Great to see Fav chime in with something he knows nothing about.
Factom is a legitimate project. Their office hosts public parties etc. The developers are real and known people. I can't speak to their distribution, much like any crypto project, but they are trying to create value. Pretty much the same level of transparency etc as BitShares.
What is Factom?
There are Factoms and some other credit you use to store hashes on a blockchain. They have their own federated server system / blockchain but it periodically puts hashes on the Bitcoin blockchain. So they get the best of both worlds with all the added complexity. IE they are part of the Bitcoin world and dependent on it (well, Bitcoin is not necessary) along with having their own chain/invention. The stored Bitcoin hashes make it quite easy to verify timeframes in a very public manner. So this can be used for proving all manner of legal document existed at X time. Their storage is ultimately quite cheap given their own blockchain, but the data is also secured by Bitcoin... It really depends on the end-user software.