We are excited to announce that we have partnered with TripAdvisor, the largest travel site in the world, to integrate restaurant data from our Global Places data set to complement TripAdvisor’s dining options and reviews. Additionally, TripAdvisor will provide Factual user-generated data to maintain freshness and accuracy for its Global Places data.

“The addition of Factual’s Global Places data to complement TripAdvisor’s current offering will provide consumers the best experience and enormous choices for dining worldwide,” said Eva Ho, Factual’s VP of Marketing and Operations. “The stream of contributions provided by TripAdvisor’s users will reinforce Factual’s Global Places position as the leading source for definitive global data on places.”

TripAdvisor and Factual share a similar global focus, as TripAdvisor operates in more than 30 countries and Factual Global Places data covers 50 countries. This partnership will give the traveler community a more comprehensive view of dining options on TripAdvisor, with over one million restaurants currently represented.

“We appreciate working with creative data providers who can scale and grow with all our data initiatives across the globe,” says Daniel Hawkins, Product Manager at TripAdvisor. “Factual will help us provide a much better user experience.”

Factual Places are classified into 440 consumer-facing categories. However, as many of our data partners still employ Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, and their more recent replacement, North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes, we have provided a mapping between Factual categories and these Government standards.

The files are tab-delineated text files, and can be opened in Excel. We’ve made them freely available for downloading here:

• Factual Categories to 2012 NAICS
• Factual Categories to 1987 SIC

We hope that these provide a handy utility for those still keying their data on these reference systems.

-Tyler Bell
Categorically Factual

Tyler Bell, Director of Product here at Factual, will be speaking at the upcoming Strata Conference in Santa Clara.  His session, titled “Bigger Than Any One — Solving Large-Scale Data problems with people and Machines”, will be on Wednesday 2/27/13 at 4:50 pm in Ballroom F.

The informatic challenges of 2013 and beyond are bigger than any one company. This presentation provides an overview of a number of recent, successful crowd-sourced and community-driven applications that combine ‘Big Data’ approaches with Community involvement. The speaker dives into the numbers and specific details of Factual’s approach to large-scale, multi-authored data collection and aggregation, and how the company’s data ethos and business positioning dictates both the shape of its technology and its vision of large-scale, collective data ecosystems.  http://strataconf.com/strata2013/public/schedule/detail/27302

Tyler has a post on Strata’s blog illustrating some of what he will address with an interesting example involving Russain railroads.

I’m excited to announce that Factual has been selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s 2013 50 Disruptive Companies in the field of Internet and Digital Media.  We were nominated by MIT Technology Review’s editors, who look for companies that have demonstrated original and valuable technology over the past year, are bringing that technology to market at significant scale, and are clearly influencing their competitors.

“Factual is making many smart applications possible,” said Jason Pontin, publisher and editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review.  “By collecting and analyzing large sets of data, it creates stores of knowledge that can inform many kinds of software.”

This is an amazing honor and a testament to the hard work our team has put forth in building one of the deepest, most reliable data stacks in the world.  What started off as a crazy idea has now been shown to provide real, measurable value to lots of customers.  We feel fortunate to have the opportunity to help the world see data in a profoundly different way.

- Gil Elbaz, CEO & Founder

Today we’re excited to announce the latest update to our Global Products dataset.  This release includes the addition of two new attributes that many of our partners have been asking for: manufacturer and average price.

Manufacturer

The connections between brands and manufacturers may sometimes seem like a complicated web.  By tying together the many brands and products that fall under a single manufacturer or parent company, we’ve made it easier to generate insight about these connections, and about the consumer products marketplace as a whole.

For instance, getting a list of the brands owned by Unilever is now as simple as making a facet call to our API:

http://api.v3.factual.com/t/products-cpg/facets?select=brand&filters={“manufacturer”:”unilever”}
preview the data and view the faceted list of brands on the right

Getting a list of products the fall under Unilever brands is just as simple:

http://api.v3.factual.com/t/products-cpg?filters={“manufacturer”:”unilever”}
preview the data

We’ve started by providing manufacturer data for more than 20 of the top CPG manufacturers and we’ll be rolling out data for additional manufacturers in the near future.

Average Price

When shopping for products online or in a store, it can be difficult to know if you’re getting a good deal.  We’ve eliminated some of the guesswork by providing the average price for the most commonly searched for products.

In addition to getting the average price for a particular product, you can also filter API results by price.  For instance, to find shampoo with an average price under $5, you can use the following query:

http://api.v3.factual.com/t/products-cpg?q=shampoo&filters={“avg_price”:{“$lte”:5}}
preview the data

If you’re the kind of person who likes to spend a little more on their hair care, you can easily get a list of the most premium hair care brands by combining a facet call with an average price and category filter:

http://api.v3.factual.com/t/products-cpg/facets?select=brand&filters={“$and”:[{"avg_price":{"$gte":30},"category":{"$bw":"hair"}}]}
preview the data and view the faceted list of brands on the right

Summary

We hope you find the addition of these attributes useful and we can’t wait to see what you build with them.  You can explore all our product data, including our new attributes, by visiting our shiny new Data Preview.  Visit our Global Products page to learn more, sign up for an API key, and find links to documentation.

As always, retailers and manufacturers interested in including their product data and links in our Global Products dataset can visit our Merchant Partners page for more information.

John Delacruz
Product Manager, Factual Global Products