We’re excited to announce today a new member of the Factual suite of APIs: Monetize. Use Monetize to tap into an aggregated and geo-indexed body of 3rd party deals, ads, coupons and offers.

Factual’s data platform has grown from our initial Places (58 million places across 50 countries) to several supporting APIs, like Crosswalk, Resolve, and Geopulse. These all provide access to unique signals and insights we have gleaned from our data aggregation stack and position as a central layer in the location data ecosystem. A natural extension is the inclusion of 3rd party conversion opportunities that are associated with a given place - queue Monetize.

Developers Get Cash

The way Monetize works is that Factual aggregates offer data through relationships with offer originators (companies like Groupon, LivingSocial, GrubHub, and Signpost). We then map offers to Factual place entities, and make the offers accessible through a simple scalable API. Developers can integrate these offers into their apps and earn money based on the conversions they are driving -- this API actually pays you. Factual will cut you checks when your users buy offers: show them a great sushi deal that’s nearby, and if they buy it, you earn bucks. With this service, you no longer need to integrate with multiple offer APIs or affiliate programs, or implement multiple tracking tools. We even autogenerate 320x50 images for each offer so you can integrate it as a regular mobile ad unit.

The data is accessible using the current Factual API -- use a lat/lng filter (what offers are near a point in NYC), full text search (what offers contain “burger”), or row filters (offers in “Austin, TX”). You can get more details on accessing the data in our docs. We also expose the data in a preview tool here.

You can access Monetize immediately with your existing Factual API key, but before we start paying you, you'll need to register your use with us. If you have offers and want to distribute them through Monetize, please contact us -- we definitely will be growing the number of offer providers in the next several months.

New Hotel Data from Factual

We're pleased to announce that Factual has released the first version of our Extended Attributes for Hotels. This dataset contains an additional 38 attributes for over 115,000 hotels, motels, B&Bs, and other lodgings in the United States, released in beta.

While Factual Places Data contains the core attributes such as name, location, address and phone number, these rich vertical datasets hold data tailored to a specific vertical. Our Hotels data contains information on:

• Price range
• Room count
• Star rating
• Air conditioning
• Pets allowed
• Non-smoking rooms available
• Parking
• In-room internet
• Facilities like pool, fitness, business center, laundry and PA services
• Complimentary breakfast
• Check-in and check-out times
• Room service availability
• Handicapped accessibility
• Bar/lounge in hotel

In all, 38 additional attributes to help your users make more informed hotel choices.

This table can be queried using your existing API key (get one here if needed) and the existing API. Browse our data preview and have a look at the hotels documentation to learn more.

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Factual and SimpleGeo Form Strategic Partnership To Deliver Places Data