Jigsaw nets $12 million

Jigsaw Data, which built an innovative, user-created database of business contacts for salespeople, announced a $12 million third round of funding on Monday.

The funding round was led by Austin Ventures and also included previous investors El Dorado Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

Jigsaw's database, which is entirely user-created, functions by having members either pay for access to contacts or submit their own. It has bloomed to more than 2.7 million contacts at more than 160,000 companies, and is growing by more than 10,000 contacts a day, the company said.

"Jigsaw's ability to leverage the power of the masses to collect and maintain a vast amount of data has the potential to transform the data industry," Thomas Ball, a partner at Austin Ventures, said in a statement. "Its user-generated database creates data transparency and delivers efficiency not only to sales organizations everywhere, but (to) anyone in need of accurate business contacts."

The company said it intends to use the new money to fund new growth, as well as new product development and marketing efforts.

EVIL!

Jigsaw is evil ... People can sell them your contact information, but YOU can't remove it!

[wbenton]

Invitation to Hackers

Anytime a database that size is publicized... hackers all gang up to see who can crack it first.

And EVERY public challange to hackers has proven that the hackers can hack into anything.

That said... they're only asking for trouble!!!

I expect to see an article about the hack within the next few weeks.

Walt

[cmingeaud]

Jigsaw is Great!

Take a look at Jigsaw's Fair Information Statement...

http://www.jigsaw.com/FairInformationStatement.jsp

I hope this helps illustrate Jigsaw ethical standards on how Jigsaw obtains data. Business to Business data and the business cards companies print for their employees is indented to be distributed with the objective to do business. It becomes public property in effect. Everyone that has a business card printed has already ?opted in? by virtue of the business card being printed. Jigsaw simply compiles this information.

Austin Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners are backing Jigsaw with millions. They would not back a unethical company.