SBIR Phase II: Project to Create an Automated System to Identify and Curate Web-based Resources for Entrepreneurs

This SBIR Phase II project will develop an online system to find and organize the best web-based resources for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to create profitable, society-changing companies with high quality jobs, but many entrepreneurs lack skills in the areas of capital, finance, legal and startup management which are required to convert an opportunity into a successful company. Many entrepreneurs fail because they "do not know what they do not know", because they do not know about available resources, or because they cannot readily find those resources. Many resources are available to entrepreneurs, but with millions of search engine links on the topic, the most useful of these are nearly impossible to find. The proposed online system will use machine intelligence software to identify and categorize a wide array of resources. It will use another machine intelligence system to grade the quality of these resources, and then use a unique display system to show the most helpful and relevant resources in a dynamic constellation-like interface. This is designed to improve the ability of entrepreneurs to explore and find the help they need to solve their problems. This project requires state of the art software development to train computers to identify and qualify each resource in order to select those most helpful to entrepreneurs. By helping entrepreneurs be more successful, more rapidly, this project will help grow America's economy, generate revenue and profits and create new jobs for businesses all across the country. The research objective of this SBIR Phase II proposal is to deliver a working system to help accelerate entrepreneurs by guiding them to the resources that will best help them achieve success. Specifically, during this project, the team will develop multiple machine intelligence systems to perform the classification, categorization and quality assessment of online resources; build on the existing Enclavix semantic network; and collaborate with the University of Utah to implement an advanced visualization system. This Phase II proposal is advancing the state of research in all three research areas. This project will include developing a machine intelligence engine to take an entrepreneur focused web-based resource and place it in the proper category in the semantic network. A second machine intelligence engine will solve the difficult problem of determining the quality of a given resource. The machine intelligence systems that are being proposed are very complex and are pushing the boundaries of this technology because of the number of resources that need to be evaluated. In addition, again because of the large number of target resources available, visualizing and exploring the data is challenging and requires an advanced visualization system that provides a new way to successfully access large amounts of data.