In a fireside chat with Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs at Street Fight Summit West Tuesday, Gil Elbaz, chief executive at Factual, the location data company, said there’s a massive opportunity for startups to help digest and analyze the massive amount of data coming from mobile devices. The challenge, says Elbaz, is folding additional information into location data to help better understand the context of the user.
We spoke to [Gil] Elbaz on what he learned from his time at Google, why he's jumped back into the entrepreneurial arena, and why he thinks data is the future.
Factual continues to expand the world’s access to data with a makeover and relaunch of its Geopulse API. Now renamed, Geopulse Context aims to provide developers with the geographic and commercial context of locations to enable personalized app experiences. The new API expands US Census data and commercial metrics available via Factual APIs.
Los Angeles-based Factual has renamed its Geopulse API, its API for providing demographic data based on geolocation information, to Geopulse Context, as part of what it called a major relaunch of the program. The API lets users specify any location on earth and get information such as median household income, population density, education level, race and ethnicity, and more.
Yesterday TripAdvisor announced that it had done a deal with Factual “to integrate restaurant data from its Global Places data set to complement TripAdvisor’s dining options and reviews. Additionally, TripAdvisor will provide Factual user-generated data to maintain freshness and accuracy for its Global Places data . . . TripAdvisor operates in more than 30 countries and Factual Global Places data covers 50 countries.”
The Los Angeles big data company will provide restaurant data in 50 countries, including both places and reviews, and in turn will receive raw user-generated data from TripAdvisor travelers.
A Los Angeles-based data company, Factual, announced it will begin providing TripAdvisor with restaurant data “to complement TripAdvisor’s dining options and reviews.”
“The addition of Factual’s Global Places data to complement TripAdvisor’s current offering will provide consumers the best experience and enormous choices for dining worldwide,” said Eva Ho, Factual’s VP of Marketing and Operations. “The stream of contributions provided by TripAdvisor’s users will reinforce Factual’s Global Places position as the leading source for definitive global data on places.”
One of Factual’s strategies for constantly gathering the newest bits of information is to enter data-sharing partnerships with its Web and mobile partners. Today, Factual announced a reciprocal partnership with TripAdvisor, one of the most popular travel sites on the Web, operating in more than 30 countries.
Factual’s data, which often includes a restaurant’s location, phone number and other relevant information, will integrate with TripAdvisor’s database of user reviews.
TripAdvisor will also forward Factual any user-generated information – say, if a café has moved locations – about the restaurants to help Factual maintain an accurate database.
Factual, the Los Angeles-based provider of a massive, cloud-based database of location and other data, said this morning that it has partnered with TripAdvisor, to complement TripAdvisor's dining options and review.
Factual, Inc., a leader in global data for web and mobile apps and mobile advertising, announced today that it has partnered with TripAdvisor, the largest travel site in the world, to integrate restaurant data from its Global Places data set to complement TripAdvisors dining options and reviews. Additionally, TripAdvisor will provide Factual user-generated data to maintain freshness and accuracy for its Global Places data.
Big data is spurring a new era of data management innovation. For CIOs, one new business entity—the data market—is worth investigating.
“Factual is making many smart applications possible,” said Jason Pontin, publisher and editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review. “By collecting and analyzing large sets of data, it creates stores of knowledge that can inform many kinds of software.”
Expect Labs has been on a bit of a tear lately — within the past six months the San Francisco-based startup showed off its fan-favorite app at Disrupt SF 2012, scored itself $2.4 million in funding from some big names, and inked a deal with the voice recognition mavens at Nuance. Now Expect Labs has tapped big data startup Factual Inc. and its sizable store of location data in a bid to make its vaunted Anticipatory Computing Engine even smarter.
Founder Gil Elbaz, another former Google executive, predicts that a small number of companies such as his will end up becoming the “canonical” sources of digital information on which the big data world turns.
Factual understands the power of data and believes that greater access will drive innovation and create better tools. Restaurant data seems simple, but the apps and tools that have engendered out of the mere availability of restaurant data stands to change the industry forever. Factual sits nicely to provide the data underlying the disruption.
Santa Monica-based data startup Factual now boasts more than 1.2 million restaurants, the company said this morning, after adding over 400,000 restaurants to its database. The firm--which provides a cloud-accessible, real time dataset available via APIs--said it also bolstered data on hours of operation, delivery, cuisine, and price across those restaurants, with hours for over 1 milion of the restaurants.
Restaurants continues to be the top local and mobile search category. And data provider Factual now says its US restaurants database is the most comprehensive and complete available.
