CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
13 September 2007
Company News
Imaginestics, LLC to be Honored as Tibbetts Award Winner
Imaginestics, LLC of West Lafayette, IN has been selected as one of the winners of the 2007 Tibbetts Awards. Imaginestics will receive the award on Oct. 10 at the Westin Washington, located at 1400 M Street NW in Washington, D.C. Named for Roland Tibbetts-the person acknowledged as the father of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program-these national awards are made annually to those small firms, projects, organizations and individuals judged to exemplify the very best in SBIR achievement.
Imaginestics is one of 55 companies in the U.S. to receive this award. Imaginestics was selected from over 4,000 companies that receive contract and grants under the SBIR Program each year.
Imaginestics has received SBIR awards totaling $1.73M to-date from NSF and DoD, with additional $800K from State of Indiana as matching SBIR award. Without the SBIR award, Imaginestics could not have been in a position to take the initial idea of connecting buyers and suppliers using visual content from concept to commercialization and also to develop the technology that answers the fundamental question for custom parts/products, what should it cost?
The visual search technology had some key challenges to overcome, including achieving accurate matches for highly complex manufacturing part and bringing down the search time to seconds, even though the amount of information processed is almost 100 times that of popular text-based search engines. In the world of Google, search users expect the results to appear in seconds so we had to meet this expectation for our search engine to be viable. Through SBIR, Imaginestics' team was able to prototype the idea and introduce it in the market in relatively short time to obtain feedback. This allowed Imaginestics to gain market support and come back to NSF for SBIR Phase II B support, with additional funding from industry partners such as Lockheed Martin and Dana Corporation. "Incidentally, it was NSF's match making service that enabled Lockheed Martin to come across our NSF SBIR abstract and contact us", said Nainesh Rathod, President & CEO of Imaginestics. "Due to Imaginestics' success, NSF showcased us at the MIT Enterprise Forum, which enabled us to be recognized by numerous investors. We are currently in discussions with some of these investors for growth investment".
The complete list of winners can be found at tibbettsawards.org .
For more information contact Juneyeta Gates at 765-464-1700 x 114 with Imaginestics, LLC or Jere Glover with the Small Business Technology Council at 202-662-9700. Since its inception in 1995, SBTC (sbtc.org) has played a crucial role in promoting congressional legislation and federal regulations that aid small, technology-based companies-including re-authorization of the SBIR program.
HereStory Content Goes HereStory Content Goes HereStory Content Goes Here
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.