Gil Elbaz Email Address

Factual focuses on making location data accessible to the mobile world. Factual Es data about places across the globe reveals a deeper understanding of people based on their geographic behavior.

Thinking back, I guess I've always been a big data geek all the way back to Apple IIe days. After college I enjoyed working in various database engineering roles in Silicon Valley until '97 when I realized that data wasn't just cool, it ruled. (Wow, that sounds even geekier than I really am.) The next year, a 7 hour phone VOIP call with my friend and colleague from Caltech, Adam Weissman, resulted in the founding of Applied Semantics in a big Hollywood Hills house. Through semi-automated processes we built a massive ontology (fancy way of saying a database of word identifiers, meanings and relationships) that would power a variety of products including ASI's AdSense. Five years later in 2003, ASI was a profitable company which was acquired by Google and Google's Santa Monica office was born.|Google was a terrific experience, and, honestly it wasn't easy to leave the great people, and ... all that juicy data.But I wanted to go down a new path, and founded Factual Inc. with founding engineers Tim Chklovski and Myron Ahn. We assembled a great team in early 2008 to build a platform where anyone can share and mash open data on any subject. Open data just takes everything I've done to the next level, so how could I resist. Hopefully, high-quality, lower or no cost data will unleash a wave of creativity and productivity by application developers and content publishers.