Three winners from the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) will be chosen at CES 2015. All ten finalists will appear on stage at the Venetian in Las Vegas to vie for the opportunity to present their product later to Sir Richard Branson.

Finalists have been helped towards their goal with a boost from such companies as Amazon who provides web service. Rackspace offers no-fee hosting. Back-up and recovery services come from Axcient.  Helpful tools were additional perks, such as app development from Progress and from Spotfire data analytics from TIBCO.

Entrants came from more than 100 countries and were whittled down to the final ten. Only three will be chosen at the CES showdown to go to Branson’s Necker island to meet with him. Kym McNicholas, Executive Director of Extreme Tech Challenge said: It was truly a tough call as we had an incredible set of high quality candidates that I believe will be the next billion dollar wave.

Contestants range from a graphics app thru medical equipment, a publishing platform, travel booking, drones, facial recognition to a high end motorcycle helmet just to name a few. Judges have experience in many of the industries represented. Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Priceline, should be able to evaluate Wanderu that is geared to making bookings, not for planes or hotels, but a different segment of the travel industry – intercity buses and trains.

Howard Leonhardt, XTC judge, holds 21 U.S. patents for products for treating cardiovascular disease.

BioHeart founder Howard Leonhardt another of the XTC judges is steeped in the medical environment. The company works with cell technologies to treat cardiovascular diseases. Robert Scoble will also sit on the panel. A well-known tech blogger who once worked at Microsoft, Scoble is now with Rackspace’s Small Teams, Big Impact (previously Building 43). This division, a new content and social networking website, is geared to help new startups and encourage groundbreaking technology. The Extreme Tech Challenge is right up their alley.

New fangled stethoscope from Eko Designs.

One entrant is by Eko Designs founded last year at UC Berkeley. Eko Designs’ Core is a digital stethoscope attachment that allows clinicians to switch between analog and digital information. It helps visualize, record, playback, share, and analyze heart sounds. The added device standardizes the recording of heart sounds, attaches them to medical records, and provides better coordination of care between professionals. It attempts to address the misdiagnoses and unnecessary referrals that occur in heart-related cases.

The device’s integrated Bluetooth links the Core to Eko’s smartphone app and its HIPAA compliant  web portal. These digital tools provide heartbeat analysis, audio visualization, and secure data storage. You can sign up for one of the beta units coming in 2015 and see for yourself if you can amplify, record, analyze and securely share heart sounds which identify heart murmurs more accurately than ever before.

Ghost is an open source publishing platform for bloggers. Its tools make you look professional while it adds in a few rules to live by when blogging. The Ghost Foundation is a small nonprofit organization that runs the project. As with any open source, the public, people from all around the world, contribute to its structure and features.

Ghost has a set of rules for users to follow.

Although the software is free, as with any open source application, with free comes “basic.” Beyond that, a fee is attached. Ghost sustains itself by renting space for, or hosting, your blog for $10 a month. Their marketplace contains a directory of themes, apps, and resources which have been created specifically for Ghost. Some are free; some are premium, meaning you pay a fee to use them. For $10/month you get unlimited transfer and storage with automatic updates and backups and worldwide CDN & security protection. For a team of ten bloggers you pay $100/month and receive priority support. You can sign up and try it out for free.

Wanderu, unfortunately is only currently covering the US and Canada. If you have ever tried to get around Europe which has a better public transport system than most of the US, you’ll appreciate this new app. They have City Travel Guides for prominent East Coast cities. Bus and train schedules for Boston make your visit to one of the important sites of the American Revolution easy. Wanderu connects you with 10 different bus companies within the Boston area.

Their bus routes are short hauls on each coast. No nationwide trips are available yet. If you want to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles and see scenery along the way, Wanderu is the ticket. Want to take a look at Florida, then after seeing Disneyworld in Orlando, hop a bus to Miami to sun yourself on the beaches using Wanderu’s routing and ticket app. The company selects only the safest and most trusted brands in ground travel. It provides mobile information on Apple, Android or Blackberry.

All ten finalists will appear at CES 2015. Look for the contest to take place January 8 in the Marco Polo room at 2PM.

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Apple has been pushing heath and fitness heavily with their most recent campaign for the iPhone. This can be most noticeable in their recent ad campaign featuring Apple’s iPhone and a series of fitness applications and accessories, which include a multitude of wearables. Their campaign states, “You’re more powerful than you think.”

So, what is Apple getting at here, exactly? That the iPhone, and Apple, can be at the very core of your physical and health success. Surely, there are plenty of people that are already using many of these devices on both their Android and iOS devices, so that doesn’t necessarily set Apple apart from the rest. What will set Apple apart from the rest is how they will very likely incorporate a lot of these different wearables’ functionality into a single device.

According to some of our sources, Apple is looking to make the iWatch a very health-centric device rather than one that is about accomplishing tasks and being an extended digital assistant (See: Google Now + Android Wear). However, there are concerns that Apple’s focus on health with the iWatch may actually hurt them and could have sent the company back to the drawing board in order to increase the overall daily ‘usefullness’ of the device outside of health applications. But even so, Apple is rumored to be purchasing certain types of sensors that will be able to measure your heart rate and sweat in addition to movement data. They’re also becoming ever more serious about how they test these sensors and the functionality of their platform as they’ve been rumored to be spending millions on medical equipment from various manufacturers. The idea that Apple is buying medical equipment should be a pretty ridiculous one, but once you think about how serious Apple is about launching their first new product line in over 4 years, you’ll realize that they don’t want to make any mistakes.

So, there’s no doubt that Apple’s iWatch is going to have a health focus. The real question will be whether or not the iWatch will be almost entirely health focused, or if they will try to build in Siri integration and make the iWatch both functional and health conscious. Because, right now, Google and Microsoft don’t really have much by ways of health applications of their own, let alone hardware. So if Apple can build an iWatch that is health focused, they may already have a significant leg up on Google and Microsoft. Now, if you add heavy Siri integration and other helpful features there’s a good chance that Apple could once again set the standard for a new type of technology, but this time in wearables.

As of right now, I don’t think anyone has any concrete idea of when Apple will launch the iWatch, but from what it looks like it is still majorly in development and we probably won’t see it until next year. Obviously, if they launch sooner, it will put a greater burden on their competitors, but as of right now most of the smart watches from their competitors either haven’t launched yet or lack a native health functionality. Samsung and Qualcomm certainly have the lead in terms of health focus with their smartwatches, but it remains to be seen how far they’ll go and how they’ll compete against an Apple iWatch.

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