Jigsaw (website)

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Jigsaw is an online business directory of companies and business professionals that is built, maintained and accessed by a worldwide community of more than 400,000 subscribers. A comprehensive database allows members to exchange and share the business information of some 8 million contacts from a million global companies.

Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Jigsaw Data Corporation was founded on January 1, 2004 by veteran sales executives Jim Fowler and Garth Moulton and is ventured funded by El Dorado Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Austin Ventures.


How it Works

Jigsaw builds its collaborative database through an incentive system where members trade business contacts they have for those they need. Users are rewarded with points, or credits, for adding new contacts and for updating existing contacts, and penalized for adding inaccurate ones. Members can also access the database by paying a monthly fee.

While not the only player in the burgeoning business database game, Jigsaw states that utilizing a user-generated database that's continually updated by its members and offers timely and accurate contacts while leveraging Web 2.0 technology makes the company unique.


Features

As of March 2008, Jigsaw members have had access to 8 million contacts from a million companies worldwide. Jigsaw's contacts act as a virtual business card, offering name, title, postal and email addresses and phone numbers for individual contacts.

Corporate searches offer company information like address, website and phone numbers. Users can also search for companies by industry and ticker, number of employees, and by Fortune 500 or 1000 ranking. It also offers multiple-level contacts within each company, including hard-to-find upper level contacts.

Data Independence Day--June 4, 2008

On June 4, 2008 Jigsaw announced the Open Data Initiative and declared Data Independence Day. This bold move meant that now anyone could download company data for over 1 million companies for free. Previously, people had to search the Web for one off data or subscribe to expensive data services. To promote this "Next Revolution" in the data industry Jigsaw founders launched a YouTube video dressed in revolutionary costume and took to Haight Street in San Francisco to tell the world.


Controversy

While this electronic method of building business contacts has proven popular with the company's target niche of recruiters, marketers and sales professionals, it has also raised questions of privacy as most of the site’s database is entered without permission from the person being listed.

Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler says Jigsaw fills a valuable niche in the electronic marketplace, allowing sales and marketing professionals to bypass gatekeepers to contact prospects directly. “We're trying to make the process far more efficient.” (The Arizona Star, 10/29/2006). Jigsaw also points out that information can be removed from the database by directly contacting the company.


Competition Chief amongst Jigsaw's competitors are online business networking sites such as Spoke.com and ZoomInfo, and traditional data companies such as Hoovers and InfoUSA. While each offer similar content, Jigsaw points out that free access to a collaborative and accurate database by its community of members is what differentiates the company from its competitors.


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