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.
Typing with your thumbs again?
It’s interesting … but Adsense it’s not.
Fantastic team that is trying to do just about the most outrageously impossible in awesome stuff – rooting big time for their success
Congrats to Gil and the whole Factual team. These are really intelligent guys trying to solve the reliability problem with open data.
Send some money this way too !
Sounds like what Google Base was supposed to be.
lots of typos in this post – worth a spell check “dome large” “hundred fo thousands”
I am surprised that people were actually “clamoring”. I took a look at the site a while back and saw nothing that was useful to me and we live in a world of structured data. IMHO = fail.
This is a really really great idea and really useful, but it seems like more of a non-profit instead of a startup. Is there a business model?
Oh yeah? Which data sets are so useful?
Rosenblatt? That just cheapens the whole thing.
Looks like a rehash of Infochimps, launched in March 08.
If the data collected is “good” or becomes good data over time – then this is huge!
This has potential to do some very creative stuff!
I dont think that having a U.I. that is essentially a spread sheet can work very well.
There is a reason why most of the world does not use spread sheets and why when asked to most would rather eat glass. Spread sheets usually mean entering data into boring grids and then have to add a formula to organize them…One When developing or using an app I like to ask mysled; could a 10 year old or a 65 year old use the UI with out any technical FAQ.
I think that linked data is one of the futures of the internet. I think to have this type of data creation and annotation picked up by a large amount of users the application will need to be both fun and easily usable.
For me one of the things to understand when
developing apps for linked data is to not discount the knowledge that a user brings to the table.
Making some safe assumptions about what a a user is looking for based on the knowledge that they more than likely have some access to some to media can help narrow the results sets almost to the point of being ridiculously accurate.
In my view it is also important to give the user the option to find other linked information if and only if they want to go beyond the basic fact.
Below are examples of a basic search for Geroge Bush using Factoetum and the other using Factual
http://www.factoetum.com/search/George_Bush
http://www.factual.com/search?q=George+Bush
I think it is also important to know that linked data is also about data that the user wants to share about themselves. There needs to be a level of personalization
http://www.factoetum.com/factoetum/Bruce_Wayne+Favorite_Tech_Newsfeeds.rss
Great idea, lots of potential. Big challenges on connecting/joining data from different tables.
This is really interesting …
Gil’s brilliant and I think the future bodes well for Factual. As for Oingo/Applied Semantics for $100million, I thought the SEC filing indicated he received 2million preferred shares of Google. At the current price, wouldn’t that be well worth north of $1billion? Can anyone shed some light on this?
I wonder if “Dennis K” is related to “Kevin K”? What do you guys think?
This idea is only good is the data is great and the usage rights around the data are completely flexible. Anything short of that and this is a non-starter. InfoChimps also does come to mind.
How is this at all differentiated from Freebase?
Full Post of announcement from Factual’s Blog:
http://blog.factual.com/gils-corner-an-update-from-gil
__________________________________________
Hello all,
I wanted to give you an update on some exciting new developments. Since our launch in October 2009, we’ve been very busy at our offices in Los Angeles and Shanghai — expanding the company, fine-tuning the product, launching new features, and learning from our ever-growing community. Factual tables are already demonstrating the power and usefulness of our large-scale open data platform. For example, Creative Commons tweeted about the 4 million record website data table which can be easily filtered to show who is using CC licenses.
After we launched Factual, I set out to garner support from a targeted list of industry luminaries who believe in Factual’s mission to build a powerful open data platform used and supported by an enthusiastic community. And today I’m very happy to announce that we’ve attracted a group of early-stage investors that will guide us as we work to refine our product, hire exceptional employees, and tackle exciting new markets.
Our investors are an A-list group of accomplished internet and software pioneers. They include:
* Andreessen Horowitz – Founders, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz
* Bill Gross – Founder/Chairman, Idealab
* Danny Rimer – Index Ventures
* Esther Dyson – Founder, EDventure Holdings
* Founder Collective
* Gunderson Dettmer
* Lee and June Stein
* Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL
* Miramar Venture Partners
* Richard Rosenblatt – CEO, Demand Media
* Scott Kurnit – Founder, About.com
* Thomas Lehrman – Founder, Gerson Lehrman Group
* Tom Unterman – Founder, Rustic Canyon Ventures
We are looking forward to working with this astute group of advisors and gleaning their insights. Of course, this now means that the Factual team will be working twice as hard in 2010 — to not only meet and exceed the expectations of our investors, but to achieve our goal of bringing greater transparency, accuracy and openness to data. Towards our goal of transparency, I hope to tweet and blog more this year, so check back here or follow us on Twitter (@factualinc or @gilelbaz) or Facebook (/factualinc) for the latest.
Thanks again to our group of investors. Let’s make 2010 the year of “open”!
Factually yours,
Gil