INVENTOR MAKES SURE HE’LL NEVER FORGET A FACE
A SYDNEY cafe has come up with a new way to tackle one of the biggest problems a barista faces during the morning rush – remembering a customer’s name.
Cafe Bahista in the CBD uses facial recognition software to identify customers, remember their choice of coffee and keep track of their orders so the barista knows when it’s time to give them a freebie.
Owner and inventor Geoff Cropley spent 20 months designing the software called Noahface with his IT-whiz business partner John Maclean.
“I bought this cafe about three years ago, and on day one, week one, month one, I thought, I have a shocking memory for names,” Mr Cropley said.
He scoured the internet for a face-scanning solution but struggled to find anything within his price range.
“The applications were for big corporations that were focused on identifying bad guys in public places ... they were millions of dollars ... and that wasn’t going to fly in a three or four-person cafe,” Mr Cropley said.
The Noahface tool uses biometrics to recognise the customer’s face within half a second of their facial features being scanned by the camera, which is attached to an iPad at the cafe’s counter.
“The tool gets you to the point where you become familiar with the face and the name, and then all it’s doing is tracking the loyalty, so the system is telling the operator – hey this one’s on us,” Mr Cropley said. He said customers could also choose whether they wanted their identities to be entered into the database, and so far nobody from Sydney had declined.
Mr Cropley said using the tool had helped him boost revenue by allowing him to rote learn the names of all his regular coffee drinkers who were catalogued in the app.
“The cafe has gone from a $500,000 per year business to a $1.4 million business since I bought it … as a business principle, we focus on getting to know people’s names and it’s now so much easier,” he said.
The software was released to the market a couple of weeks ago and costs about $1.50 per day to operate.
Mr Cropley has conducted a round of fundraising from high net-worth investors with the intention to use the cash to market Noahface to cafes all over the world.
Mr Cropley is no stranger to inventing new products, with his biggest claim to fame being the Titan floating boat winch handle.