What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing Access Control: Alcatrazai's AI Innovations Transforming Biometric Authentication and Privacy Compliance
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the secrets of cutting-edge biometric access solutions with Vince, the visionary founder of Alcatrazai. Our latest episode promises an insightful journey through Vince's remarkable career, from shaping Tesla's Model S and crafting the iPhone X's Face ID to pioneering facial authentication technology with Alcatrazai. Explore how Vince's innovations in AI are revolutionizing access control, tackling common issues like tailgating, and transforming sectors from healthcare to finance. Discover Rock X, their groundbreaking product that ensures privacy and compliance by not storing personal data, reshaping how we think about secure access. Tune in and prepare to be inspired by the future of biometric solutions and the transformative power of technology.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, today we're headed to Alcatraz not that Alcatraz, alcatrazai to talk about biometric access solutions and what's the latest and greatest in this space. Vince, how are you?
Speaker 2:Good, thank you for having me. How are?
Speaker 1:you. Thanks for being here, really intrigued by you and your work at Alcatrazai, by you and your work at Alcatrazai. Let's talk about you first, introductions. You've had a fascinating journey from NVIDIA to Apple to Alcatraz.
Speaker 2:Maybe share a little bit about yourself with the audience. Sure, I mean long story short. I had my professional career through starting with NVIDIA. I was designing chips and modules that were going into the automotive industry, including Tesla, back in the days when the Model S was coming out. Then I moved to Apple, leading a few teams creating iPhones and, more specifically, face ID, before I came out on iPhone X, and that's what inspired me to create Alcatraz to solve basically a bit of Face ID-like technology for the physical world, for enterprise. So wherever the employees come and go in high-secure locations, non-secure locations, data centers, factories, everywhere instead of guards and old-school biometrics, they use their face to go through Fantastic non-secure locations, data centers, factories, everywhere instead of guards and old-school biometrics they use their face to go through Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the concept of facial authentication as a service.
Speaker 2:That's quite an acronym, but what does it mean and how do you see it? Redefining privacy-driven security. Yeah, so Alcatraz was started with a few core principles, one of them being privacy, no PII, no data. Everything is given to the customer. It's traded by the customer. We had to build a lot of technology. We have a lot of IP around privacy, compliance and management. So facial communication as a service is essentially what we provide to the customer. It's not like a one device, kind of an iPhone-like product that you deploy on the door and forget about it. It's the continuous deployment of compliance software, consent software, a lot of tools to create not only the best biometric product deployed experience by the employees but a product that's kind of feature-proof from a compliance perspective, no matter where you deploy globally.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and your flagship product is called the Rock Great name great movie product is called the Rock Great name great movie and now you have the Rock X. Maybe talk about the platform and how it works indoors and outdoors.
Speaker 2:So Rock X is essentially a product after eight years of learnings. We've deployed to numerous clients on-premise cloud very different verticals, kind of learning throughout time. What's really important for them, and one of the main things, was well, if they're going to be deploying facial authentication-based products anywhere, they want consistency between outdoor and their applications so they potentially can use only facial authentication everywhere. So that's how we designed the ROCKx. We believe it's the first reliable facial authentication product for access control. We put a lot of time, a lot of effort making it very reliable outdoors, which is a key for something that has a camera inside that's very susceptible to lighting conditions, angles, creating authentications in the real world, real time, within milliseconds. Essentially, it's a little different to do authentication on the phone with Face ID with one person enrolled, Very different to do it at scale in a corporation. So eight years of learnings finally coming out very happy to share. Rockx is out there outdoors, with a few more features on top of it.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and there are so many breakthroughs happening in this space. You know, I see it now at the TSA when I travel. I've seen it on airlines like going to Dubai and Emirates you don't even show your passport anymore door to door. What are some of the big tech breakthroughs that are enabling this? And you know how is it influencing your roadmap?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean just the technology advances. You can do now facial authentication fast, you can do it reliably, especially if you use multiple sensors. As to how we do it, you can do it in a very private, very secure way, so you actually know who's on the other side. It's not a picture of someone, it's not a screen, but it's actually really you, with the liveness, with a spoof check. Facial authentication also enables, just with the nature of deploying cameras, to do much more than just authenticating the first person going in.
Speaker 2:Nowadays, in access control in enterprise, tailgating is a big issue. So how do you solve for tailgating, which is, you know, is piggybacking of an employee by someone else? It can be an employee, it can be an employee without access, it can be a guest. Right now, you can solve it with just guards, security guards deployed at that location or turnstiles, gates, but with the advances of AI and facial authentication, you can actually do it in real time, as if you're deploying a virtual guard at the door, which is what we're trying to do as well with Rock and Rock X, Creating much more value than just authenticating one by one, each individual.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Yeah, so many use cases. As you mentioned, critical infrastructure, corporate campuses, but you must see so many opportunities. I'm thinking hospitals and healthcare settings. People still have these terrible badges that they wear and lose, but what other use cases are you seeing firsthand?
