FaceTec was formed by John Bickley in 2008 to commercialise the face personalisation platform Face-it! which uses patented facial recognition technology that enables the large scale automated facial personalisation of digital advertising, brand communications and content via social media websites and smart phones. FaceTec Ltd acquired the assets and IP of Genemation Ltd, which was spun-out of The University of Manchester in 2002 (John was CEO).
John joined the company in January 2003. Prior to Genemation he was Senior Vice President, EMEA for Celoxica, a spin-out from Oxford University . From 1992 to 2000 John worked in the video games industry for Sony Psygnosis, a UK based video games developer and publisher. He joined when it was privately owned and worked with the founders to sell the company to Sony in 1993. Psygnosis went on to become Europe 's largest video games development and publishing company. John was also involved in running the publishing division for Psygnosis's sister company, Sony PlayStation Europe. Before joining the video games industry John was managing director of CIC Video, a joint venture company owned by Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios.
Warren is a highly regarded graphic design artist and ex art studio director. Warren was responsible for the design of the Face-it! website, iPhone apps and third party brand widgets.
Matt developed the all the platforms and applications that comprise the Face-it! web presence along with helping to produce the tools that allow the Face-it! engine interact with those web applications. Matt has extensive experience building large web/e-commerce applications for a wide variety of SME and Blue Chip companies such as Beaverbooks and the BBC.
Dr Gavin Wheeler built the Face-it! engine and was one of the founders of Genemation, the company that spun the original technology out of The University of Manchester.
Professor Tim Cootes heads up the computer vision school at The University of Manchester and is one of the world’s leading machine vision academics. Tim is responsible for the patented algorithms behind the Face-it! platform.
Dr Matthew Ryan is an ex Canon research scientist with a number of patents in the image processing space. He has worked with John to turn Face-it! into an application that can be used across a number of platforms. Matthew has also built the iPhone pipeline that communicates with the Face-it! server
Company registration no: 6545725
Registered in the UK