Thursday, December 13, 2012

Factual's Real-Time Places Data Expands Internationally

Factual, the provider of a giant, geolocated database of businesses and other points of interest, said Wednesday that it has extended the real-time updates to its Places data stack to another 49 countries. The company--which had added real-time updates to its U.S. data a couple of months ago--said that the move makes lets changes and updates to entries and information on places immediately available to developers. Factual's big "database in the sky" lets developers do things like pull up local businesses and locations based on a geographical coordinate; find things like business hours and information on restaurant types and food; and much more. The new updates also include support for double-byte characters, which are needed for non-Roman languages like Japanese. The latest real-time changes make it easier for developers to submit corrections to data (better lat/long data, corrected phone numbers, etc.) to the database for immediate inclusion.