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Product Management :: Product Marketing


27 April, 2010

Salesforce acquires Business Contact Directory Jigsaw For $142m

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Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Jigsaw which provides crowd-sourced contact information for business. The deal is worth approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price, according to Techcrunch.

I derided Jigsaw when it first launched in April 2004 (see my blog post), as it allows users to buy other people's contact information, without their permission.

The model has changed - but I still dislike the whole concept:
  • Users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people's contact information (ie not real currency, but a virtual one).
  • It is now positioned as contact information cleanup tool
  • Users can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily.
  • Revenue was rumored to be around $30 million per year at the end of 2009.
  • 1.2 million users with 800 corporate customers.
  • Database of 21 million contacts at nearly 4 million companies.
  • The company had raised $18 million in venture capital to date.

07 April, 2010

Google adds QR Codes as part of URL Shortener


Not to be outdone by Facebook adding QR Codes (see recent post), Google has enabled QR Codes as part of the URL Shortener according to this Techcrunch report: Google Continues To Embrace QR Codes, Integrates Them Into Its URL Shortener.

So Google has a URL Shortener Goo.gl (yawn) which launched in December 2009 (Facebook And Google Get Into The Short URL Game). Today, Google added a very elegant feature: if you add “.qr” to the end of any shortened link, this will generate a QR code for it. For example, the link http://goo.gl/SJhz would become http://goo.gl/SJhz.qr.

Google are a clearly massive fan of QR Codes and this is an easy way to propagate them.