August 24, 2006  |  Imaginestics to shape manufacturer's supply chain

Purdue Research Park, WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, U.S.A — Purdue Research Park, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A – Imaginestics, a leading global supplier search engine company for the discrete manufacturing industry, today announced that it was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II to further develop the shape search technology to streamline search and retrieval of product information across the manufacturer's supply chain. Imaginestics launched the beta release of 3D-Seek.com, world's first online shape search engine in Fall of 2005 and to-date has more than 3,000 registered suppliers and over 30,000 products and custom parts indexed that contain catalogs, pictures, 2D drawings, and 3D CAD models. Imaginestics' 3D-Seek technology today enables users to search via inputs such as 2D drawings, 3D CAD models, and even a Doodle. Imaginestics plans to further enhance the technology to accept pictures as an input and match it to a 2D drawing, 3D CAD model, or even another picture. This breakthrough research will further bolster Imaginestics' position in the marketplace as the leading global supplier search engine.

Imaginestics' 3D-Seek uses 3D shape search technology as the basis for parts search across the supply chain to alleviate the inherent problems with textual descriptions, such as user bias, language and context sensitivity issues. The research will be an expansion of the earlier work done by Dr. Karthik Ramani, Purdue Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Director of PRECISE (Purdue Research & Education Center for Information Systems in Engineering) in this area, which is patent pending. Imaginestics has licensed the technology from Purdue.

"We are excited to receive this grant from NSF and it further validates the importance of our work in changing the way the industry searches for parts and products," said Nainesh Rathod, President/CEO of Imaginestics. "The work to be performed using this grant will help solve a very difficult problem in extracting the shape of a part or product from an image or picture."

"Since shape is unique to a part or product, 3D-Seek uses shape as a search input to overcome cultural, language and context challenges faced by traditional text based search engines," stated Errol Arkilic, Program Manager at National Science Foundation, "We believe that 3D-Seek has the potential to change the way suppliers market their products or capabilities."

About Imaginestics
Imaginestics, developer of world's first online shape search engine, 3D-Seek.com, connects suppliers of manufactured parts or custom services to potential buyers globally using innovative search technology. Imaginestics also develops decision support solutions such as i-config, 3D-config, i-advisor and i-compare, which offers search users a comprehensive search experience. For more information about Imaginestics, visit http://www.Imaginestics.com