Every one of our customers who has access to our API demonstrates that the Ark (YC W12) API has much more data than FullContact's API. Send me an email and I'll hook you up.
Kipp from FullContact here. Interestingly, we've had several customers put us head-to-head against Ark in match tests using the same source data sets, and all have wound up going with us due to much higher match rates & better data returned.
We always encourage potential customers to try other services. With over 500 paying customers of the FullContact API from some of the internet's largest SaaS providers, we're pretty confident in the quality and quantity of our data.
Bottom line is, none of us will have the same amount of data as Rapportive, because Rapportive had direct access to LinkedIn's data warehouse. (And as we all know, LinkedIn has never been shy about hoovering up data from anywhere it can get it.)
Hey Priley,
Vibe uses FullContact. However, it is not just FC. We have other sources, our own crawlers and APIs as well. This is why we are steadily getting improvement in our data.
PS: I'm the founder of Vibe.
The issue is they specific said you can't start or use existing code before the date (still there in the rules PDF). I know that many very talented teams followed that rule even though theycould have used some of their older repos and did something even more impressive than Upshot. Then they respond to a forum question, weeks after the hackathon started, saying "yeah sure, just not a significant amount". Most programmers were heads down in their code and didn't check the forum. That's wrong and they did nothing to explain or correct this.
About a week before Dreamforce, Salesforce had a call with their "premiere partners", and were very unsure about their own rules. They ended up saying "You can submit an existing app or product, but you'll only be judged on your contributions for the hackathon", which was a huge red flag of BS. In light of all of the news, I almost feel like they knew the winner at that point and were trying to cover their tracks a little bit.
Wow, that's messed up. My team and I could have tacked on Salesforce to our existing product (like several of the top teams), but we read over the rules several times and made the conscious decision to build everything from scratch so that our entry would count.
Yeah, we knew this was going to happen after hearing that. We should have just aborted, but decided to be hopeful that it would be tastefully handled. I guess that was too much to hope for.
Their strategy at this point if the high ups are stubborn will be to wait out the weekend for activity to die off. People get on with their lives. The thing to do now is to reach out to companies who could sponsor ending this thing right. prize or no prize. i think we organize to find a Microsoft or oracle who could host an evening
I'm starting a fact timeline that we can contribute to. Google spreadsheet probably. maybe it's all the episodes of ms marple my wife watches. Can you say how and when you came across this info? Was it firsthand?
It was firsthand. I'm not entirely sure how many people were invited to the call. They talked about the hackathon (mostly marketing stuff). In the QA afterward they were asked some details about teams (if everyone had to be there, etc), but the question of preventing people from bringing premade apps came up. And the answer given was almost exactly (per my memory) "You may use an existing application, however, you will only be judged on your contributions for the hackathon". It's weird that no one really dug deeper for more clarification, and I'm ashamed for not doing so myself.
Wow. Thank you. Who issued the call from their side? I can't imagine they passed that information to the judges. But even before then it should have been made public and applied to the entries. That would have made the winning app a text field with Google voice that shows an arbitrary link
That's actually a really neat way of tackling the problem, but it does require people to change habits and use Ark instead of Mail.
So while Intro seems to have less friction, you have to give up privacy (HAH. Email and privacy always makes me laugh) to achieve it, which does suck.
Shame there wasn't a cooler way to try and handle it by only using headers or something, rather than MITM the whole damned email stack.
Ark is neat though. Out of curiosity, how do you handle double notifications? As in, I get a new email, now I've got a notification in Mail and Ark? Or does Ark replace Mail entirely?
I know this isn't the place for it, but when she said that, I just had to share. Give her a chance... time is on her side.