I first read about Eliyon Technologies in the current issue of Business Week magazine. Longtime privacy advocates like me have to be wary when a company claims to be "the most comprehensive source of information on business professionals available"--but the lawyer in me wanted to check it out, and so I did.
From the Eliyon home page, you can reach "Eliyon Networking," which though touted as a free service limits users to a certain number of searches per day. I reached the limit in about ten minutes, then tried another computer on the same network--no luck, the website recognized me.
To test out the database, I first typed in the name of a drug company I know a lot about and instantly came up with some stuff I was interested to read. Searches of other companies, including law firms, yielded other interesting results.
Give the site a try as a tool to be used for informal discovery. Just be sure to take the information the database spits out with a grain of salt: a search of the Sonnenschein law firm gave me six pages of names and titles, but listed one lawyer as a "pro bono partner" and another as a "law dictionary."
No one, I'm sorry to say, would ever say either of those things about me.
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