Contact Networks Makes Making Connections Easier

 by Ethan Forman, Mass High Tech 3/28/05

Contact Networks Inc. chief executive officer Geoffrey Hyatt got the idea for a “who knows whom” company search engine while working as a manager at The Boston Consulting Group in the mid-1990s.

His group was assigned the task of benchmarking new product development at Motorola Inc., Nortel Networks Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc.

Hyatt’s cold calls yielded little.

He found that when a colleague introduced him, however, he obtained useful information.

But he lacked a way to find out the contacts of 4,000 employees at BCG, as they were mostly locked away in Filofax organizers and voice-mail messages. But today most workers have moved their communications onto their desktop or a network.

With that, the 4-year-old company has developed a search engine for business contacts in mid-size to large corporations. The software allows you to query who has that foot in the door.

“We are the search engine that allows you to find the colleague that can help you,” Hyatt said. “Whether or not that colleague actually will help you, whether their contact will be useful to you, that would be between you and your colleague. That’s a social interaction.”

Analyst Guy Creese, a managing principal at Ballardvale Research in Andover, said the software replaces the networking that used to go on around the water cooler. Also, employees nowadays tend not to stay with a company as long as they have in the past.

“It is a nice way to keep things going in the face of companies losing (institutional memory),” Creese said.

The software, however, does not cough up your address book. It gives users control regarding the contacts they are willing to share.

“As a firm you can dial the sharing level up or down,” Hyatt said, “and as an individual you can have control to override that and dial that further up or down. We let the individual be in control of their contacts.”

The company, with less than 20 workers, announced last week it is growing, and had raised $1.6 million in its first round of financing from private investors, both institutional and individual. The money will be used to ramp up the sales, marketing and support staff and is also hiring to fill out its new office in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, said company executives.

Contact Networks, which Hyatt founded with Michael Yoon, a former vice president of technology at ArsDigita Corp., has gone from three to 12 customers in management consulting, financial services, law firms and higher education, and touching about 40,000 users.

Hyatt would not name those customers, but the company’s website lists testimonials from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College and venture capital firm Arcadia Partners.

Annual subscriptions start at $40,000 and up depending on the size of the company, Hyatt said. Travel search engine TripAdvisor’s chairman and co-founder, Langley Steinert, has invested in the company and is set to join the Contact Networks board of advisors.

Steinert formerly worked as an executive at Viaweb, which was bought by Yahoo. Other investors include Stephen Kaufer, the CEO and co-founder of TripAdvisor, and David Parker, CEO of DigitalAdvisor and vice president of business development at Direct Hit.

Hyatt is the former CEO of online pricing software firm Strong Numbers, which he sold to Income Dynamics, a subsidiary of Intuit Inc., maker of financial management software.

Hyatt acknowledges that the space for search is getting crowded, with Yahoo, Google and Microsoft searching the web and target search engines such as ZoomInfo.

Companies are also offering software that allows you to seek out what is lurking on your hard drive. What Contact Networks does is different, Hyatt said. He calls it enterprise search, the mining of vast amounts of data contained on a company’s network.

“There is more information and data in corporate enterprises than … there is on the web.”

The software culls information from many sources and can identify valid contacts. The software does not read the contents of an e-mail but does look at the pattern of traffic.

“We want to capture the fact that one of your employees has a strong relationship with an executive at TiVo,” Hyatt said. “That may be very valuable in your environment and we want the software to recognize that. On the other hand, we actively want not to capture your dentist, your dog walker and your wife. … unless she is an executive at TiVo.”