Monday, September 24, 2012

Factual Bolsters Places Dataset

Los Angeles-based Factual, the data API firm led by Gil Elbaz, has made a big enhancement to its Places dataset, the firm explained this morning, saying it has added over 80,000 landmarks (parks, memorials, historic building), 20,000 transport hubs (airports, rail stations, etc.) and 190,000 ATM location to its database. The firm said it now has over 23 million entities in the Us and 63 million places worldwide.

Factual's APIs and data set is used by mobile application developers and many others to find nearby businesses and much more; the firm's service is unusual in that the cloud-based service pulls in updates and corrections from all of its application users to make a more accurate and comprehensive set of data than any one database; plus, the firm has plumbed its data API to just about every software language and tool available. The firm's data is being used by such apps as Trulia, Geoloqi, and Booyah. Factual is venture backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, Index Ventures, Miramar Venture Partners, and many others, and is very closely watched given the last firm that Elbaz headed: Applied Semantics, which became Google AdSense.

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