KNOWING YOU
ZoomInfo, a new site that compiles information about your personal profile - whether you like it or not - will be supplying that information to Web site operators and advertisers soon so that they can target you as you surf the Web. The inquisitive startup arrives at a time when Facebook is unleashing its own advertising platform that it says makes precise targeting possible. Based in Massachusetts, ZoomInfo already has personal information for almost 40 million business professionals, which it gets by scouring the Web, gathering things such as your name, past work affiliation, and even your e-mail address if it can find it. It attempts to track the industry you work in, your company, title, job description, education, sex and location. ZoomInfo calls its information "bizographic" - biographic data related to business - and says it is much more useful to advertisers than Facebook’s targeting information, because it is more precise. Both companies think they have something better than Google. "Contextually placed ads don't cut it anymore", says ZoomInfo CEO Bryan Burdick, referring to the ads supplied by Google. "They simply look at the words on a Web page and serve up advertising related to the words without knowing anything about the reader". ZoomInfo says it updates over 3 million profiles per day and that about 100,000 people a week are finding their profiles on the site and clicking through to confirm or correct them.
http://www.zoominfo.com
When I put my proper name into the ZoomInfo website it found me as a member of this forum and reproduced a newspaper article about my 2005 BH2N run.
