Archives: September 2010

Gil Elbaz struck gold when he sold the company he co-founded, Applied Semantics, to Google for its AdSense technology. But AdSense was the outgrowth—not the foundation—of why Elbaz founded the company in the first place. Applied Semantics’ mission, which turned out to play well in the search and ad space, was to build very smart categorization engines to understand language – words, their meaning variations and relationships – to ferret out the value within data.

After four years at Google post-acquisition, Elbaz followed his heart back to what he calls his idealistic notion of building huge databases of information. Formally launched last October, the vision behind his Factual, his new venture, was creating large databases that aggregate facts in many formats from hundreds of millions of web sites – health, government, media and education among them – and clean up and give structure to that massive amount of data, along with tools to help developers merge and mash it up. The company has just retooled its web site to reflect the closer focus it plans to have on the development community, with enhanced developer tools, and on the local vertical. In conjunction with that, it last week launched geo-coded data for nearly 14 million local US businesses, and for millions of businesses located in the UK, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, and Australia, among others.

Read more