Deal Radar 2008: Jigsaw

Jigsaw is an online directory of over 8 million business contacts, complete with full name, title, address, email address and telephone number. It works on a point system, where members exchange contact information they have for contacts they need. Members are given points for every contact they provide and for wrong contact information which is

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Microsoft’s Shopping List

Let Yahoo deal with its mess, Microsoft should go cold turkey on them for a year now, and let Jerry Yang get fired for failing to create shareholder value. A far more interesting question looms on the Microsoft side. What is Microsoft’s Internet strategy going forward?

Deal Radar 2008: Elance

Elance is a marketplace which matches freelance design, technical, writing and other professionals with companies that need their services in a timely manner. The company was founded in 1999 by Beerud Sheth and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Deal Radar 2008: LinkedIn Should Roll-Up Jobs

LinkedIn is a professional business networking site founded by Reid Hoffman in 2003. It allows members to showcase their profiles and caters to the age 25-65 professionals demographic. It generates revenues via subscriptions and advertising. Recruiters use the site to tap talent, and is LinkedIn’s primary revenue generating segment. In 2003, LinkedIn secured $4.7 million

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News Corp. Charging Ahead

News Corp. has certainly been the most bold and dramatic dealmaker of 2007. Murdoch gets it. WSJ print revenues were up 7% in October and online revenues were up 30%. I have already discussed, why the WSJ acquisition is a good one, and suggested that the WSJ should go free. This week, Bear Sterns Analyst

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Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti (Part 4)

SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model? UM: One way to calculate TAM is by the money available to spend today on sales intelligence. This includes licenses to database information, such as Hoover’s. There’s about $5-10 billion spent today on this in the US market alone.

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Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti (Part 3)

One of the things I did when I designed the Intarka product was that I went and interviewed tons of really good sales people to understand the various kinds of tactics they use to prospect. To this day, this experience has always helped me in my various business development activities, and has today become second

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Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti (Part 2)

SM. What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? Competition? Competitive Positioning? UM: The market landscape did not include any “true” competitors at that time and still do not today. InsideView represents a unique technology that uses Web 3.0-type features to address sales issues in the enterprise. Although they aren’t true competitors,

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