Sep 18, 2009 3
The Magic of Facial Cues
TechCrunch50 in San Francisco is fast becoming one of the premier places to launch a technology startup if you’re looking for exposure, customers or funding.
In fact, one of the companies that presented at the inaugural event a couple years ago just announced that they had been bought for a considerable sum.
So we were watching the live stream of this year’s event when the startup Affective Interfaces started to pique our interest.
Based on the work of facial coding expert Paul Ekman (recently popularised in the hit TV series Lie to Me), AI has built a system that monitors facial expressions in real time and on a mass scale (via webcams). They claim the system provides a much more accurate and sensitive indication of, among other things, an ads. likelihood of success.
The presentation didn’t go as well as it could have done – the presenter spent too much time talking and not enough time showing ‘compelling’ videos. But then, in a scene reminiscent of Dragon’s Den, a couple of judges on the expert panel started to recognise the potential. Those enlightened judges were publishing entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly and senior Google exec Bradley Horowitz.
But while these judges know tech, they’re not experts in human behaviour. So we decided to get Jai Haissman, AI’s founder and CEO, to chat with Conquest Research’s David Penn, someone who knows a thing or two about the reliability of interpreting emotions and non-verbal cues. This is a pretty geeky podcast, but we hope you find it stimulating nonetheless.
Affective Interfaces is keen to reach out to potential partners, customers and funders (they’re self-funded). We regard them as an exciting addition to the world of new research and so encourage you to engage with them (as you’ll hear in the podcast they’ve already had a good amount of interest from the event).
VCs and corporate M&A folk: this could become a very special company.
STARRING
- Jai Haissman, founder and CEO, Affective Interfaces
- David Penn, MD, Conquest Research
Our article in the Apr ‘09 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy 
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