Jigsaw provides D&B's missing pieces
Jinfo Blog

12th May 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Up to now it seems to have been LinkedIn making most of the running when it comes to strategic alliances between business information providers and executive social networking sites (try http://www.vivavip.com/go/e18907 for instance). But now Dun & Bradstreet has announced that it is partnering with Jigsaw, a provider of contact information for 12 million business people, which is kept up to scratch through content contributed by Jigsaw’s own global business-to-business community of 800,000 members (http://digbig.com/4yrty). As Penny Crossland explains (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16917), Jigsaw’s online directory of free, downloadable company information works by awarding its members tradable points when they contribute or update contacts, and a ‘premium’ plan is available for those who don’t have time to contribute data. Its boast is that it rewards its members for something that they would have been doing on their own anyway. Working on the principle that a collaborative wiki-type approach such as this means that information is rapidly self-correcting, Jigsaw has now launched a new application called Data Fusion. ‘Eighty per cent of records in most customer relationship management systems are incorrect or incomplete,’ the company says (http://digbig.com/4yrwa), and it claims that Data Fusion is the first cloud-based, automated system for acquiring and managing new sales prospect records. An open application programming interface and developer toolkit allows any CRM application to be integrated with Data Fusion, the company continues – and customers can ‘significantly reduce’ their monthly subscription by contributing back to the Jigsaw system. This is very much in keeping with Jigsaw’s philosophy. Last year (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e6792), its co-founder Jim Fowler declared 4 June Data Independence Day, saying that ‘the days of the multi-billion dollar data industry being under the rule of the few, and accessible only by the few with deep pockets, are over’.

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