FullContact Blog

Reading this thread I can answer the question because I have worked in this industry and given/sold data to Intellius specifically.

There are three main sources of ALL of the data:

1. Acxiom http://www.acxiom.com/
2. Experian http://www.experian.com/
3. Neustar https://www.neustar.biz/

Acxiom got it's big start by developing a way to copy phone books in the 90s and they won a court case that sided with them saying the name and address information was basically public info. Acxiom aggregates something like 800 different attributes for each named person at each address using third party vendors and then resells the entire consumer database to list brokers who often times will add additional detail for smaller subsets of the data. You can opt out of Acxiom by going here

http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/privacy/consumer-data-information/

2. Experian. Same as above but they have a lot more specific data about you because you probably fill out forms related to credit and loan applications correctly. Thus they know all of you previous addresses and they sell that to companies like Intellius.

3. neustar: ditto.

The main thing to keep in mind is that each of those three companies have slightly different channels through which they aggregate consumer data so your info comes out a little differently in each database.

Almost any list broker or mailing house or telemarketer that you encounter is getting their data ultimately from one of those three companies (and in many…

Thank you for the feedback about the web site. You are right, we will update our web site and put pricing information when it will be ready. Currently the application is in beta and free for use. Furthermore first 100 users provided feedback to the application will get a released version for free. Pricing will be easily affordable – about the price of a coffee for individuals or a client lunch for business users. You can find similar text on the web site.

Regarding “ethically sourced contacts”. Scailer finds an avatar and social profile links (linkedin, facebook) of a particular contact in the internet using the FullContact service as a data source. Scailer shows avatars of contacts in the left panel. That feature improves Scailer’s user experience. “Ethically” means that Scailer uses only public information: public avatars and public social profile links, and Scailer does not share that information to 3d-parties, and does not use it for advertisement. Scailer caches contact information retrieved from FullContact because of FullContact recommendation. Scailer does not store on any servers any link between email address of user and requested contact. You can find FullContact’s privacy policy here: https://www.fullcontact.com/privacy/privacy-policy/

Of course no messages are passed to the server. Scailer connects to a IMAP server (gmail, office365) using a secure channel and stores message cache in local encrypted database. It allows Scailer to work with old messages in…

I can't speak for everyone, but to me MongoDB is far easier than any other NoSQL engine I've looking into. The reason why I said "probably" because I can't speak for every NoSQL database out there.

We had a 5 node cluster in Mongo that we moved to Cassandra last summer. While our experience with Cassandra is by and large much more performant and cost effective than MongoDB, getting setup with Cassandra was not as easy with MongoDB. With MongoDB you can literally start throwing data in your database, then add an index after the fact. With Cassandra we had to make sure our data was modeled correctly, and decide where we would denormalize. Riak from what I remember has a similar data model to Cassandra, and Redis isn't something you just "start up and go" (mainly because its an in memory store).

So I know for a fact that Cassandra, Riak, Dynamo, and Redis are far more complex than MongoDB. Cassandra even requires you run a "repair" command periodically, and that alone makes it more ops work than Cassandra. We can even throw HBase in there too as it requires Zookeeper nodes, Named Nodes, and all that Hadoop goodness.

Now none of these databases are hard to use, but compared to mongo, mongo is a cakewalk. You literally spin it up, throw json inside, and get json back. There is no query writing, and for most cases there is very little ops management. In most cases if a query is slow, you can fix that by adding an index, or moving to SSDs, only once you have exhausted these…

I found segment.io in the early days of a new job and quickly set it up. I started playing with it and siphoning off some live data using a pretty rough shell script calling curl. Peter and another colleague saw what I was doing and came to my company to meet in person. I recall booking the largest, most impressive conference room we had and a 10AM meeting.

Peter and his colleague showed up and walked me through using Segment. The told me that I was the only one using their API via curl and that they were impressed with what I had been able to cobble together so quickly.

Peter took out a tiny Moleskine-type notebook and drew a diagram of what was next on the roadmap for Segment. I recall how neat and detailed the diagram was and how thoughtful Peter was about what he was doing next.

Peter and his colleague also revealed to me a sort of sister company they were familiar with that was creating an API around professional identity as a service. This sounded a lot like https://www.fullcontact.com/ but was something else.

I've since moved on from focusing on that type of data. HN seems to feature a fair amount of content about Segment. I enjoy keeping up with their progress and wish them all well.

FullContact | Multiple Positions | Denver, CO | ONSITE, https://www.fullcontact.com

We’re solving the world’s contact information problem and looking for amazingly talented people to join our team in downtown Denver. We're a primarily JVM focused shop with some very challenging data and scale problems for you to tackle. If you're interested in working with large, messy datasets at scale, we'd love to talk with you.

In addition to challenging technology problems and a great team, we offer 100% paid healthcare for you and your family, parking and transit reimbursement, and a $7,500 "paid paid vacation" stipend, among other benefits.

Open positions:

Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform: http://careers.fullcontact.com/apply/prDdh5Ccsl/Senior-Engineer-Data-Platform-Identity-Resolution

DevOps / SRE: http://careers.fullcontact.com/apply/Pe4tbk/DevOps-SRE

Product Manager, API Platform: http://careers.fullcontact.com/apply/qQEfg4/Product-Manager-API-Platform

I started working as a Developer Evangelist about a year and a half ago, and was having a pretty nasty problem dealing with contacts myself. I keep meeting people all the time, and want some way to:

* Have their contact info auto-imported if I add them as a friend in SOME WAY: either by emailing them, tweeting them, messaging them, whatever.

* Have all my contacts synced into one centralized data store (Google Contacts, in my case).

* Merge and remove duplicate contacts so I don't have to deal with 50 entries of people...

What I ended up settling on is really working well for the past year or so.

I use Google contacts as my primary datastore. I then use FullContact (free): https://www.fullcontact.com/

FullContact will hook into everything, eg: Google / Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / etc., grab EVERYONE'S contact info, and merge it into one record, then merge that back into Google contacts =)

Would highly recommend it.