Buzz: Zoominfo Tool

For a venture capitalist, I have a pathetic memory. I can never remember names of people of meetings from even the day before. I cling to my Blackberry (searching calendar, to do’s and email) for my institutional memory. I have limited ROM and use all of these means for scalable RAM.

A very cool product in this realm is Zoominfo (www.zoominfo.com). It spiders crawl bio’s, board listings, etc to pull together, in an automated fashion, consolidated profiles on individuals. It is the largest player in this space and has more than 30 million people summarized in its database. It pulls together the work history, education, current position and other affiliations of these people.

This is very useful if you are trying to remember where someone worked, want to know the background of someone you will be meeting or simply want to know someone’s title for a pitch. It is a very useful sales tool.

Its parsing technology is pretty good though not perfect. If you type in Matt McCall (I am pleased to see I am top of the list!), you will see my education and work history. It also has a number of my board positions though it missed a bit by putting me on the Motorola, Tellabs and Boeing boards (confused by my fellow Atomworks board members).

It was started in 2000 under the name Eliyon as an executive recruiting tool and has spread from there. Check it out…