“Sorry…the machine doesn’t recognize ugly people.”

“A little make-up would help the machine.”

“You’re possibly not a human, access denied!”

“Sometimes it does matter if you’re black or white! Auwww!!” – MJ style certainly.

The R&D guys joked when the prototype failed to recognize faces back then. Some of them even suggested having these kinds of greetings in the machine, which obviously was shot down immediately by the more sane ones.

2 ＋ 3D Face Recognition Algorithm

Recognize this face?

Having our past experiences in the biometrics industry, gradually we had to diversify our research and development into other areas, and we choose to develop face recognition. The road to commercialization stumbled upon engineering and re-engineering of the 2＋3D face recognition algorithm. After myriads of denials from the marketing department over time, the overall outcome now is positive.

So, another market revolution can be expected, this time, led by face recognition.

According to a research report, face recognition would keep its status quo in between 16-18% for another 6 years, whereas fingerprint technology will slowly lost its momentum, from current market share of 55%, gradually declined to 31% in 2015 for a combination of private and public sector.

Ready For The Change

Of course, the market development might not always follow the forecast. Especially for high-tech products, if the time is ripe and the product is right, you have higher opportunity to change the world, or to prove expert’s projection is rather conservative or wrong.

This time, we are more than ready when come to term with the new biometric technology and market. We understand the customers better, more aware of their requirements, and the market acceptance would be easier, we reckon.

For instance, facial recognition is truly contactless when embed with one-to-many verification technology. Every time you want to gain an access, or to check in for attendance, what you need to do is just to stand before the reader, it will scan and verify; or flash an RFID card prior to the process if the reader is incorporated with RFID functionality.

Our Face Recognition Roadmap

FingerTec FaceID 2 (artist's impression)

FingerTec FaceID 2E (artist's impression)

We will introduce two new products simultaneously into the market before year end with a codename FaceID 2 and FaceID 2E respectively. The first, FaceID 2 would be a combination of fingerprint and face recognition technology, providing options for users either to use single method, or a combination depending on their security needs.

The latter, FaceID 2E, would be an external face recognition reader which can be plugged into FingerTec existing fingerprint reader models through USB port. (Note: Only apply to future batch of FingerTec reader models with USB port)

Standalone face recognition reader only without any fingerprint module, is also in our pipeline, schedule to be launched by 2010.

For our existing partners, prepare yourself for a shake-up in biometrics market. Please bear in mind that when opportunity knocks, you can either open your door or you can let it pass.

FingerTec once again will abide by our philosophy, to lowering the entry barrier and making high-tech products mass; and most importantly, our brand is tagged with an affordable price.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Salesforce.com, the world’s leading CRM (Customer Relation Management) system that we’re currently using, puts emphasize on “NO SOFTWARE” in their sales strategy.

No doubt, “NO SOFTWARE”, is more clear than if they were to use “Cloud Computing” technology term, which needs further elaboration and having no catchy punctual to actually ‘catch’ customers.

“No Software” is the fundamental

NO SOFTWARE. The same goes to TA100 DIY but it is not something related to “Cloud Computing”. TA100 DIY is simply NO SOFTWARE. It’s just like a smart phone; all the smart features are put together in one phone.

NO SOFTWARE. Offered at a competitive price yet loaded with superb features is what TA100 DIY all about; suits perfectly for SME and SMI.

“TCMS V2 is overtly too sophisticated for our small business. We only have a few staff, and we are not going to use some of the features. 'Overnight shift' for example, is of no use to us.” Commented some customers.

“TCMS V2 requires training. For small businesses that are tight in budget, they even want to save on small training fees.” Lamented some resellers.

TA100DIY, everything in one box

“Can we just sell the machine as cash-and-carry item and the customers do the rest by themselves?” Asked some idealistic resellers, a twinkle in their eyes.

Harder than we thought

When the first batch of TA100 DIY was introduced to the market a few months ago, some users started to rebuke, “I had to type long username to register users one by one with those small keypads. So inconvenience! The user has to punch some key first before they can put their finger, unlike the other models. No good too. The HTML reports have flaws, etc …” And the list extended.

And some users came back demanding us to ‘upgrade’ the DIY machine to become a normal machine with TCMS V2 software. We helped them downgraded the firmware, and we sent them TCMS V2 software (of course, with some charges involved).

The Will Lives On

But I did not back away from the lukewarm response, in fact I told my staff, the market has thousands times more small offices than large corporations or factories, and these offices will need time recorders to record their attendance. Simpler and cheaper Biometrics reader would suit their requirements better than the normal machine with software.

“If some percentage of these offices starting use our TA100 DIY, we will see much improvements in our sales.” I reiterated.

The R&D team later was instructed to gather customer’s feedbacks, refine the crude features, adding some new ones, and enhance the batch processing to import and export data and etc.

DIY is the Final Destination for TA100 DIY

For resellers, TA100 DIY can definitely help them to reduce training hours spent at end users. For tech-savvy end users, TA100 DIY should be a walk in the park. If you can operate your mobile phone, you can do TA100 DIY.

My aim is to make the DIY reader so simple, even housewives could use it in the house to check their husband’s IN and Out (go out and back home) movements. (And have records to prove it) :)

I bet on the DIY reader to be as successful as the rest of the models.

What’s next?

Of course, software will remain inevitable for all other FingerTec models including the ones we are going to produce in the future. We have also started the TCMS V2 web version development, which would involve cloud-computing technology, and eventually, our next milestone is to operate like Salesforce.com.

Stay tuned with FingerTec, interesting things keep happening.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

It all started as an idea or a perception and after sometimes (plus words of unreliable mouths), the perception becomes ‘facts’ and worry seeps in. One user actually linked her miscarriage to the frequent use of biometrics machine, which was only installed at her office for a month. It’s human nature to put the blame to someone or something else; that’s understandable but to blame it on a machine is not the smart move at all. Another worker made up a story that biometrics machine could cause tumor and it scared the rest of the colleagues. It’s either that or they found a way to escape from using accurate time attendance machine that actually requires them to come to work punctually every day.