Just the facts. Yes, all of them.

March 25, 2012 | Source: New York Times

Gilad Elbaz is trying to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual.

Factual is meant for the heart of a great business of our age: using all the cloud-based data and algorithms to find patterns in nature and society, for scientists to observe and businesses to exploit. It intends to build the world’s chief reference point for thousands of interconnected supercomputing clouds.

Factual already has thousands of customers and 500 terabytes of data, which includes information on half a billion Web pages; available government data; terabytes of corporate data; information on 60 million places in 50 countries, each described by 17 to 40 attributes; 800,000 restaurants; and data on the offices, specialties and insurance preferences of 1.8 million United States health care professionals.

The digital world is expected to hold a collective 2.7 zettabytes (billion terabytes) of data by year-end, an amount roughly equivalent to 700 billion DVDs. Factual could prove immensely valuable as this world grows and these databases begin to interact.