1 post tagged “xing”

LinkedIn and Xing aren’t the only ways for executives to stay in touch and share contact information. Another Web site called Jigsaw might actually beat these services - as well as other business networking sites like Plaxo - as the best way for corporate executives to find a perfect hire or sales lead.

Jigsaw, which lets people submit the office phone numbers and e-mail addresses of individuals at large companies - virtual business cards in a sense - is thriving, according to CEO Jim Fowler, because the site has a community approach and tries to ensure that people have the most accurate information in order to recruit employees or make a sale. You don’t have to be a member of someone’s network in order to see their contact information.

“We are a wiki. We’re not about networking. People don’t come on to Jigsaw to get introduced. They come on to get direct information,” Fowler said. “We are a data company. We hope to do to the corporate data dinosaurs what Wikipedia is doing to Encyclopedia Britannica.”

So how exactly does the site work?

Fowler said that site’s more than 310,000 members have submitted information in order to build a database of 7 million records. He said that the site’s primary users are sales people and job recruiters.

People can use the site for free and earn points that allows them to get more information about people by referring the site to other users or sending in new contact information or updating existing information. Users also can pay in order to earn points that can be spent to get more relevant leads.

Fowler said the company should be profitable by the end of the year and is considering selling advertising on the site next year. For now though, Jigsaw generates its revenues primarily from subscription services as well as premium corporate offerings that it can cater to specific businesses. For example, a business could pay to have its entire sales team listed on Jigsaw.

There is, admittedly, a lot of competition in this area. Fowler said he sees a site like business search engine ZoomInfo as a rival as well as big data providers like Dun and Bradstreet (DNB), Acxiom (ACXM) and infoUSA (IUSA). Interestingly, he’s not as concerned about competition from big search firms like Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO) though because searching for contact information about people is not really a key part of those sites’ search results.

But Jigsaw appears to have a lot of promise, so much, in fact that my sister publication Business 2.0 named it one of its Next Net startups to watch last year. And even though Fowler is quick to point out that his company is not really competing with LinkedIn, Fowler does share one thing in common with LinkedIn: a strong desire to take the company public.

In this environment, where many dot-coms are shunning the public markets in favor of selling out are staying private, LinkedIn executives have been very candid about their desire to one day go public. And Fowler also is hopeful that Jigsaw, which has raised $18 million in funding so far from venture capitalists Austin Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners, will one day go the IPO route.

“I’ve got a wooden desk and I’m knocking on it,” he said, when I asked him about going public. “We want to transform the data world and take it from a closed proprietary system to a community and to do it globally. We would love to go public.” Fowler said it would probably be a few years before going public makes sense though. But he said he’s not interested in selling out even though some data companies have made offers.

So Jigsaw looks like an intriguing piece of the growing corporate networking puzzle. And if LinkedIn, as some suspect, does file for an IPO later this year or in 2008, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see Jigsaw follow suit.