Facenition update: covid19 related use cases, scale up to Europe update and more

I wanted to update you on our Facenition progress. At the moment because of the Covid19 situation we decided to improve our communication and issue a sort of weekly email update to my close circle of clients, colleagues, family and friends. We are using an external mail service so you could OPT-out easily if this is disturbing you (w hope you wouldn’t as this will be my way of communicating Facenition through the lockdown!)

So… Facenition is full gas ahead, we actually hired Philip today – a new engineer (Auckland based) in our team to develop two new use cases which we invented inspired by the pandemic situation. One of the ideas is in patent writing – so I can’t really tell anything about it – we hope to file the patent application within two weeks and the other use case is as simple as the attached images would tell: it is a simple crowd / distance control solution. We want to remind you that unlike other solutions, Facenition is not based on cloud services – all the analysis is done locally on the device without any storage or processing of biometric data, what makes it privacy / GDPR compliant.

Patent application: Our patent application is written by Maor – which is doing his PhD in theoretical physics in Sweden, and Nitay which is a Victoria university MsC student for theoretical physics and math (on his way to Melbourne to do his PhD). Maor solved the complicated math behind the algorithms, and Nitay is writing the patent itself.

Finland Project: We were supposed to begin our scale-up to Europe project on 1st of June, as been accepted by Business Finland, but due to the situation – our plans are postponed – but not cancelled. We are now looking to execute parts of our plans from remote – like opening the Finish company and setting up our systems in Helsinki. We really appreciate the help from the Business Finland team and the Helsinki Business Hub – you are just awesome!

Prototype: Four of our devices are running in Wellington CBD all the way through the lockdown (one device had a hardware fault but we couldn’t access it to fix it), we collect data and continue with our basic R&D. The situation has motivated us to develop a remote control object for the device (i.e. – that we would be able to upgrade and update it from remote)

Covid19 solutions: Our pandemic track and trace solution (which is also 100% privacy compliant – i.e. does not store any biometric data even that it tracks people as they go!) is now ready for sales with a lead time of 3 months (i.e., at the moment it will take us 3 months from agreement to be able to deploy it on premises). I will send some screenshots in my next update. Our initial plan was to deploy our solutions with first clients in Israel and Russia, but because of the situation, it looks like we will deploy in Sydney first. Prior to the lockdown we have pre-ordered and received enough hardware to assemble 200 devices – this will let us an income of US$240,000/yr which is enough for our current execution plan. I will keep you updated of course.