Jim Fowler first took on the likes of Dun and Bradstreet as CEO of Jigsaw, which used crowdsourcing to collect and curate business contact data, and now, after selling the company to Salesforce.com in 2010, he has launched Owler, which wants to take on competitive intelligence providers through -- you guessed it -- crowdsourcing.
Salesforce.com said Wednesday it has signed a deal to buy Jigsaw, a cloud-based vendor of business contact data, for roughly US$142 million in cash. The acquisition, which appears to be one of Salesforce.com's largest to date, is scheduled to close later this year.
Contact-information vendor Jigsaw on Tuesday announced Data Fusion, a cloud-based service that ties Jigsaw's database with CRM systems such as Salesforce.com and automatically matches and updates contact records.