ViRGiL

Date: 2007

ViRGiL was a joint-venture between Jason Calaiaro and Nick Selman, originally conceived as part of a project for a class under Robert F. Culbertson. ViRGiL was to be a plain-text parsing personal web shopping assistant. At first adopted for consumer electronics, ViRGiL could eventually help any hapless shopper find their perfect product simply by telling ViRGiL basic information about themselves. The business model, which took second place in Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business Tepper Challenge, contained a detailed analysis of the current market and business strategies. Similar to Google, ViRGiL revenue would come primarily from the consumer data trends it collected.