Negocios Now

www.negociosnow.com 12 Diciembre 2022 By David Steinkraus D iego Ferrer is putting his deep experience in computers and aviation to work in a new startup that he and his partners hope will be notable for not being noticea- ble. Their goal, said Ferrer, is to streamline the check-in system at airline gates. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress wan- ted biometric tracking of inter- national travelers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection itself handles the collection of bio- metric information such as pho- tographs and fingerprints for international travelers coming to the United States. It wants airlines to handle the system for outgoing passengers, Ferrer said. Ferrer and his partners at Fal- co Systems (Rafael Romero and Francisco Gaivis) are developing a facial recognition system to sell to airlines and perhaps others, he said. Their pitch, he said, is founded on the reality that today's government pilot pro- ject often becomes tomorrow's mandate. ONE PHOTO Falco's technology integrates with the border protection com- puter system, and the process starts with a passenger coming to an airline gate. At the gate, a camera photo- graphs the passenger and sends the picture to the border protec- tion system, he says. "CPB has a picture of every person traveling because they either have a U.S. passport, a foreign passport, or a visa." The border protection com- puter system compares the pho- to from the gate to its gallery of passenger photos and signals whether the person in front of the camera is clear to fly. The border protection system also generates a passenger ID number that is sent to the airline's computer sys- tem, which verifies who the pas- senger is and where they're sit- ting. Falco's system doesn't save that ID number, so the identity of the passenger is unknown except to the border protection and the airline, Ferrer said. With this type of one-step processing, a camera and com- puters do all the work, and boar- ding times will be the same as they are now or shorter, he said. "There are other companies doing this. They're big compa- nies compared to us," he said. "The competitive advantage we have: One, we use off-the-shelf components so we don't have any proprietary hardware, and two, we're setting up alliances with distributors." Buying off the shelf is difficult for airports unless a vendor con- tract is in place, he said. Without that, any purchase requires a lengthy and formal bidding pro- cess. The Falco system could also be used to grant access to air- port lounges, he said. "We want it to be an opt-in process. If the passenger wants to do this, they would have an app. So they would take a picture of themsel- ves through the app and get it registered with the airline loun- ge or a third-party lounge," he said. AVIATION VETERAN Ferrer has the right experien- ce for this work. For six years he was chief information officer for the Chicago Department of Aviation and was in charge of all technology and communi- cations systems for O'Hare and Midway airports. Now he splits his time between Falco and his consulting company Orinoco Systems LLC. He said he's been interested in computers since he was a stu- dent at Universidad Simón Boli- var in Caracas, Venezuela, but he no longer writes code. "I'm more of a high level archi- tect. I could code, but it's kind of like when you're a baseball player: You get older, you don't bat anymore, then you become a coach. So that's me," he said. Ferrer says his work is both for him and for the Hispanic community because it's unusual to find Hispanics in IT. Several years ago he started Electronic Knowledge Interchange after he read "The World is Flat," the 2005 book by Thomas Friedman that explored the globalization of business and supply chains. Ferrer said he did "nearshoring," working with clients in the Uni- ted States but using program- mers from Mexico and other countries in Central and South America. Clients benefitted from lower costs and the convenien- ce of working with people in the same time zones, and the programmers received work and experience, he said. Now he and his partners at Falco are hiring IT workers from Venezuela, Pana- ma, and Mexico. "A Latino sees another Latino being promoted, having a good position, that can inspire him," he said. Latino IT expert plans to reduce airport delays SHENIX™ ASSISTS LATINAS MAKE THE BEST-INFORMED MONEY DECISIONS AND HELPS ACCELERATE THEIR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION, ALLOWING THEM TO BUILD THEIR FINANCIAL LEGACY.

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