Salesforce goes into amoral crowdsourcing

Nowadays the confidentiality of personal information is not so important. Especially for sales guys, like Salesforce's management. Today, Salesforce has acquired Jigsaw, which TechCrunch's Mike Arrington at first called evil and then simply amoral. Jigsaw - is a huge (21 million) online database of contacts and companies, filled by crowdsourcing: users add contact information of other people (without their knowledge) usually from business cards. When the service appeared in 2006, it paid people $1 for each added contact. Then Jigsaw sell the access to contacts database to companies using cold calling (or spammers). And there was no way to remove your contacts from the service.

A year ago, Jigsaw added the ability to delete personal data and stopped paying for the adding contacts. Now, users just get points for this and then buy access to other contacts (i.e. sales persons are exchanging their contacts). That was the moment when the services went from Evil to Amoral.

But despite its amorality Jigsaw has always been financially successful. It received $12 million funding from respectable investors, and its revenue has risen to $30 million per year. And now, Salesforce has purchased it for $142 million.

Salesforce already can pull contact information from Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. So that Jigsaw base will be quite appropriate to them.

See also: Top 10 Online CRM software