Austin-based Hoovers, acquired by Dunn & Bradstreet in 2002, announced it’s acquisition of Visible Path for an undisclosed sum. Visible Path had raised over $20M from high profile VCs Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and Integral Capital Partners. Hoovers had been using Visible Path’s technology for the past year to power the beta test of their Hoovers Connect functionality. Hoovers Connect (demo here) works by scanning your Outlook contacts, email, and calendar, then evaluating the strength of the various paths of connections going to the person that you’re seeking to meet or network with. This is a slightly different approach from LinkedIn, which also plots a path to the target of your networking interests. It’s going to take a lot of trust for people to allow an evil mega information aggregator (D&B) scan all your personal emails and contacts in Outlook and not “Beacon” it.

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