Social search startup Connect6° aims to connect you with everyone
Discovering and connecting with new people can be a challenge. It is not easy to obtain contact details and discover people’s skills on the web unless you connect using tools such as LinkedIn and request email and phone information.
Los Angeles based startup Connect6° aims to change the way we find this information. It was founded in 2013 by Vikran Kashyap, Andy Estep and Dean Nicolls. It is a search platform that enables you to connect with the right people for you and your business.
Currently available for the Chrome browser, Connect6° has two offerings — PeopleDiscovery and PeopleSearch. The Discovery tool is a browser extension that delivers contact and professional details about a person.
PeopleSearch helps you find business prospects and job candidates based on keywords within their social profiles. You can also search for people by skills, location or distance from a certain city.
You can search on job titles and display only people with Quora, Salesforce or Google Plus profiles.
It is a competitor to tools such as Rapportive in as much as it displays contact information about people you already know within Gmail. Connect6° shows you information about people that you do not know across several online platforms.
It uses big data analytics to help you discover and connect with new people. It is built on “one of the largest, searchable online databases with more than 550 million social and technical profiles."
It enables you to find candidates using its people search tool. It helps recruiters find eligible people for roles and it aids talent acquisition in a way similar to TalentBin and Entelo.
In LinkedIn, you need to be introduced to new people to make connections, or send an InMail to connect. You also contact new people using LinkedIn’s email feature. Sales staff and recruiters tend to prefer to have the contact’s email address and phone number to directly connect.
Networking
Interestingly, the company does not see itself as a competitor to LinkedIn for job searching. Connect6° views itself as a complement to LinkedIn.
Although LinkedIn does an "amazing job of compiling current profiles and online resume, not everyone is on LinkedIn."
Instead the company provides public profile data from a number of social, professional and networking sites.
These include Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn. It also captures data from GitHub, StackOverflow, Quora, Gmail, Outlook.com, AOL.com, AngelList, Hootsuite and Salesforce.com.
As you browse web pages, Connect6° places a small search beacon, or pointer, next to any unique identifier, such as a Twitter handle, or link to social media site. Hovering over this beacon, displays the information in a sidebar.
Details, such as location, contact details and job role appear under an image.
All new users are given 50 free contact search credits and 25 credits per month during the beta phase. More credits can be given upon request, but there is a limit to avoid fueling spam campaigns.
Credits display for your account. Each time you request additional contact details about someone, your credits reduce by one. Requested contact details take about 24 hours to appear in your inbox.
Connect6° is currently free while it is in beta. The beta phase will determine how the company can best monetize its PeopleSearch and PeopleDiscovery solutions.
The founders also want to let customer feedback and behavior guide the decision-making.
Connect6° is 100 percent bootstrapped from the sale of cloud-based email archiving company LiveOffice to Symantec in 2012. Currently it is only available for Chrome, but will soon be available for Firefox, Safar and IE too — based on consumer demand.
For those of us who are frustrated by the lack of information displayed on some sites, Connect6° will be very useful indeed.
You can see how much information is publically available about you — which might prompt you to change your online settings if you feel that you are sharing a little bit too much.
Related articles: