Factual
| Private | |
| Industry | IT Services |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Founder | Gil Elbaz |
| Headquarters |
Los Angeles, CA San Francisco, CA Shanghai, China New York, NY Chicago, IL |
|
Key people
|
Gil Elbaz, Founder and Chief Executive Officer Bill Michels, Senior Vice President of Product and Partnerships Rob Jonas, SVP of Revenue Boris Shimanovsky, Vice President of Engineering |
| Services | Data Mining, Data analysis |
| Website | www.factual.com |
Factual, launched in 2008, is an open data platform developed to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and accessibility. It provides access through web service APIs and reusable, customizable web applications. It is described by its founder, Gil Elbaz as "a platform for anyone to share and mash open data". Factual has data sets about local place information, entertainment and information derived from government sources. Dr Tim Chklovski co-founded the company. Commercial consumers of the datasets include Facebook Places and SpatialMatch. Factual intends to provide discounts to data consumers that contribute improved data back, in order to encourage crowd sourcing and other collaborative approaches to data creation and curation.
Factual is currently using its location-based data-mining for purposes of geotargeting advertisements to smartphone users. This service, known as Geopulse, makes use of location-tracking data (since each smartphone acts by default as a GPS tracking beacon, and much can be learned about each user's interests, income, and spending habits simply by virtue of where each person spends his/her time), data gathered from web-browser cookies (which show search-interests histories), and other sources (such as census data). This enables highly specific ads to be targeted to users when they are most likely to be "receptive" (i.e. vulnerable) to the influence of advertising.
...
Wikipedia