Jim Fowler, CEO and Co-Founder, Jigsaw Data Corporation

- People spend 1/3 of their time finding the right kind of people to contact, gatekeepers make this painful, marketing departments go out and buy data
- Everyone goes out to buy data, but building harder than maintaining
- Jigsaw founded to solve this problem, global contact marketplace, online business card exchange, users buy sell and trade bizcontacts, up from the ground approach, collaborative and self-correcting, at very low cost
- Picture worth a thousand words: 16,000 for Medtronic, Inc. Chevron 12,559, JP Morgan 10,659, etc.
- Contact costs 5 "points", one person's trash is another person's treasure [COMMENT: like "go fish" or hearts]
- Every contact has been added by a member, is complete and with email address - no blank fields.
- "Challenge" button allows users to correct info, same number of points as a new lead.
- Building data is easy compared to keeping it clean.
- summer '04 a few thousand contacts, now 1.4 million, growing at 10K a day
- 2 criteria: is a business contact, is correct.
- Trade: Get 2 for 1
- Buy: buy points to acquire contacts, $1 per contact. A LOT of members buy a lot of data.
- Monetizing content, they broker it. Jigsaw does NOT pay money, they broker.
- Users can make real money, top ten members have made $3,000 each selling points, if you can do your car payment on the side "that gets interesting." [COMMENT: As in my weblog, a transparent anonymous market is key]
- No "free," all value- or money-based - can pay for 25 contacts monthly.
- Our mission - map every business organization on the planet [COMMENT: Google-like goal] so far all English, making it transparent, keep up to date for collaboration [COMMENT: also providing internal QA function to expand cleansing that social network may not cover]

Lou Morsberger, President and CEO Service Ratings LLC

- Consumers lack service business info and wish it were online. 70 percent have a problem finding services providers, worried about getting ripped off.
- $700 Billion market, trying to shed light on it
- Hasn't this been done before? Not the case, plenty of success stories for gathering feedback, but product-driven, or hobbyist driven - consumer goods, restaurants - but services are overlooked. Very granular audience, small geographies, hard to get voluntary feedback, low sex appeal. Yellow pages services with feedback on AOL, but in Philly of 500 plumbers only 36 ratings for 27 plumbers. ValueStar participants vetted, good credit standing, no adverse judgments, do survey of custs, maintain data.
- Businesses get free info, assurance to consumer, can see what CONFIRMED consumers are saying. Rewards program, 1 percent rebate for service experience feedback. Businesses can customize.
- Each business has at least 25 consumers with feedback, ValueStar drives traffic
- Business pays only for business influenced by ValueStar - low risk, high ROI - credit card driven measurements
- Surveys and Benefits Offer Continuous cycle of user input - as users appreciate benefit, credit cards can be enrolled. Long term, the business scales with search engines and credit card companies, think of what embedded benefits could mean for credit card companies.
- ValueStart cust makes purchase, xaction matched in background, commission collected, survey sent to consumer, when reply received benefits received, update rating
- "Get the consumer benefits right and good things happen."
- Credit card surveys benefit eBay's feedback mechanism for the offline world, will be what D&B is to trade credit what Nielsen is to TV ratings [COMMENT: Maybe, potential is there for something huge, CPG equivalents show that this can be successful]
- Exclusivity enhances appeal, include ONLY businesses that meet quality ratings, consumers have to be true customers, can't "game" it, valuable incentives.
- Towards consumers, value is guarantee and reward, San Francisco now, going nationwide.
- Pay for performance OPTION - paying for business actually transacted, makes it easier to get businesses enrolled [COMMENT: PPC-like structure to encourage use.]

Tim DeMello, CEO and Founder, Ziggs Inc.

- On average every business professional is crawled every day.
- Can use your professional profile professionally (?) Free networking sites could be a serious cost to young people trying to build career, can hear search typing on phone.
- Today there will be 50 million searches of business people every day. Pretty soon they will be typing names into MySpace.
- Your profile is really, really important. People can post a profile, bio, etc. on ZIggs
- Launched in 2003 launched 04 with million profiles, now 3 million profiles for 92,000 companies
- Angel funded, no VCs, $7.5 million, powerful indexing
- Need to understand your search results, not just your name.
- Searches oftentimes category oriented, e.g., IP attorneys in Atlanta
- People are searching for people's names, but really searching for a good profile
- Content sources: user-filled template, free, know what pages are a profile with face recognition, etc., more content from companies submitting to make sure that it's updated regularly.
- When people are dismissed taken down, updated on promotions, real-time referral alert on searches that hit your page, $4.95 premium service. Alerts within a minute.
- 5-10,000 a day growth, gets competitive, people want to have the best profile
- Shows up on search engines, corporate sites
- Ziggs WebPro, Real-time referral alerts, search engine placement costs $25 per user per year.
- Getting towards critical mass

Q&A
? For Jigsaw, part of your goal is to map every business organization, limited to what's on a business card, any initiatives on mapping organizational structure?
- Yes, cards public info, reporting to was an idea at first but attys pointed out that it would be a trade secret, can't divulge data without COMPANY permission.
- Ziggs - only compiling data
? Reaching critical mass, what did it take?
- Service Ratings - how many providers before positive user experience? Maybe a couple of hundred, so consumers could come away with something, need to focus on specific categories, could buy public data, consumers may not get additional data to see something
- VCs loved idea, how to get mass?
- Ziggs - decided that 1 million were needed for launch, went and got them, quality would attracts participation.
? Used to have huge budget for hot tech company, wanted salespeople NOT to have it, what do you do?
- Fowler - I am a sales guy, being listed on Jigsaw happens without prior permission, proving contact info ratchets it up, thought long and hard, knew model would work but would it be accepted. Only database that allows you to set preferences for personal "rules of contact"
? How do you guarantee?
Service Ratings - $1,000 guarantee, businesses are jealous of relationship, when dissatisfied customer called response is quick.
? Salespeople and quality data entry don't go together. How is this better?
- Difference for Jigsaw is the carrot and the stick - every action gives action or a spanking. 2 for 1 rule works both ways, more automation to check, "Bounty Hunters" concept, tattle on others. Arbitrators idea like Wikipedia. Since complete info is required up front, hopefully will solve.