Last night at our annual CES media event in Las Vegas, we announced the finalists of this year’sBluetooth® Breakthrough Awards. These awards recognize the best Bluetooth enabled products and applications on the market today, as well as innovative prototypes of products coming soon. This year we invited students from around the world to participate and be recognized for their potential contributions to the Bluetooth market and the Internet of Things.

The Internet of My Things is turning into the Internet of Everything right before our eyes. We’re seeing a shift from one-to-one devices and applications, to one-to-many, like the Polar Team app that moves fitness tracking from the individual to the team level, or even a retail beacon that sends info from one device to many shoppers. This shift is powered by Bluetooth Smart technology and we’ll continue to see it light up bigger remote monitoring and management scenarios in mobile health, smart home, commercial and industrial scenarios.

Every day the sheer volume of creative uses of Bluetooth Smart technology astounds me. When people ask me what the next “killer app” is going to be, I can’t answer because this technology is used to enable so many different things. This year’s finalists speak to a broad mix of health, fitness, retail, and consumer uses. They also speak to the market acceptance of Bluetooth Smart – the intelligent, low-energy technology enabling the Internet of Things.

And the 2014 Bluetooth Breakthrough Awards finalists are:

Breakthrough Products

• 94Fifty Smart Sensor Basketball (InfoMotion Sports Technologies)
• Nonin Model 3230 Bluetooth® Smart Finger Pulse Oximeter (Nonin Medical Inc.)
• Swirl In-Store Mobile Marketing Platform (Swirl Networks)
• Anki Drive (Anki)
• DISTO D810 touch (Leica-Geosystems AG)

• Polar Team app (Polar Electro Oy)
• Automatic (Automatic Labs)
• Mobilis framework (Mobili)

Breakthrough Prototypes

• Skulpt Aim (Skulpt)
• H2O-Pal (Out of Galaxy, LLC)
• Smart Plug (BeeWi)
• The Nymi (Bionym)

Breakthrough Ideas (Students)

• Catherin Keithline, PianoPedal
• Shiva Nathan, Arduino based Bluetooth Transhumeral Prosthesis
• Beth Quinn, Spectrum
• Temeka Gongs, Kool-Fridge
• Savannah Cofer, Bicycle SuperVision

All finalists receive development kits from BBA gold sponsors CSR and Nordic Semiconductor and a sensor tag kit from gold sponsor Texas Instruments. The Bluetooth SIG’s expert-judging panel that includes industry players Robert Scoble, Ken Denmead, Victoria Woollaston, and Joel Kaczmarek, as well as sponsor judges David Bean, Frontline Test Equipment, and Mario Pasquali, Ellisys, will decide the winners.

Winners will be announced at the Pepcom media event on February 23 at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona, Spain. The Product, Application and Prototype category winners will be invited to attend Pepcom MobileFocus Global at MWC with the Bluetooth SIG to highlight their product to hundreds of international media. These category winners will also receive a trip to gold sponsor Nordic Semiconductor’s headquarters in Norway. The Student category winner will receive a cash prize of $5,000 USD.

(Credit: Suke Jawanda)