Monday, June 14, 2010
Factual Partners With Newsweek
Los Angeles-based Factual, the open data startup headed by former Google engineering director Gil Elbaz, said this weekend it has partnered with Newsweek on a "America's Best Public High School" initiative. The firm said that Newsweek and Factual will enhance Newsweek's list with a mix of proprietary and open data. Newsweek said that the partnership with Factual will allow students and faculty of individual schools can comment and contribute information about their schools. Financial details of the arrangement between Factual and Newsweek were not disclosed. Factual said that the partnership will help parents, student, and educators to make more informed decisions, and help transform what were static data tables into interactive, dynamic ones.
Gil Elbaz, who was most recently at Google, was one of the founders of Applied Semantics, a Santa Monica firm which developed Google's AdSense product. Applied Semantics was acquired for pre-IPO Google stock in April of 2003. The firm is backed by a slate of well known angels, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, Bill Gross of Idealab, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, Esther Dyson, the Founder Collective, Gunderson Dettmer, Lee and June Stein, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, Miramar Venture Partners, Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt, About.com founder Scott Kurnit, Gerson Lehrman Group's Thomas Lehrman, and Rustic Canyon's Tom Unterman.