SBIR Phase I: Social Dynamics of Sales in a Global Village

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project proposes to enable company's existing software to extend concepts from social network theory and computer science to create a new data type -the relationship master network. New data types (e.g., customer master) have, historically, solved business problems and created new enterprise software segments (e.g., CRM). While the company's existing software's current focus is on using this relationship to help enterprise sales teams make the appropriate contacts faster and more efficiently (by answering "who knows who?"), this technology supports any referral-based process (e.g., finding jobs). In particular, it only connects parties with mutual interests (e.g., employers and job seekers). Eliminating discovery costs makes it much easier to gain insight into a person or organization - thereby bringing the social dynamics of a village up to global scale. This project will develop a way to prototype components that are significantly more complex than existing products can currently prototype. If successful this project will develop methods, using information in the relationship network, to (1) reconcile the multiple records (each with sparse data) which appear to describe different people or organizations to a record for a single person or organization and (2) identify and extract information of relevance (e.g., biographical information on customers) from the web.