Context, not individual data points, will enable the next wave of enterprise applications, the only question is who will get there first. Leading the race for holistic analytics in the social sphere is the Los Angeles-based Factual, a low-profile startup  with a unique approach to personalization that, according to vice president of product Tyler Bell, delivers a force multiplier in understanding consumer behavior at a massive scale. He appeared on the latest episode of CUBEconversations to discuss his firm’s role in the industry with SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier.

The way Bell sees it, Factual is helping to shift the business world’s perception of Big Data from a  technical challenge to a strategic asset that can be turned into actionable insights. The key to realizing that potential is focusing on whole rather than the parts, he says, combining information from multiple sources for a complete view of the specific metric at hand.

Although this capability is only now becoming accessible to traditional enterprises thanks to innovations in analytics infrastructure, especially around Hadoop, it has already been proven in the field by web-scale giants such as Google, which meshes data sets in real time in to tailor search results to each individual users based on their activity history.

“When you form a search query you’ll add a string, and that search query’s metadata is who you are and where you are, and then that search query is analyzed for entity recognition, so you get results back and Google learns a lot about you in the process,” Bell elaborates. “That doesn’t necessarily help them as an individual but looking across the signals they are getting in, they now have this panopticon of who you are as a consumer.”

Factual makes that kind of information available in a cohesive fashion, he continues, enabling companies to gain a grasp of the big picture instead of just analyzing isolated datasets in pursuit of narrow insights that may or may not turn out to be useful. However, while the firm may do things differently than the competition, its value proposition is a familiar one: empowering brands to identify and anticipate what their customers want today and what they will want in the future.

Moving from keyword-centric to user-centric

 .

Traditionally, digital marketing revolved around the use of keywords, a methodology that Bell says no longer cuts it in the era of mobile devices and analytics. The reason, he explains, is that it doesn’t address the fundamental need to contextualize data based on the specific requirements of the user, functionality that is becoming increasingly crucial to meeting the fast evolving expectations of the modern consumer.

“What you’re doing is taking an uninformed string – and this can come through voice, come through text, search, it could be a chunk of text in a news article – and you’re annotating that, you’re disambiguating the entities and you’re saying ‘this article talked about these places and these people over time,’” Bell details.

Factual is promising to simplify that process, taking care of the data preparation and helping organizations to extract the signal from the noise across mobile devices and social networks. The firm is walking a very fine line between personalization and privacy, he admits, which is why it’s taking active measures to ensure that the information it handles for brands does not expose end-users.  “We can create fairly intimate profiles about individual s that are trusted and retained within the individual resource which you as a consumer shared,” Bell tells Furrier.

The road ahead

 .

Bell wraps up the segment with a word of advice to CIOs embarking on the long journey to analytics. “Look at your data assets and leverage them to the best of your ability. Very often it’s not gonna be all win, there will be some disadvantages, or at least perceived disadvantages, but the opportunities that sharing data creates are so much more significant,” he concludes.