Friday, November 5, 2010

Factual Ties With Partners On Local Data Effort

Los Angeles-based Factual, the open data platform startup headed by Google AdSense inventor Gil Elbaz, said last night that it has inked a number of deals to provide and link its local business information data to Facebook, Booyah, Home Junction, and others. According to Factual, it will access and contribute to new local datasets with Home Junction and Booyah, and deliver local data for Facebook Places in the UK and Japan. The new relationships are related to the company's launch of a database of information for more than 14 million U.S. businesses, and similar data for the UK, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, and Australia.

Factual's open database allows anyone to access or contribute data into a central database, and makes what has been a fairly difficult--and expensive--set of data much easier to access. Factual said that Home Junctions is using its data to pull up points of interest for real estate agents, brokers, and Multiple Listing Services, and Booyah is using its datasets for its social game, MyTown.

Factual's data access is currently free, however, the firm has said it intends to eventually charge customers for access based on their use of API calls. That model is similar to other, cloud-based services like Amazon Web Services.

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