Could your face be the key's to Facebook's future?

Facebook - Market Level Research

The following is a recent case study I completed in researching markets Facebook could focus in turning their DeepFace technology into a viable consumer product. I'd be excited to hear your thoughts or opinions. 

Problem Statement

I am a non-tech user who forgets passwords and has trouble typing on small screens such as a mobile phone. My problem is that many sites require different passwords and it is time staking to log in repeatedly to pay bills, shop or identify myself online. If I could solve this problem, this is how my life would be better: I'd feel confident when surfing the internet and interacting with my devices.

Market Research

Estimates calculate Facebook has more than 1.3 Billion monthly active users in Q2 2014. For mobile users, estimates claim more than 945 million users in Q4 2013 [1]. The following market research will attempt to find a suitable market segment to target for initial product development leveraging facial recognition.

Current Biometric Recognition Market

Mastercard conducted employee trials using voice & facial recognition with reported 98% accuracy rates taking about 10 seconds per transaction [2].

How big is the segment?

Biometrics Research Group, Inc. estimates that the global biometrics market will grow to $15 billion by 2015 [3].

• With fingerprint identification being a majority share of about $10 billion.
• Face, iris, vein, and voice recognition biometric technologies together form the second largest segment.

The research consultancy expects that worldwide mobile payment transactions will reach $250 billion in 2014, reaching $750 billion in annual transactions with more than 700 million users by 2020 [4].

Segmentation Breakdown [5]. e.g.

• Application Type
• Face
• Finger Print, etc.
• End users
• Government
• Defense Services
• Banking and Finance
• Consumer Electronics
• Mobile Commerce
• Healthcare, etc.
• Region
• North America
• Europe
• Asia Pacific

Cross referencing estimates above for potential facial recognition with mobile payment estimates. Facebook could seek to gain more than $5 billion within 2015. With even more potential if Facebook's product generated profit based on every mobile transaction.

Market drivers and inhibitors

• Increased familiarity and demand for making mobile payments will drive need for more secure methods by mobile users.
• Facial recognition does not require new hardware other than a camera. Unlike fingerprint and scanners. [6]

Current market share

Facebook itself does not appear to have market share for using facial recognition. But other players in the market are splitting potentially upward of $5 billion per year.

What problems remain in the market?

Concerns by public and government sectors about privacy issues around facial recognition may cause delays in adoption in certain countries. In February, U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) raised concerns after a hacked Google Glass application was released leveraging facial recognition techniques [7].

References

[1] - http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3573009/mastercard-trials-voice-and-face-recognition-mobile-payment-technology/
[2] - http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
[3]- http://www.biometricupdate.com/research
[4] - http://www.biometricupdate.com/201309/mobile-commerce-will-drive-millions-of-biometric-smartphone-shipments-billions-in-transactions
[5] - https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609090140-173774513-biometrics-technology-market-share
[6] - http://www.biometricupdate.com/201409/top-biometrics-news-stories-week-ending-september-21
[7] - http://www.franken.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2699

Firefox DevTools: To theme or not to theme

While I don't find myself going into Firefox's 'Toolbox Options' that often.  I found a pleasant surprise yesterday when I discovered that my version of Firefox supports a Dark Theme in addition to the Light Theme.  I prefer the contrast of a dark theme and have been using most of my editors in dark themes. e.g. WebStorm, Sublime. If you haven't already, I suggest you experiment with using a dark theme. It may take a few days of getting used to the colors, but I find it is worth the effort.

Chrome users shouldn't feel left out, as you can download themes for your Developer Tool usage.  That being said, buyer beware as these themes may not work with future releases of Chrome Tools.
 

Steps to configure

1. Launch Firefox
2. Open the Web Console by pressing the keyboard shortcut:
1. Control-Shift-K (Windows)
2. Command-Option-K (Mac)
3.  Select the Toolbox Options i.e. gear icon, should appear to the left of the Web Console.
4. Under Choose DevTools theme, select Dark theme or switch back to Light theme to revert.
5. Enjoy!

Dark Theme

Light Theme

I will share some of the not so obvious developer tools that I stumble upon.

Do you have some interesting tips for dev tool usage?  Please share in the comments section below.

Tips on moving to a new city

How do you go about finding things to do or learn about your new town or city?  Sure you can search the Internet for hours and never actually interact with anyone.  But is that really the best use of your time?

After moving to the greater Seattle, WA area, I found the following tips, websites and tools came in handy and got me out on the street and active.

Space Needle, circa 2005

Helpful Tips and Tools

1. Get your bearing, look at a map
2. Talk to people and ask them for ideas
3. Sign up for local Twitter feeds & activities in your area
4. Search for Meetup.com activities
5. Read Weekly newspapers

Looking at maps

Getting your bearing so you don't get lost is probably the most important and overlooked tool to hitting the freeways or finding the local parks and walkable locations.  Also, when people mention surrounding towns or neighborhood, you will have a general sense of how far or which direction they are referring to.

