George Eliot once wrote, "There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life." She ought to know. Born Mary Anne Evans, the 19th century English novelist adopted the male nom de plume shortly after her first work was published anonymously, in part to keep separate her public life as a writer and her controversial private life as the common-law wife of an already married man. Over time, Eliot's readers learned the truth of her identity—and kept on reading. Ultimately, they didn't care what Evans did in her private life as long as Eliot wrote stories that moved them.

Celebrities, politicians, and even corporate executives contend with similar "public versus private" information issues today, but in wide open forums. Because the Internet is all about information—that which we find in the public domain but also, unfortunately, that which industrious seekers find through their own devices and then make public—even Average Joes and Janes have to be aware of their Web identities and proactive in managing them. 

 "We all have identities—at work, at home, and on the Web," says Jonathan Stern, founder and CEO of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Zoom Information (née Eliyon Technologies). "Information about people is infused everywhere on the Internet, but it's not organized. What we've done is collect huge amounts of information about people and put it all in one place . . . allowing them to manage their Web identities."

Moving Beyond Artificial Intelligence
To appreciate what Stern describes as Zoom's role as a content creator, it's important to understand how Eliyon began.

"I've always had an interest in artificial intelligence and intelligence in general," Stern says of the company he founded in 2000 as a spin-off of Corex Technologies, the manufacturer behind the business card-scanning solution known as CardScan. "When I looked at the search engines in use at the time, I could see that they weren't delivering the kinds of information people wanted. The problem had little to do with the search engines themselves, but rather with people's expectations of what search engines do. So I asked myself, ‘What kinds of questions will be valuable to people, from a business standpoint, and what kinds of answers can the Internet provide?'

"Once you phrase the question in those terms, information about people becomes an obvious answer," he continues. "If we could organize all of the professional information there is to be found about a person online into a database, then you can start asking sophisticated questions about that person. So the idea was to develop a set of tools very much like a search engine, but with algorithms that can read sentences and convert them from English free text into database records."

Instead of simply indexing the text, the company's patented natural language extraction, artificial intelligence algorithms, and information integration logic technologies "summarize a lot of online information and boil it down to its essence," Stern explains. "Our system crawls the Internet searching for information about people and the companies they work for and reads that text in context. We do not do what Google does. We take information in online text, parse it, and create database records for people and companies that don't look at all like the source text. We create millions of new records every day, and it's all automated." Every few weeks, the system automatically tries to figure out which records belong to whom and combines them in a short summary for each person. The system also compiles all sources from which the information was drawn in a single location for each summary.

For years, Eliyon made this information available exclusively to business users, including recruiting firms and Fortune 500 companies, to help them streamline their recruiting efforts, compile sales leads, and enhance their competitive intelligence efforts. But in March 2005, the company made two central changes to its business model: (1) It opened its ZoomInfo database of more than 26 million people summaries to the public for free, non-commercial use and (2) it changed its name to Zoom Information to better describe ZoomInfo's ability to "zoom in" on information about people and more than 1.5 million companies. (Paying subscribers conduct searches far more sophisticated than those permitted by the free people search tool on the Zoom homepage using the company's ZoomInfo On-Demand service.) 

"We wanted to make our system open to the public in certain ways so people can find themselves and correct their information," Stern says of the shift. "We all have the right to see, update, and shape, to a certain extent, how we are perceived online, and one of the most obvious sources of information about a person is the person himself." By giving someone the ability to "have some control over what people see when they type in his or her name," he adds, the company can ensure that the information its system delivers is both accurate and up-to-date. 

"The biggest problem in the econtent industry is that information changes very quickly," Stern says. "Most of the information circulating in databases originates with human actors, but if you look at any database, you'll find some out-of-date information. That's why what we do is so important from a business perspective. We're not just aggregating existing content. We're automatically refreshing information about people based on what our system finds online and on what the people themselves provide us, creating new records of information you can't find anywhere else."