Jigsaw tries leveraging 'Wisdom of Crowds'

A start-up that built an innovative, user-created database of business contacts for salespeople is looking to ideas raised by the popular book "The Wisdom of Crowds" and turning to its members to provide hard-to-find data about private companies.

Since last year, Jigsaw Data, of San Mateo, Calif., has built a database of more than 1.2 million business contacts, all of which were submitted and vetted by the company's members.

Each Jigsaw member either pays $25 a month for access to the contacts, or submits 25 names, along with current phone numbers, titles, e-mail addresses and the like, thereby ensuring that the company has a steady and growing source of both contacts and revenue for its database.

As more salespeople have learned about the company, which has only 28 employees, it has increasingly become a relevant alternative to data giants like Dun & Bradstreet, Hoover's and Harte-Hanks, which each charge at least $1,000 for contacts database access. Thus, for Jigsaw's 17,000 users, all of whom depend on accurate, up-to-date contact information for executives at companies around the United States and the world, it is playing in what almost seems like an entirely different arena.

"Jigsaw is onto something enormous," said Emmanuelle Skala, director of sales operations for Cambridge, Mass.-based Endeca Technologies. "The (thing) we like about it is that it is other, similar people putting in their information knowing they're getting something in return."

Until now, Jigsaw has provided information only about individuals. But as it's grown to become better known and respected, it's felt the need to further differentiate itself from its larger competitors.

As such, it's turning to its chief asset--its members and their collective pool of insight about the companies they sell to--and tasked them with providing information about private companies' revenues and employee counts, data essential to salespeople but extremely difficult to come by using traditional methods.

"What struck us is that we've got a community (of members) and these guys are the eyes and ears of organizations," said Jim Fowler, Jigsaw's CEO. "They're the ones touching other businesses and learning firsthand about those businesses in a way that's very hard to replicate."

Fowler said that after reading "The Wisdom of Crowds," James Surowiecki's hit book extolling the collective intelligence of groups, he hit on a way to arrive at valid educated guesses about companies' key metrics.

How it works
The idea is that if multiple members voted on a selection of figures when submitting or reviewing contacts for people at individual companies, Jigsaw could aggregate the votes and arrive at what would likely be accurate information on those companies.

"Salespeople are in a unique position to figure out what kind of revenue and how many employees a company has because they have to have that kind of information in order to do their business," Fowler said.

The system works, he explained, by having the first member to submit a contact for a company vote on the metrics. Rather than forcing members to come up with raw data, Jigsaw asks them to choose between ranges of employees and revenue. For example, for employees, members can select zero to 25, 25 to 100, 100 to 250, 250 to 1,000 and so on. For revenue, the ranges start at $0 million to $1 million, $1 million to $10 million and go up from there.

Fowler acknowledges that because the system is relatively new--it's

[lynn998]

You do have the option to opt out of Jigsaw. Dont let them sell your info any more. It took forever to figure out how to opt out of Jigsaw, go to http://www.jigsawoptout.com for the easy way out.