Salesforce.com
has just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.
The enterprise cloud computing company in a statement touts Jigsaw’s Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model, which it says delivers the world’s most complete, accurate and up-to-date business contact data (e.g. check out Salesforce’s profile on there).
When we first reviewed the company back in 2006, Michael Arrington deemed it a really, really bad idea because Jigsaw would pay people simply to upload other people’s contact information (a privacy nightmare).
Jigsaw has changed its model since then: people can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And 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. Revenue was rumored to be around $30 million per year at the end of 2009.
More ...http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/salesforce-buys-jigsaw-for-142m-in-cash-plus-earn-out/
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