If you co-founded the company that became Google AdSense, as Gil Elbaz did with Applied Semantics, you don’t have any problem finding investors when you want to start a new venture. Elbaz sold Applied Semantics to Google for $100 million in 2003, and launched his latest startup, Factual, last October. He doesn’t really need the money, but so many all-star investors were clamoring to get in that he raised just over $1 million in an angel round.
His angel investors include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz via their Andreessen Horowitz fund, Bill Gross via Idealab, Esther Dyson, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos, as well as New York City seed fund the Founder Collective.
Factual is setting out to get people to create as many open databases as possible by providing tools for creating table son any topic, embedding them and sharing them. There are already hundreds fo thousands of tables on Factual, dome large some small. For instance, Creative Commons created a database filled with Websites using Creative Commons licenses that contains 4 million rows. All the data in Factual is editable in a wiki-like fashion and is available through Factual APIs.
Chris Dixon, founding partner of Founder Collective (and CEO of Hunch) says they invested because of Factual’s “huge ambition.” In order for the Web to become programmable, it needs data and lots of it. “I think of it as Wikipedia for structured database-like information,” says Dixon. It joins many other efforts pursuing similar ambitions, include Freebase, Wolfram Alpha, and even Google.
Factual provides access to definitive global data for powering web and mobile apps, mobile advertising, and enterprise solutions. Using its sophisticated big data stack, Factual builds data products that leverage contributions from partners, user communities, and the web. Factual’s first offering is its Global Places suite of data and APIs, which provides access to more than 63 million places in 50 countries along with entity mapping, resolution, and geo ad-targeting services. Its second offering is its Products suite of...
Freebase was founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Danny Hillis who previously co-founded both Applied Minds and Thinking Machines Corporation. In March 2006, Freebase received $15 million in funding from investors including Benchmark Capital, Millennium Technology Ventures and Omidyar Network. Freebase is a large public database that collects three kinds of information: data, which includes fine-grained information like the release date of a movie; texts, which include documents such as the topic descriptions; and media, which includes files like...
Wolfram Research is building a computational knowledge engine called Wolfram|Alpha for the web to be launched in May 2009. The product will contain data in various fields including physical sciences, technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, music, etc. in order to provide answers to questions that users input. Its language interface will accommodate variations in how users frame their questions, such as the use of abbreviations. Wolfram Alpha’s vision is to create a system which can do for formal...
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