John Jonelis
As I heard it –
BNC is at their new location. The food is great. The room is packed with guests. Things heat up as the excitement grows throughout the meeting.
Eclypse Idenity Recognition – Bob Lanlois
Eclypse told several fascinating stories in a refreshingly low key presentation—one story covered a lost child at a theme park with no picture available, another was about a terrorist with a phony ID, and then the 2005 London bombing. Eclypse offers a security solution that can recognize multiple people in grainy surveillance footage and ID criminals hiding in police uniforms. They’re the only company that searches on biometrics and can identify a lost child based purely on a description. Eclypse detects faces from muddy video, matches them to identities, gives alarms, and sends data to smart phones for instant field implementation. They’re already installed and are working on a project with the UN. Homeland Security says they’re 2 years ahead of everybody else. They own the biggest reference database that exists. Chicago alone has over 10K cameras but the standard ID technology is designed for the passport world and isn’t up to the challenging world of grainy video footage and distracting background noise. Eclypse doesn’t need perfect conditions to work. It took 2000 man-hours to analyze the London bombing surveillance footage. Eclypse cuts that time to minutes. Other technical benefits include a statistical confidence level for each match and a display of secondary alternates. This is a software company. They use standard computers and work with any cameras. Their company’s customers are law enforcement, public safety, and private surveillance. They will partner with OEMs and permit them to embed the software—like adding binoculars to old technology. This is the first presentation all year that I rated higher than 6. I gave it a 10. But how fast can they gain customer adoption?
Kadoo – Donna Hemmer
Kadoo is the YouTube for small circles—but built on privacy. It’s a free app running micro social networks on smart phones. Kadoo only links you to your intended audience. Groups can be temporary. They already captured 2.4MM users and are targeting millennials with a freemium model followed by a subscription when bandwidth or storage benchmarks are exceeded. Management has launched 10 startups, 8 successfully. They estimate a 2 year jump on the competition. Facebook and YouTube are profitable without privacy, so Kadoo doesn’t believe they’re incentivized to enter this market. Can they build market share quickly?
ArborVita Associates
They sell a protein that allows labs to quickly breed genetically modified mice and speed drug research. The current process takes 2 years. AVA is 90% faster, which translates to huge dollar savings in both cost and speed. They sells their protein on a royalty basis. They estimate that the market is growing at 12% per year with 2BB users not yet developed. So far, the technology is proven on Zebra fish and is expected to be demonstrated on mice within the year. The company runs lean with one scientist and outsourced R&D. Can they execute?
That’s what I heard. What did you hear? Your comments are welcome.
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