Jigsaw solves a puzzle

Jim Fowler, who was once half-owner of Lookout Ski Resort, has a different business he’s pushing these days.

His Web company, Jigsaw, aspires to be the Web map of every business contact in the world, complete with e-mail addresses and office extension numbers. Jigsaw’s business model is simple: You can pay to find its list of contacts, or you can create points or credits by entering as many business contacts as you wish.

Founded in 2003 – with seed money from Idaho-born venture capitalist Rick Magnuson – Jigsaw is anything but a social network. Jigsaw is a buy-and-sell service that lets companies gather names and contact numbers from all across the English-speaking segment of the world. Fowler, who heads the office from San Mateo, Calif., said the biggest customers of Jigsaw are sales teams and recruiters.

Fowler sold his half-interest in Lookout in 1999, then moved to Silicon Valley.

Because of work history in the Northwest, Fowler chose to locate half of the company in Post Falls. He says he considered the area’s low cost of operations and “strong work ethic” when basing the sales office and other units in offices on Clearwater Drive, just west of the Post Falls outlet mall.

That Post Falls office also holds Jigsaw’s customer-service, data-gathering and “data-cleansing” teams. The idea of “clean” data is something Jigsaw talks about frequently. While numerous firms offer stacks of business contact information, Fowler says Jigsaw has a more efficient way to keep those business contacts fresh and updated.

“That’s because all our community members are constantly updating and correcting the data in the database,” Fowler said. “It’s a self-correcting system like Wikipedia,” he said.

Here’s why Jigsaw users clean up data: When you sign up for a free account on Jigsaw, you’re entitled to two credits; that means you can buy two other people’s personal information.

If you had a new contact, you earn one more credit. And if you fix or correct incorrect information for anyone’s contact (your boss, for instance), you earn a credit.

Cell phone numbers are excluded by Jigsaw policy. The company realizes that trying to add that information to a Web database would likely inflame millions of people in the business world.

People can also just buy credits for a monthly fee and simply plug into Jigsaw to gather contact information.

Bob Memmer, director of the sales unit at Jigsaw’s Post Falls office, said some corporate customers buy as few as 10 contacts at a time; some buy millions of names and numbers on occasion.

While recruiters and sales teams dig through its mass of data, Jigsaw also cold-calls potential customers. Recently, an Australian yacht-building company decided to use Jigsaw, asking for a specialized list of high-level corporate executives working in the United States. The goal was to target those names with offers to buy a yacht, said Memmer.

The amount Jigsaw charges for those contacts can range from $1 per name to much less, depending on volume of information, said Memmer.

Fowler acknowledges the use of data that way – wholesale packaging of detailed office numbers and office e-mail addresses – rubs privacy advocates the wrong way. One well-known blogger, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, has called Jigsaw evil for its practice of encouraging the import of other peoples’ contacts.

Not only does Jigsaw encourage the import of others’ data; it doesn’t identify – other than by screen name – who put data into the Jigsaw system.

Fowler said Jigsaw never guarantees that data and contact information added to the system won’t be provided to outside and third-party sales companies or marketers.

“Jigsaw is not the only company that provides that kind of information,” Fowler explained. “We are just more efficient at it than other companies.”

He said Jigsaw members – people who sign up and claim their information – can either have their information removed, or they can set conditions over how others contact them or for what reason. Fowler himself tells marketers through his Jigsaw account that he won’t take calls from marketers trying to pitch wealth management services.

For now, Fowler says about one-third of Jigsaw’s revenue comes from individual customers, with two-thirds coming from corporate customers.

“We are not yet cash-positive,” he said, noting he expects Jigsaw to become profitable in the last half of 2008.