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Factual, the location platform that enriches mobile location signals, is today releasing a new product to help with geographically labeling images and messages on mobile. The product is a “reverse geocoder” called Geopulse Geotag that is powered by open data sources like OpenStreetMap. Geopulse Geotag is available globally and processes between 4,000 and 6,000 queries a second
Geopulse Geotag is just the latest release by Factual to help accurately and quickly contextualize the mobile world; already Factual’s Geopulse Proximity and GeoPulse Audience products help turn signals into contextual data so its clients can deliver personalized ads and contents to their mobile users.
Factual has been busy with launching new products and with rolling out new programs lately, so that it can become the “best provider of global places data,” VP of Product Tyler Bell said. Earlier this month Factual introduced a new trusted data contributor program to do just that: the contributors include GoDaddy, Location3, MomentFeed, Moz, Placeable, PositionTech and several more. These contributors’ jobs are to interface with brands and also with businesses to give Factual the best data.
“The main reason that this avenue is important is that we are getting very high quality data from businesses themselves, which helps us make sure the data is authoritative,” Bell said. “Data contributors will help notify us if there are newly opened or closed retail stores, etc. Working with the data owners themselves helps us have a gold standard for when we evaluate other data as well.”
Bell said Factual has over 65 million data points worldwide (mapping, points of interest, business listings) so that mobile app developers, publishers and advertisers create better mobile experiences overall. Only 20 million of those points are in the US, a fact that allows Factual’s Global Places database to live up to its name. But Bell said “bigger isn’t necessarily better” for Factual since “there’s always a tradeoff between precision and recall” with the numbers. For example, the team has removed over 5 million bogus or defunct data points from the systems in the past year.
By gathering its data from the best sources and quality checking it constantly, Factual can be sure that its new products like Geopulse Geotag and others soon to come are serving publishers and advertisers in the best, most accurate way possible. At this rate, Factual is on track to beat out Google (which actually was the purchaser of CEO Gil Elbaz’s first company Applied Semantics) when it comes to data.
“Factual focuses on only the data,” Bell said. “We want to be better than Google. In many countries, we’ve surpassed Google and in many we are approaching Google. We are the best single provider of global location data.”