Talking to people

Talk to your friends and family before you move can help you find some great places they have visited or wish they could visit.  But, nothing can take the place of talking to locals.  Once landed, speak to the clerks at shops you visit, or waiter/waitress at a local restaurant.  Let them know you are new to the area and were wondering if they had any good tips.  You would be surprised how open people are to helping you out in exploring.  If you are shy, use the meetup idea as a way to socialize.

Sign up for local Twitter feeds

Most towns now have a virtual "town square" under the disguise of a twitter feed.  You don't even have to have a twitter account to follow their tips but it would make it easier.  A simple search on twitter for your town will show many results.  The trick is to filter through the results for groups, companies or individuals you believe will provide posts on local activities or events in your area.  e.g. Searching Seattle, WA

Some Twitter accounts that seemed legitimate and I chose to follow

• Seattle Magazine
• Seattle Weekly
• Seattle Police Department
• Seattle Weekly Events

I'm sure your town or city has many similar feeds.

Sign up for a Meetup

Meetup.com has a lot of local people who are interested in a wide variety of topics.  I personally use the site to find out about tech related events.  However, there are almost an infinite amount of groups on the site including groups interested in dancing, attending concerts, photography, etc.  This might be the easiest way to meet a group of like minded people and get their feedback on things to do in the area. 


A quick search on Seattle returned more than 30 events in one day. 

Read Weekly Newspapers

Remember those things called newspapers. Most larger towns have a local paper that you can find outside of supermarkets, cafes and just about anywhere.  These papers are typically written weekly and hold a lot of information on upcoming activities and news that does not always get headlined in the local daily paper.  If dead paper trees are not your thing, most of these papers are also available online.  Check out your city for similar papers. 

• Seattle Weekly 
• The Stranger

Do you have more tips

I hope these tips provide a few ideas on how you can explore your town.  Please share if you have some idea you have used in discovering your town or city?  Or leave any stories on how technology helped you find out more about your area. 

Explorations in JavaScript Tooling Can Improve your Day Job

Elijah Manor @elijahmanor has a great article on his blog titled Angry Birds of JavaScript Series.  In an interesting format, he describes how a "flock of birds" fight some pigs to get their front-end JavaScript architecture back.  Elijah has in-depth coverage of the material on his blog, which I highly suggest you read.  O'Reilly recently posted a video where he recapped slides within about an hour (video embedded below).

Elijah describes many options and pros and cons of some popular tools.  I created this short list of tools for quick reference in the future.  Now to integrate these into a CI tool such as Teamcity or Jenkins. 

Quick List

• Help write clean consistent code and detect errors or problems
• Idiomatic.js - code beautifier i.e. style guide
• JSHint
• Plato - Code Coverage Tool 
• MV* Application Structure, Templates & Patterns
• Backbone.js
• handlebars - Templates
• JavaScript Patterns - factories, decorator, etc.
• Mocking & Testing
• prototyping and unit testing with Mockjax & mockJSON responses
• PhantomJS & QUnit (I added these two as testing wasn't the major focus of his article)
• Automate all above and more
• Grunt - task runner to run above tools in build system

Video

Top New Programming Languages/Frameworks of 2013

It seems around every corner there is a new exciting software language or framework popping up.  Developers continue to build upon older languages and patterns in new ways with new APIs, languages, tools and hardware while social websites such as GitHub and Stack Overflow help spread the excitement and offer community support.

Tools and frameworks came out in the mid-2000's which allowed for web development to become more approachable for those without formal software backgrounds.  CRUD sites could easily be created for blogging, e-commerce or just hosting a fan page on social sites.  The need for Front-End Software Engineers has increased due to the demands for complex single page applications not to mention the explosion in cloud development, mobile and cross-platform development, etc.  While Engineers have early exposure into architecture of applications with consideration for performance, security, accessibility, maintainability, extensibility and the list goes on, we do love to solve problems.

As a rule, a new language should be learned each year, or at least explored.  I've been primarily interested in HTML5 technologies and languages which are all about coding and less about configuration and setup.  The best part about a lot of new languages and web frameworks is that the creators are offering full-stack solutions from IDEs, debuggers, and hosting servers to lots of libraries to reduce rework.

This is an exciting cycle in software development and our tool belt is getting larger with each generation.  In no particular order are a few exciting projects I've been following this year and do find actually fun to use. 

• Dart - A new language, with tools and libraries, for structured web app engineering 
• Meteor - an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started. 
• Backbone js - gives structure to web applications by providing models, collections, views and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface. 
• Groovy/Grails - an Open Source, full stack, web application framework for the JVM
• Android - a Linux-based operating system[9] designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers
• Go - an open source programming environment that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. 

There is a plethora of options available to us all.  I believe success for teams will likely come to those teams that choose the right tool for the job and can adapt quickly in using new or old tools when necessary. 

Here is a particularly interesting infogram from IEEE on the The Top 10 Programming Languages.  What languages are you exploring this year?