This Startup Will Let Your Company Use Your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter Accounts
It wants to use those connections for marketing, recruiting, or sales.
Reachable scans public information on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other sources, to build a massive database that shows how everyone in the world is connected.
It sells access to that database to companies as a cloud service. They add in their own corporate information, like e-mail addresses, HR records, etc. and Reachable gives them a corporate "social graph." So when someone at the company wants to find contacts at another company, say Oracle or Google, it can find employees with contacts.
It's cool and a little creepy. Reachable might even have you in its database because it has already mapped "100 billion connections from all these different sources," says CEO Al Campa.
"I believe the online world ultimately mimics offline world. You have business connections. They are not all in Facebook or in LinkedIn, they are all over the place," he says. "That's what Reachable is trying to build. The one system that has a database of everybody that you know from any source, and everyone at your company, and everyone that they know."
So Reachable is grabbing "all social data, LinkedIn data, Facebook data, some Twitter data," he says as well as e-mail address books ("with user's permission, of course," he says). It snags work history. It looks for customer data and other public stuff from sources like Thompson Reuters, Dunn & Bradstreet, etc.
Reachable sees this as tool to eliminate cold calling for sales and replace that with having an employee that knows the person reach out. But it is also being used by company recruiters, too.
Reachable is also noteworthy because, a little over a year ago, it nabbed Campa as its CEO. Campa became a who's-who in Silicon Valley for founding Jaspersoft (makers of an uber popular open source analytics software). He left his startup to become chief marketing officer for Taleo in 2007. Oracle acquired Taleo for $1.9 billion in February.
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