Facewatch Fundraise for UK Anti-Crime Platform

JH
John Honovich
•Published May 25, 2015 04:00 AM

A foolish dream or the future of crime fighting?

A UK businessman has spent millions of his own money and now has raised nearly a million more from investors to fund a UK anti-crime platform that promises to drive down crime through sharing criminal information and real-time criminal face recognition alerts.

In this note, we examine the financial details, and the challenges the company will have to overcome.

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Comments (4)
U
Undisclosed #1
•May 25, 2015
IPVMU Certified

If Facewatch can get to a critical mass, it could generate increasing 'network effects' where it could become extremely valuable... The UK itself is densely enough populated, a relatively small enough area and literally an island(s), that knowing or getting alerts on other criminals across the country could be extremely valuable to many retailers / business.

I'm suprised that you think this system could work and be valuable, considering the skeptical attitude you showed towards a similar system: 18 Million Face Database Now Operating In The U.K.

As opposed to using mug shots taken close up in good lighting for the reference image, which the 18 million system has, this one is using cctv captures done with random quality for BOTH the reference image AND the match image.

Wouldn't that be even worse?

JH
John Honovich
•May 25, 2015
IPVM
In reply to Undisclosed #1

I mean for basic information sharing - human to human, i.e., my store gets robbed, I post an image of the robber from my surveillance system and another store owner / manager recognizes that person as the same person who stole from his store or the police know who he is.

I've seen some success with that for the US based Crimedex, but it's hard to do more and hard to make money at it.

The automagical facial surveillance, much more skeptical.

U
Undisclosed #1
•May 25, 2015
IPVMU Certified
In reply to John Honovich

Fair enough.

Listening to the video, if you didn't know any better, you might be lulled into believing that the face recognition problem has been solved by them. Another day, another Unicorn... :)

SN
Steve Nauman
•May 26, 2015

I gotta say, from the perspective of your average citizen the name "Facewatch" is more than a little bit skeevy.