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Mintigo uses a corporation's definition of the target customer to build algorithms and conduct a search that will provide the best new customers for that corporation. Their selling point is that they can make outbound marketing more effective, but targeting potential customers that will have a higher conversion rate.
Salesforce.com's Sales Cloud has Marketing & Leads features, including Automated Lead Scoring. Salesforce obviously is building a massive database, and putting Mintigo's deep search on top of that would provide SF customers with a very powerful tool for finding, qualifying and managing leads. Of course, there will be some confidentiality issues to contend with, and it may be that Mintigo would be confined to the public space, as it is now.
Mintigo recently (9/2011) completed series B of $9m. Don't know what their revenues are, but it's clear that they could only grow massively inside Salesforce. The other side of that is that Mintigo has fairly limited exit alternatives. I suspect they'll have a hard time scaling as an independent company. Salesforce should pick this one up for cheap now.
The Mintigo executive team appear to be seasoned professionals with quite a track record, and they're based in Israel; Salesforce could do a lot worse than to try to retain that talent, and perhaps join many other successful tech titans who've opened R&D centers in Israel.




