Sales. The more you know about the people you're cold-calling, the better chance you have of selling them something.

"Turning phone numbers into full profiles" is a primary objective of every telephone marketing/"lead-generation" campaign in the history of time, and automating part of it by aggregating publicly available data seems only natural.

I would guess this is aimed less at telemarketers calling people's homes, and more at telemarketers selling business services (especially B2B startups), where cold-calling is seen as more legitimate and is the way a lot of business gets done. You want to know, at the very least, that you're calling someone whose job title indicates that they have the authority to spend money.

The term "big data" stands for the nature of the data Contactive stores, which comes many sources. Most of this data is unstructured and unorganized, and we are able to structure and index it.

Every time we get new data, we have to compare it with the existing set. This is done in realtime..

So, the fact we have 600+ million identities ready to be queried is the result of having a much bigger dataset were all the non-matched-yet data is stored.

Hi. Thanks for the comment. We only use data that is publicly available (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp (for businesses), etc. Regarding the "big data" logic we use a lot of complex algorithms to provide accurate resolution and to be able to create compelling profiles. We consider ourselves as a "big data" solutions because of the principles we use to aggregate this data.

So the connected social networking data gathered from a person's use of the 'Contactive' app is kept separate and private?

As with everything, I'll assume nothing is free unless I'm the product.

Just because a phone number is publically available doesn't mean that the owner of that number wants all of their public information aggregated for an unknown purpose, which looks to be a pipeline for sales lead generation.

What use case is your product addressing?

And I'm sorry, but 600 million unique data entries isn't "big data" that would fit into a single Excel 2013 worksheet if you used multiple columns (570 ish columns) but still 1 worksheet.

The 600+ million records are not just unique records since phone numbers are not necessarily primary keys. One of the challenges of Contactive is about indexing and building relationships between phone numbers, emails and social identities. Every time we collect new data, it is stored into the directory and indexed in realtime.

It is also important to know that we only index public data and also we provide an opt-out option if someone wants to be unlisted.