Just over a year ago, Salesforce acquired Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud. The startup crowdsources information on professionals and companies and currently has a database of information on more than 24 million professionals at nearly 4 million companies. Now Salesforce is integrating Jigsaw’s data into its CRM product, giving sales representatives greater, realtime intelligence when curating and following up on leads.
So Jigsaw will be natively available to all 94,000 users who are using Salesforce’s CRM. Jigsaw’s data was previously only available via an app on the AppExchange. Salesforce says that the Jigsaw community adds 36,000 new contacts and updates an additional 12,000 existing contacts daily. → Read More
When Salesforce.com bought crowdsourced business contact database Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year, the CRM giant said that it would combine its suite of applications with Jigsaw’s model for the automation of acquiring and keeping up-to-date business contact data. Today, Salesforce is unveiling Jigsaw’s deep integration into the company’s platform, Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM.
Jigsaw will now deliver real-time updates to contact and company information within Salesforce CRM through communication platform Salesforce Chatter. Jigsaw, which uses a Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model to bring in data around business contacts, has been incorporated into CRM applications to provide on-demand data, and analytics on the health of data and on usage. → Read More
Salesforce.com has just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011, subject to customary closing conditions. → Read More
In 2006 I was horrified by Jigsaw, a website that encouraged users to upload people’s contact information (often from business cards) for money – $1 per contact. Other people then bought that contact information.
Even if you found out about Jigsaw there was no way to get the information removed. Hand out your business card to the wrong person and you could suddenly find yourself in vendor cold call hell.
From my original post: “Jigsaw makes money while pushing costs to other people…[by] making private contact information public. The problem here is that Jigsaw’s actions aren’t easily found out by people getting constant cold calls and emails – it’s very unlikely they’ll know that these people got this contact information at Jigsaw in the first place.”
Jigsaw has changed its model since 2006. People can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people’s contact information. → Read More
We’re all getting used to the idea that our personal information information is now public to the extent that we share it on social networks and elsewhere on the Web. Corporate data about people’s roles and functions within different organizations is similarly becoming increasingly public. All you need to do is search on LinkedIn to get a person’s entire work history or Jigsaw to find their direct contact information. Now you can add TheOfficialBoard, a contact database which goes one step further. It shows the organization charts for 20,000 of the largest companies, so you can not only look up an executive like Mark Zuckerberg but also see who reports to him or her.
Org charts are not always the most reliable indicator of power within a company, but they do serve as a handy way to visualize the power relationships within specific corporate networks. At launch, TheOfficialBoard is hit or miss in terms of its comprehensiveness and accuracy. (See Google. Where is Marissa Mayer? Does Joshua Schachter really report directly to Eric Schmidt? Update: he doesn’t). But it will get better over time. Like Jigsaw, it relies on its members to fill out the data about each company. And most of the detailed information is obscured unless you either add three contacts, or you can pay $100 a year for premium access. Both contact data or cash can be traded in for virtual currency, which then can be used to access the data. This data exchange model is also similar to Jigsaw’s, over which Michael once had a hissy fit. → Read More
Jigsaw, a company that I have begged our elected representatives to do something to stop, continues to see skyrocketing growth and managed to convince Austin Ventures to lead a $12 Million series B round of financing. Previous investors El Dorado Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners also participated. One of my best friends, Tom Ball, has joined their board of directors, which makes our conversations about the company somewhat lively to say the least. All I ask of you is this, Tom – at least try to convince Jigsaw to allow people to get their personal information out of the database so that it cannot be purchased by anyone who visits the site. Jigsaw isn’t the most evil company on the Internet by far, but it is the most evil company funded by well known and respected venture investors. There should be more to an investment decision than the bottom line profitability potential of a company. Its cost to society should be factored in as well. → Read More
Well, just as soon as one company stopped being evil, another one has stepped in to take its place. Jigsaw is a marketplace for contact information, and it is very efficient. It boasts detailed personal contact information for 2.5 million people, and 7,000 new people are added every day. If you want the name, title, email address, direct phone line and/or address of any executive of any company, there is a very good chance Jigsaw will already have it in its database and will sell it to you. And if you are a sales guy and have no ethical concerns about where you get your contact information, you probably already know all about Jigsaw. Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people. See the demo (and note the other demos on that page as well). Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information. That’s right, the next time you hand out a business card to someone or otherwise divulge your contact information, you may be handing it out to the entire world. Here’s how it works: Sign up and start downloading contact information. This includes name, title, company, address, email and direct phone line. For example, a quick search brought up all of this personal contact information for Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo (appropriately smudged): But wait, it gets much worse. Anyone can find out if Jigsaw has their contact information via a link on the home page, but amending or trying to delete that information simply puts a flag on the data with the changes noted – but the original information also remains.There appears to be no way to remove your own contact information from Jigsaw once someone has entered it into their database. There is no method that I was able to find on the website to do this (including in the privacy policy), and an email to the company asking about this went unanswered (its been three business days now). Jigsaw has a carefully worded privacy policy to deal with the fact that they are the antithesis of → Read More
