• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, September 22, 2016

Data company Factual on Thursday announced the public beta release of Observation Graph and the next generation of its Geopulse Audience product.  The company said Observation Graph and Geopulse Audience are designed to offer advertisers access to location-based audience targeting capabilities, and mobile developers advanced personalization tools for their mobile apps.

"Over the next several quarters we will be launching new products and features that take advantage of the underlying Observation Graph technology,” Vikas Gupta, Factual's director of marketing, told Real-Time Daily via email. The first product to use the technology is Factual’s Geopulse Audience, which will  offer the ability to scale custom audiences, and improved accuracy in terms of the quality of location-based audiences.

Factual described Observation Graph as a method of cataloguing real world consumer behavior to offer a more in-depth understanding of mobile users. It combines location data and other sensor data from mobile devices with Factual’s data to generate observations about mobile users. The types of observations that can be generated include the place visited, event attendance, activities such as walking or driving, presence at home or at work, apps used, and type of mobile device used.

New types of observations can be added to Observation Graph as more data becomes available, according to Factual. And the product also seeks to analyze the relationships between observations.

Observation Graph is built on Factual’s Global Places data, a database of local businesses and points of interest that covers more than 100 million places in 50 countries. Factual said Global Places is used by mobile apps and companies including Apple Maps, Microsoft Bing, Facebook Places, and Uber. The new capabilities don’t include real-time or mid-flight campaign optimization, according to Gupta.