Review – “Data Mercenary” Factual officially releases U.S. POI & business listings

Factual is what Arik Hesseldahl, the senior editor of NewEnterprise, calls a data mercenary, in that they create, curate and sell access to data. In the case of Factual, the databases are generally open access, where their revenue is generated by service level agreements (SLA) to provide guaranteed throughput limits via their API. Representative topics for which Factual provides datasets includes television, beer, sports, music, and many other domains of interest.

Factual has also included a pricing perk where your SLA cost may be lower  if you or your users also contribute to curating the datasets you access. For instance, this pricing perk may come in handy if you leverage Factual’s official U.S. Points of Interest (POI) and business listing. This updated official dataset increases listings from 12 million (12m) in the beta version to 17 million (17M) in the official release.

The beta release of the U.S. POI & business listing will remain online to ensure existing applications will function. Access to fields in the beta version is deprecated in the official listing release. Developers should reference the official and beta releases, along with the developer documentation site and wiki for additional information. Examples of some differences between the beta and official releases of Factual’s U.S. POI & business listings:

• additional data fields: po_box, email, and status
• field name changes: state → region, telephone → tel, zipcode → postcode
• listings for Omaha, NE doubled from ~18K to ~36K — we are Big Omaha — press coverage, 2009, 2010, 2011!
• listings containing “pizza” increased by 36% from ~78K to ~106K — clearly the official release is much better!
• but the new release may contain some glitches — the beta release lists 32K entries in Education > Colleges & Universities category wherease the official version reduced to 22K, and several seemingly previously valid listings for the University of Nebraska in the beta release don’t appear to exist in the new official listing.

This information is based on an email announcement from Factual that was also posted in their developers group hosted by Google Groups (this info has to yet appear in their press releases or blog). Such developments by Factual and other data mercenaries create interesting and potentially disruptive challenges for organizations such as Hoovers, Acxiom, and infoUSA.

Potential next great step for Factual – getting added to apigee’s default listing, as described in a prior post with respect to Twitter. Also, thanks to Factual for listing this post on their press page.

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