Headed by famed Google AdSense creator Gil Elbaz, Factual has created a massive, cloud-based repository for data on geolocated businesses and points of interests; products; and much more, plus an extensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to get to all that data, in real time--which it describes as "mind-blowingly hard data problems". The firm's software is now being used in a very wide range of both web and mobile services, from Foursquare, to Yelp, to LivingSocial.
A market for data swaps is rapidly emerging. Factual, a Los Angeles-based startup, has put together a database that houses location data and details on retailers and restaurants. Access to the database costs companies money, but they can accrue discounts by agreeing to contribute some of their own information.
Factual is creating a curatorial engine that seeks out data created at many other companies and organizations. Using machine learning and other advanced technology, Factual has created an emerging data economy that encourages people to trade the data they have for improved data.
"The more data that you have," Elbaz said, "the better the model that you will be able to build." He added: "Sure, the algorithm is important, but whoever has the most data will win."
Want to cut out sugar or add super-foods to your diet? Now app developers can help. Data curator Factual just added ingredient lists for over 350,000 of the most popular consumer packaged goods (CPGs) and nutrition parameters for over 150,000 of them to its Global Products API.
As someone who is dedicated to creating high quality and accessible data, I am encouraged that more and more people are realizing that data in massive volumes does not really mean much unless it is high quality, verifiable, relevant, and accessible. The most important trend I see in the world of data today is that the element to create quality and accessible data is entering the mainstream.
Today, the company founded by former Applied Semantics co-founder Gil Elbaz is announcing the addition of two new heavy hitters to its advisory board, Clare Hart and Jason Rosenthal.
The company just announced that it has added thousands of new locations to its U.S. point of interest sets, for a total of more than 22 million places in the U.S and 62 million places around the world...Well, Factual also announced a new feature: Place Rank, which will enable developers to sort query results by relevance.
Factual has been steadily enhancing and increasing the data it makes available to developers and publishers. This morning it announced the addition of new categories of data to its US database as well as improvements to its international databases.
If the whole wide world is made of data, then Gil Elbaz might be the first person to map the vast terrain.
Ex-Google AdSense creator Gil Elbaz always envisioned a marketplace for data, like an eBay for facts. Only six days after leaving Google in 2007, Elbaz incorporated a new startup called Factual, a platform that takes big data and makes it accessible to businesses and developers.
Open data platform Factual continues its expansion into the local market. The new “monetize API,” as the company is calling it, helps connect developers–and their users–to coupons, table bookings and other referrals to local places. The developer, in turn, gets a cut of whatever Factual earns from the deal. The addition to the Factual Places API comes with four launch partners, including the two most popular daily deal websites.
Factual has added engagement and monetization capabilities to its set of local data tools with the release of a new Monetize API. The API enables developers to snap deals and other engagement tools like restaurant reservations to any business in a developer’s local dataset, and share in the revenues generated from conversions.
Los Angeles-based Factual, the developer of APIs and a dataset of geo-located information about businesses and other locations, said today that it has launched a new API, which aggregates and geo-index third party deals, ads, coupons, and offers.
Data services provider Factual is announcing a new API this morning for developers: Monetize. It becomes the sixth API in the Factual data family.
Factual, the POI data aggregator start-up, today announced the release of a new API (in beta) called Monetize which aims at aggregating and geo-indexing third party deals, ads, coupons and offers. Factual will then offer a share of revenue to developers based on the deals sold to end users.
[VIDEO] Gil Elbaz, CEO of Factual, talks about the importance of data and analytics for marketers and how the technology is evolving to better assist automated, real-time decisions.
Open data platform Factual.com is beefing up its Global Places offering today with three new APIs that will provide mobile developers with access to a ton of new data which can help them build better location-aware apps. But the company notes that the APIs’ launch will be of special interest to mobile ad providers, including mobile ad networks, demand-side platforms and agencies, who are looking for new data points around geography. This is particularly important on mobile where traditional methods of ad targeting – beacons and cookies – aren’t viable.
Factual has added deeper analytics to its compendium of location data services with the release of its new Geopulse API this morning. The API enables developers to retrieve contextual information — commercial profiles and density scores as well as demographic indicators like age, gender, and median income — for a given location across Factual’s 50-country reach.
Los Angeles-based Factual, the developer of application programming interfaces (APIs) and datasets for the location-based and mobile market, has expanded outs its suite of APIs today, with three new APIs focused on location and mobile ad targeting.
Factual Inc, a company founded by ex-Googler Gil Elbaz that is creating a collaborative data platform, announced extensions to its Factual APIs today that are aimed at improving the ability to target advertising and provide other geo-based capabilities in mobile applications. The three new APIs, Geopulse, Reverse Geocoder, and World Geographies, fill gaps and extend the scope of Factual’s API portfolio. But the way that Factual thinks about its APIs also holds lessons for anyone who is mapping out an API strategy of their own.
