The Rapidly Changing World of "People Data"

For many years customers would ask us for accurate data on people - contact information, biographies, six-degrees-of-separation, non-profit board memberships, etc.  So we worked with the officers and directors data of some of our existing partners (Thomson Financial, Reuters, Hemscott) and licensed a couple of new databases: Leadership Directories and Corporate Board Member. And we continue to try to add other content on executives our customers subscribe to: Boardex and Capital IQ.  We have an application called Alacra Connections that lets users search for people and companies meeting certain criteria that sits on top of the databases mentioned above, which have painstakingly concorded - we've mapped all the names so that each person has a unique ID.
Customers used to assign a significant amount of value to these databases and in many cases were forced to subscribe to more than one because they needed comprehensive, global coverage.  But in just a couple of years, the market for people-related data has changed dramatically and is approaching commoditization. 
Here's the evidence:  Company Insight Center, the new website jointly presented by sister companies Business Week and Capital IQ includes most of the corporate officer and director data available through Cap IQ's premium product.  Relationship information is nicely displayed and you get the now-readily-available compensation information from the proxy. This is an improvement over what's available on Yahoo Finance.  (The really valuable company and people information they collect on private equity firms doesn't appear to be there - yet.) Three search engines for people were discussed on TechCrunch yesterday: Wink, Spock and recently upgraded ZoomInfo.  They're each interesting in their own right, but Spock is asking/encouraging  users to contribute their own content for the greater good.  I've only seen Spock over someone's shoulder but according to a great post at WebWare,

Spock wants password access to your online contact lists.

This is made clear when beta users activate their invitation code. Spock asks you first for your personal connections: It wants you to provide a password to one system you use that has a personal address book. The options are LinkedIn, Plaxo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo. Spock does a one-time slurp from the contact list you give it. It says it uses the information so it can add your contacts to Spock, which is pretty cool and will make Spock look better to you, but by providing password access to your accounts, you're helping Spock get data it couldn't otherwise get from the public Web. In particular, you're providing not just names and data to fill out the Spock database, but also the connections between people.

So even if a small subset of Spock registered users contribute their personal contact information, this could conceivably create a broad and deep ad-supported search engine of people and their relationships.  And while the premium database providers will still retain some premium value (Corporate Board Member and Leadership Directories still have plenty of information that is impossible to find elsewhere) free is free.  New sales at premium prices won't be easy to come by.