Grant: Engage Grants Program

nGauge is a Canadian company incorporated in September 2009 and headquartered in Moncton, NewBrunswick. nGague develops technology to identify sales leads from social networking sites on the Web. Theircurrent patent pending technology allows them to automatically and rapidly identify sales leads among themillions of publicly posted messages on social networking websites such as Twitter. Despite the success ofnGauge's current technology, computational approaches (including intelligent filtering, classification, semanticanalysis, natural language processing and machine learning) often identify messages that are not goodcandidates for sales leads. Due to the subtleties of human language, computational analysis techniques cannotidentify potential sales leads with 100% accuracy. This means a secondary step, where humans assess whetheror not a message is a genuine sales lead, needs to be incorporated before a sales lead can be forwarded to apaying client. To make human assessments both timely and cost-effective, we will investigate the use ofworkers from existing crowd sourcing services to perform microwork tasks, where potential sales leads arerapidly assessed on an ongoing basis. In this project we will build a web platform that will allow nGauge topipe potential sales leads, identified by their current technology, through human raters working throughcrowdsourcing services. The developed technology will allow sales leads to be vetted in a timely and costeffective manner.