Google wants to digitize all the world’s information so it can make it freely available to everyone. But, according to Gil Elbaz, founder of data aggregation company Factual, Google can’t be considered an honest data broker for business because it’s competing with them by selling its own services to consumers, too. Elbaz, whose earlier start-up, Applied Semantics, was acquired by Google in 2003 and became the basis of AdSense, says businesses can trust Factual to be an honest data broker precisely because it doesn’t sell anything to consumers.
We’ve assembled a list of some of our in-shop favorites tools, ranging from streamlined image editors to dynamic databases, from unassuming to in-your-face, as well as various practical uses for each.
Factual is not new in that it integrates data. What is new is the scope of its ambition: seeking to use raw and messy data sources, rewarding new classes of data providers, providing quality control, and taking responsibility for delivering just the right APIs to help certain classes of applications.
These facts and a few gazillion others come to you courtesy of Factual, the brainchild of mathematician Gilad Elbaz, who gave us the company that is now Google’s AdSense. In Factual’s 500 terabytes of storage, there’s data from sources governmental and private, on topics broad and narrow, profound and trivial. It’s worth a wander through the website and its featured data sets to see just what it’s been vacuuming up.
Big Data -- the accumulation of massive amounts of information just for its own sake -- is the revenge of the nerds, a booming generator of money and power. New kinds of faster, cheaper hardware and software are providing a level of data never imagined before, including facts about human behavior. If that means more efficient sales of products to people want them, does it also mean identify theft and credit card fraud? If consumers are worried, why do they pour their personal data into Facebook and Twitter? What are the broader applications of Big Data?
“The world is one big data problem,” Mr. Elbaz says from his headquarters, a quiet office 14 floors above the Los Angeles Country Club. He is a slim, soft-spoken man who weaves in his chair when an idea excites him. “What if you could spot any error, as soon as you wrote it? Factual is definitely a new thing that will change business, and a valuable new tool for computing.”
With the rise of location-based services and apps, the availability of geo-specific data has grown more important than ever. With the recent sale and shuttering of SimpleGeo, a startup that was beginning to turn heads in the geo-data field, many are wondering where to go for the location data they need.
After leaving Silicon Valley, Gil Elbaz co-founded a company that Google bought and used to create AdSense. His current venture, online-data aggregator and organizer Factual, is based in Century City.
Los Angeles-based Factual, the developer of application programming interfaces to a giant, database of places and other data used for location based applications, said this week that it has launched an official PHP driver for its API. The firm said the API wraps its Read, Crosswalk, Resolve, and Schema APIs, simplifying access ot its database of 55 million global places. Factual's collection of data is being used, among other things, for pulling up information about businesses and nearby locations on mobile phones.
Having received some $27 million in investment from big names like Andreessen Horowitz, LA-based Factual is one of the better funded examples of a ‘data marketplace.’ But Tyler Bell, the company’s Director of Product, is not sure that Factual necessarily fits most people’s perception of what a data marketplace should be.
Push messaging platform Urban Airship will shutter location services provider SimpleGeo's Places, Context and Storage products on Mar. 31. Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo in late October for a reported $3.5 million.
Yesterday, we wrote about Urban Airship, the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, and how the company has been on a tear of late. They recently hired Skype’s former strategy czar and yesterday hit 10 billion notifications pushed. Not bad for a two-year-old.
It looks like it's finally the end for SimpleGeo, the location-based information service started by Matt Galligan and Joe Stump which was founded at Boulder-based TechStars. In a blog post to SimpleGeo's users Thursday, Urban Airship, the new owner of SimpleGeo, said it is targeting a complete shutdown of SimpleGeo by March 31, 2012.
It looks like it's finally the end for SimpleGeo, the location-based information service started by Matt Galligan and Joe Stump which was founded at Boulder-based TechStars. In a blog post to SimpleGeo's users Thursday, Urban Airship, the new owner of SimpleGeo, said it is targeting a complete shutdown of SimpleGeo by March 31, 2012.
Push notification startup Urban Airship is closing the doors on all three APIs from the geo infrastructure company it acquired in October. The data behind one of the APIs, SimpleGeo Places, will be maintained by Factual and become part of its Factual API. Other SimpleGeo functionality is being folded into Urban Airship’s platform.
Los Angeles-based Factual said Thursday that it will help former SimpleGeo customers--who were informed today by Urban Airship that it will start winding down SimpleGeo's location database by the end of March--migrate their services to Factual's own services.
