Jigsaw is an online business directory of companies and business professionals that is built, maintained and accessed by a worldwide community of over a million subscribers. A large database allows members to exchange and share the business information of more than 29 million contacts from over 4 million companies. This information consisting of what is commonly found on a business card.
Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Jigsaw Data Corporation was founded on January 1, 2004 by sales executives Jim Fowler and Garth Moulton and is funded by venture capital firms El Dorado Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Austin Ventures. On April 21, 2010, Salesforce.com agreed to a $142 million in cash deal to purchase Jigsaw Data Corp. The acquisition was completed in May, 2010[1].
Jigsaw competes in an increasingly competitive database industry and utilizes a user-generated database that's continually updated by its members that leverages Web 2.0 technology (just like Wikipedia uses its viewers to update entries). Jigsaw's contacts act as a virtual business card, offering name, title, postal and email addresses and direct-dial phone numbers for individual contacts . Jigsaw, however, has grown to contain much more than just contact information. In April 2009 it launched its first Data as a Service product, Jigsaw Data Fusion (now called Jigsaw for Salesforce), a cloud-based automated system for acquiring and managing CRM records within a users Salesforce.com account.[2]
Credibility of provided information is a concern. Erroneous information concerning job title, e-mail address, employer, etc. are major complaints (yet common with many data providers). Removing personal information or correcting incorrect information may seem difficult, Jigsaw is one of the only data companies that allow people to remove their information.
While this crowd-sourced method[3] of building business contacts has proven popular with 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 does, however, make it easy to remove business information on request as noted in December 2009 by TechCrunch[4]. However, recipients of these messages regard it as spam and at least one complaint about receiving more spam after attempting to remove one's address have been noted[5].