Grant: Idea to Innovation

Our long-term goal is to develop and market powerful search and processing tools/software for financial databases, by applying our advanced innovative signal and information processing technologies in the areas content-based information retrieval (CBIR), statistical signal processing and adaptive filtering, and advanced computational intelligence. The current product under development is FinancialSharp, a software platform of novel tools to support content-based search/retrieval, customized analysis, and intelligent decision-making for sophisticated financial professionals. Our software and services will maximize the competency of our customers in the financial industry by 1) greatly increasing flexibility and quality of financial data analysis and supporting intelligent decision making, thus enabling smart investment decisions; 2) empowering financial professionals to conduct complicated analyses independently and easily, thereby reducing the need for costly research support. FinancialSharp will run as a web-based Application Service Provider (ASP). This proposed Phase IIa project is built on our successful completion of a Phase I project, in which we filed 2 US patents on key technologies, developed a FinancialSharp Web demo and presented the demo to financial professionals in about 20 institutions. Based on the enthusiastic market response we received and with the support of our early investor, our objectives of the Phase IIa project are to develop a commercial prototype of FinancialSharp, test market, and spin-off a start-up company. Our project team is composed of leading technology researchers and developers, financial professionals, interface design and marketing experts. Our technologies and product concepts have attracted strong interests from investment professionals. Several investment firms indicated that they would evaluate an investment opportunity in our project if we demonstrate a feasible FinancialSharp prototype at the end of Phase IIa.