Speaker 2:I mean anywhere there is a need for compliance. There used to be other biometrics deployed by finger. Now, after COVID and even before COVID, fingerprint is not as favorable anymore due to you have to touch something and it's kind of clunky. It's not reliable anymore and we get passes of new chips and new algorithms on the face side. Face is becoming the norm in biometrics and in a lot of the use cases in financial institutions, utilities, critical infrastructure, data centers you must have dual-factor at least. Just how, on the phone, when you're logging in your bank app, you'll get a pin call or a text message by email, so authenticate.
Speaker 2:In the real world there is no way for anyone to send you an email before you go into a door. So you need a dual factor authentication. So that's what FACE provides in those kind of infrastructures. A second layer it creates a lot more security, as if there's an actual guard on the door. Back in the day, 10 years ago, a lot of companies were solving it with just an actual guard on the door. Back in the day, 10 years ago, a lot of companies were solving it, but just an actual security guard, and the security guard was comparing with their eyes the face printed on the badge with the actual face, the person that has the badge on their neck. With our technology you can do it real time without an actual person. So you can imagine the return on investment there, because now you can deploy it in pretty much any kind of environment and have the same security.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So you've been at this mission for almost a decade. That's like a lifetime in tech these days. You must have seen a big change in how people viewed biometric security when you started to today big change in how people viewed biometric security when you started to today. And there's still a lot of misconceptions around privacy and security. So what is the mood, I guess, of folks adopting your tech? Have they come around to see the benefits?
Speaker 2:Again, alcatraz was built with privacy as one of our core principles from the beginning, and you really need to start building a platform from scratch to include things like no PII, never images stored, no employee names, no tracking of any kind. We communicate to the existing infrastructure with just batch numbers, as if people are badging in making us a very secure platform. And obviously we've been through a lot of certifications some very expensive and long ones to make sure we are compliant with all regulations and kind of future-proofing our platform for a while. So 10 years is a long time. It takes a long time to create an end-to-end large enterprise platform of such kind A lot of learnings, a lot of features.
Speaker 2:There is no way for a startup to just deploy a little MVP what you call in the startup world a minimum value product. You have to have tens of millions of dollars of investment and a lot of time and effort through even pilots with customers, to exactly know what's needed to deploy at scale. So you know, very happy, we've been through that already and now we're just, you know, deploying multiple generations of products.
Speaker 1:I bet. So yeah, apple and you were there, as you would know has really reinvented the perception of facial ID. I couldn't imagine using my phone without face ID now. And you know even Apple you hear about getting into doorbells and cameras and other things potentially who knows?
Speaker 2:no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Well, a big learning for me is just not only dream big, but expecting to take double the time, triple the money, triple the effort.
Speaker 2:Usually, no matter what kind of industry, no matter if you're going to a B2B or B2C kind of business model, it just takes a long time to develop core tech model. It just takes a long time to develop core tech. Nowadays, with AI, anyone can create a company with a few use cases with AI. But to create deep technology that is defendable and you will differentiate yourself and another company cannot just make it happen within a few months. It takes a long time, especially if you go to the large enterprise market. And obviously, especially if you go to the large enterprise market and obviously especially if you go to high security physical infrastructure, it takes a long time to go through all the pain points, all the steps to even establish trust as a company. You know the industry takes time to get to know you pilot you trust you to. Eventually, you know, as Alcatraz is now known probably as one of the best, if not the best and the deepest access control platform for biometrics especially in the US.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic, and I see you have lots of partners on the go-to-market side. How is that shaping up? You must have commercial opportunities, government, state, local government agencies. What's your key to ramping up over the next years?
Speaker 2:We don't comment on our customers. You can imagine everyone wants to keep things private. On the security side, I would just say the need for high security that's privacy-centric is skyrocketing in the last two years and we don't see this stopping in the next 5-10 years. Just the geopolitical challenges and the nature of how technology evolves and the rise of AI, how we can optimize, make anything more efficient with technology we don't see this stopping and I'm so excited for the future.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So what are you excited about for the next few weeks and months? Do you have any events or announcements, roadmaps? What are you looking forward to as we head into the spring?
Speaker 2:I will give a little call. That I learned from Apple. We like to have our customers delighted when they're ready to announce new products. We have a lot of things going on both on the software and the hardware side. Our company is primarily creating innovative software that kind of goes above and beyond on the privacy and compliance side with different tools so to make it easy for customers to digest, to fly through their internal processes. So I'm just excited for the team we've built and the core technology we've created and now we can just step on top of it and keep serving our customers, maybe explore a few different markets.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Well. Congratulations on all the success. It's an amazing mission and can't wait to see your technology in action one day who knows where I'll encounter it. Thanks so much for joining Vince.
Speaker 2:Thank you for hosting.
Speaker 1:Thanks and take care of everyone. Thanks for listening and watching and sharing. Bye-bye.