All in the name of business!

NEW YORK: The Internet now offers a powerful twist on the old boy's club rule: It's not what you know, but who you know, that puts you ahead in business.

With little fanfare, Eliyon, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company, has in just three years compiled a vast -- and still rapidly growing -- database of 15.7 million profiles of U.S. business people culled from many Internet sources.

Eliyon is quickly becoming to resume information what D&B is to credit reporting, Google to general Web searching and what Friendster or Classmates.com is to social networking among potential dates or old school buddies. In fact, it's a little bit of all these.

The goal is to quickly become the default for finding people in business, its creator says.

"In business, there is no directory of corporate America because companies have been reluctant to reveal such data," Chief Executive Jonathan Stern says. "It is hidden in millions of Web pages but there needed to be a way to organize it."

Beginning this weekend, Eliyon has opened its commercial database to allow individuals to verify their personal details. Visitors to the networking section on the left side of the Eliyon home page at http://www.eliyon.com, can also search for former colleagues, old friends and new business contacts.

It's a short walk down memory lane for any office worker who searches for former colleagues and a powerful business tool for job references, sales tips and competitive intelligence.

DATA ACCURACY VS. PRIVACY

Eliyon's database software technology works by crawling the Web and "reading" press releases, newspapers and company Web sites. From such sources, profiles of people can automatically be assembled from all steps of the American business ladder.

Eliyon relies on natural language processing technology that seeks out patterns in the way words appear in certain contexts. Numbers in front of the word "street," for example, suggest a street address and are filed accordingly.

Each tidbit of data about a person becomes a record in that person's online resume put together by Eliyon. A personal file is culled from as many as 100 different sources, Stern says.

While the scale of information gathered may raise fears of privacy abuse, Stern is quick to distance his company from the issue, saying that Eliyon only collects publicly available information. There are no arrest, credit or divorce records -- only material that you or someone in your organization has made an effort to publicize via the Web.

"The information that we collect and post has nothing to do with your private life," he stresses. "We stay away very, very (far) from anything having to do with personal data."

To be sure, any Google user can find far more personal details using its phone directory search function, which instantly returns home addresses and phone numbers.

FROM BUSINESS CARDS TO DIRECTORIES

Stern is not just another entrepreneur with another bright, but ultimately unprofitable, Internet idea. For a decade, he has been a leader in basic business information collection through an earlier business he founded -- Corex Technologies.

Ten-year-old Corex is the maker of top-selling CardScan business-card reading devices, having sold 500,000 of the compact desktop scanners. For people who receive many business cards, it's a convenient way to scan them into a computer.

Unlike D&B, Hoover's or InfoUSA, who specialize in information about retail America, Eliyon is putting names and places together for the millions of people who work inside companies.

"We want to get about 40 million profiles of working Americans," he says of his target audience. "What we want to have is a database where anyone who wants to talk to anyone in business can find them."

Already, Fortune 1000 companies including Microsoft, Time Warner, IBM and Staples use the Eliyon system for recruiting, sales prospecting, competitive research and more. Leading online job search company Monster.com resells the Eliyon database to recruiters to check information about job seekers.

© Reuters