Our founders recently challenged us to build our own facial recognition apps, so we had a weekend hackathon and built 4 apps in 48 hours.
“Challenge Accepted” is the statement we live by, so our team did exactly that. The entire team was divided into 3 groups and after doing some preparations during the days before the weekend, the 2-day hackathon finally started.
The teams had to utilize facial recognition technology in the apps they were building. A facial recognition system uses biometrics to map facial features from a photograph or video. It compares the information with a database of known faces to find a match. An example of this commonly used today is the feature of some mobile phones to unlock after scanning and verifying the face of the phone user using its camera.
The teams had to build the actual apps, validate the product ideas with the market, craft a business model, create landing pages for their products, and then finally pitch it to invited judges.
These were the finished products the groups came up with:
Consumers carry bulky wallets containing all their different cards for different brands they are a member of. The Idemfy app user has to select from a list of different brands they want to subscribe to then register to these by taking photos of their themselves.
Every time they purchase a product or do a certain transaction with the brand to earn points for rewards, they just have to have their faces scanned through the app from the side of the cashier or establishment staff and the points automatically reflect to their accounts.
The long-term vision of Idemfy is for the consumers’ faces to be their single ID whenever purchasing goods— goodbye rectangular pieces of plastic!
Mata is a web app that aims to improve the security of company buildings and makes employee attendance easier, more efficient, and more accurate.
An employee entering their company building only has to take a selfie through the app and they are automatically logged in to work. Your face is your ID!
Mata removes the need for any manual work for the company to log employee attendance, and provides even more logging accuracy too, paving for better monitoring for the administration.
Team Foints came up with a product that records your loyalty points from your favorite brands without the need for cards!
All you need is to take a picture of yourself when registering to the brand, and let the cashier take a photo of you every time you purchase to verify who you are and get the points. Plus, you can redeem the rewards without the need for carbon paper.
Our founders did not miss out on building their own product for the hackathon!
Our CEO Dave and CTO Albert used the facial recognition technology to make events registration a breeze.
With the FacePass webapp, attendees simply have to upload a recent picture of their face to pre-register to an event, which in-turn adds to their user profile, and the platform will recognize the participant instantly.
This means that attendees simply walk joyously into an event instead of waiting in line to have an organizer manually search for names on a list.
Facepass also tracks attendee movements and using that data, it reports attendee engagement so organizers will understand what will make their next event a bigger success.
Disclaimer: The apps are still in their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) phase but phew, #technology.
This is what we do at Symph. Whether it be doing internal hackathons or working on projects for our clients, we grab every opportunity to learn and use (especially) new technology to build products with a purpose.
We accomplish this with our cross-functional teams of experts (consultants, project managers, developers, designers) working together to take an idea and quickly build an MVP. We roll out this MVP to the product’s users so that we get feedback on the user experience early on. We take this feedback from every phase and we continue iterating until we finish building the right product that helps solve our clients’ problems.
“Hack”—one word in our ethos— has always been about harnessing technology to improve how individuals live, how businesses operate, and how the world works. It's ingrained both on our walls and in our minds.
See more of our work here.
Do you have an idea you want to turn into reality? Talk to us about it.
