His new company, Factual, sells location data and will be introducing a mobile-targeted product.
Gil Elbaz, the founder of Factual, a data aggregation company, says that Google can’t be considered an “honest” data source because it sells its services to consumers. Elbaz founded and later sold a company named Applied Semantics which was acquired by Google in 2003 and was branded AdSense. Read this really interesting article on The Wall Street Journal blog.
Factual doesn’t sell the the data to consumers at all. Instead it caters to companies and governments like Facebook, AT&T and CitySearch to parse and extract valuable location data. For example, Facebook used Factual data for its Places Local Deals service two years ago. They sit on a tremendous amount of data which continues to grow at a massive pace.
Reports indicate we should see an announcement of a new products being offered by Factual as early as tomorrow. Its new service will offer location and mobile ad-targeting tools that provide data on the type and density of businesses near a given location, as well as demographic info on age, gender, race, and median household income for locations. The idea is to provide some contextual punch to a world where technology and its users are becoming increasingly mobile, Elbaz said.
Responsive Search Marketing is quickly becoming necessary in our modern age of SEM. As companies like this continue to data-farm and gather information about our whereabouts it offers a huge opportunity for businesses to gain valuable market information. This guy seems like he has some sincere philanthropic views. Of course, there are some concerns about huge data farms creating a monopoly of data and then controlling prices, etc…
