Big Data company Factual has just rolled out two new products that should helps its clients to extract even greater insights from the location-based data it specialized in. The five-year old Los Angeles-based company has just announced Geopulse Audience and Geopulse Proximity, two new services designed to facilitate mobile app personalization and advertising. By using these services, companies will be able to combine the location data of their own customers with data from third-parties and Factual’s own servers, allowing them to segment and target users more effectively.

The launch marks a departure for a company that has traditionally only been a seller of raw data, to one that sits squarely within the burgeoning location-based analytics market. The new products will allow Factual to push more relevant advertising and app content to consumers – something that’s become increasingly important in the mobile space in light of research that suggests consumers are far more likely to be looking at product information or store locations using such devices.

In line with the release, Factual has also announced two partnerships, with mobile ad exchange MoPub, and real-time insights cloud provider Turn.

Geopulse Audience is a piece of software that’s able to build up profiles of consumers from their time-stamped location data, building up a picture of consumers based on their demographic, behavior and geographic characteristics. It’s hoped that the service will appeal to publishers and developers looking to serve more relevant content on mobile devices, personalizing their apps to create a more ‘individual’ experience for each users. This is where MoPub comes into play – the ad exchange plans to integrate Geopulse Audience data into its own offerings, allowing publishers and advertisers to better target their ads according to the demographics, behaviors and geography of each users.

MoPub recently carried out a two week trial integration of Geopulse Audience, and during this pilot Factual was able to categorize more than 25 million users from across the country into segments like Healthcare workers, electronics buyers and moviegoers. Using its location data, Factual was further able to estimate the household income of these users, identify the location of their home and workplace, and discern various other attributes. This rich supply of data means that MoPub can greatly increase the value of its ad supply, selling its new targeting capabilities to advertisers who can then improve the relevance of the ads they display.

Gil Elbaz, founder and CEO of Factual, explained what prompted Factual to turn to advertising:

“At Factual we believe that the future of mobile will be built on location. With our vast amount of location data and our technology stack, it is a natural fit for us to expand our focus to meet the demand in the mobile market from partners to better leverage the location capabilities of mobile devices. We are excited to partner with mobile industry leaders MoPub and Turn and look forward to working together to deliver more relevant mobile experiences for advertisers and consumers.”

Factual’s second service, Geopulse Proximity, further aids publishers and mobile brands by helping them to understand the mobile data they collect from their users. Labeled as a “geo-fencing solution”, the service works by using Factual’s global data to validate mobile data streams in real-time. Turn is set to integrate Geopulse Proximity into its own analytics platform, giving its advertisers the ability to run campaigns according to specified parameters at any of the places within Factual’s Global Places data set.

Admittedly, now is a sensitive time for any company to go rolling out new business intelligence services based on consumer data, especially when that service is as effective as Factual’s. But the company does its best to ensure user’s privacy is respected – for one thing, it only processes data collected by app developers who have already been given permission to do that, and all data is anonymized before it lands on Factual’s servers. Finally, the company purges all incoming data after two weeks so in reality it’s only ever dealing with ‘fresh’ data.

Consumers rightly have concerns over their privacy, but the fact remains that many of the apps and services that we take for granted are free only because developers can sell advertising. As such, it can be argued that we’re better off being targeted in this way, because at least the content, services and advertising that’s sent our way will be more relevant and personalized. Like it or lump it, data-sharing is the future, and so the best thing we can hope for is that it’s put to good use in a way that companies like Factual seem to be doing.