Crossing the Chasm: The XID Technologies Story

XID Technologies is a face processing start up company built initially around a disruptive face recognition technology. The technology innovation came from Kent Ridge Digital Labs, a publicly funded software research laboratory in Singapore. Face recognition is the least intrusive and harmless among the various biometric solutions available in the market. The basic approach to human face recognition is to identify a robust feature set that was unique enough to differentiate amongst the many millions of human faces that the system was required to verify. The technology innovation used by XID framed the problem differently and thereby overcame the challenges posed by poor lighting and tilted or rotated heads. XID developed a pilot application that was in an undiscovered market. This new and yet undiscovered market gave the young company a protection from established face recognition solution vendors focused on well established biometrics markets. XID was emboldened to explore developing solutions for other markets once its initial solutions were accepted. It has now several parallel products under development even as its main offering is being brought to market by some of the large solution integrators. The paper describes the transition of XID from a young one product start up to its present position as a technology and new solution generator