A selfie and that's it. Corroborate attendance at work with a photo and from a smartphone or tablet is the proposal of XmartClock, an app that uses facial recognition technology to corroborate the identity of a worker in real time.
By adding georeferencing, it completes the system and configures the location tracking and time worked, said Fernando Rivero, co-founder with Rocío Pla of the application. Also available for PC (in its web format), the development was launched in 2017 for the "Laboratorio de Ideas" contest of Startup Cowork in Punta del Este. After winning, and with an investment of about US$ 30,000, it is already used by about 100 companies in Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, England and Holland. According to Rivero, the differential compared to other options in the market is the unification of several functions in one place and its "very easy" implementation. "As it is an app, it is not necessary for the company to install anything extra, no fingerprint or card reader. You just have to download the application from any of the stores (Android or iOS), register the company and workers and that's it".
The company employs 10 people and is applying for a seed fund from the National Development Agency (ANDE) for marketing, a key area of the business. "All our clients from abroad have come to us through our advertising on the Internet, without making any trips. What's more, our first client in Europe, an English company in the style of hospital escorts, came without planning it and they downloaded the app in Spanish. This motivated the English version and that we are with business rounds in that continent, because we captured another client in Holland and there are more interested, "said Rivero in dialogue from London. For the English client they made a customized development. "Because of their regulations, they must include a signature of a responsible person. So, we implemented the digital signature that is done on the smartphone," he said.
The app is offered in two versions: basic (US$ 1 per employee per month) and premium (US$ 1.5). "The premium version includes the possibility of facial identification with selfie and send notifications at the time and other features," he said. The contract is month to month and in both cases there is a free trial month. Innovation and ease, each client opted for the app for different reasons. The first, a 50-person paint shop in Maldonado, needed to solve a problem with the fingerprint reader. "It wasn't reading the workers' fingerprints properly. They chose our product because they could solve it with a selfie. A company in the port of Montevideo whose workers travel to ports in the interior of the country used to work with a portable fingerprint device. A month and a half ago they switched to the app because if the mobile phone breaks they download the app on another one and with the user registration it is operational again at the moment. The fingerprint equipment can take a day or more to be replaced," Rivero said. Meanwhile, his first foreign client was a company in Argentina that provides maintenance and cleaning solutions. "It employs more than 700 people and its problem was that some employees didn't show up to work at their assigned places and the company was the last to know. It installed the app two months ago and the person in charge of each group registers the arrival of employees with a selfie on a smartphone. If someone is absent, an alert is automatically issued to the corresponding person," he concluded.
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