft.

Gist has about 5 employees.  One of them is Steve Newman, former VP of Software Engineering at Go2Net.  Gist is based in Seattle, Washington.  Some of the other companies Vulcan invested in includes Evri.com, Redfin.com, Radar Networks, and ZoomInfo.com.