Jigsaw continues to raise big cash with a Series C bringing in $12 million.

" The funding round was led by Austin Ventures and also included previous investors El Dorado Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

Jigsaw's database, which is entirely user-created, functions by having members either pay for access to contacts or submit their own. It has bloomed to more than 2.7 million contacts at more than 160,000 companies, and is growing by more than 10,000 contacts a day, the company said.

"Jigsaw's ability to leverage the power of the masses to collect and maintain a vast amount of data has the potential to transform the data industry," Thomas Ball, a partner at Austin Ventures, said in a statement. "Its user-generated database creates data transparency and delivers efficiency not only to sales organizations everywhere, but (to) anyone in need of accurate business contacts."

Mike Arrington has a passionate hate post about Jigsaw but not related to the round but the overall data mining strategy.

The thing is that data mining is being done by hundreds of companies every day - Jigsaw just does that more efficiently and was never shy about how they want to monetize it. Plaxo and many other were.

I think it's rather unrealistic to believe that you are able to control your contact data this way. Once you hand out your first business card or send your first email with a signature your data are in the wild. Hating Jigsaw for the this is rather inappropriate.