Today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2014) in Las Vegas, at the Bellagio Hotel, over 200 attendees including VIPs from all over the mobile technology industry gathered to hear the announcement of this year’s winners of the annual 2014 Compass Intelligence Mobility Awards.
Among the big winners was the biometric authentication startup out of Kansas City: EyeVerify. The company netted two awards, announced by Compass Intelligence CEO Stephanie Atkinson and based on the votes of more than 50 industry experts from the research, analysis and journalism communities.
The tabulated votes had Compass Intelligence bestowing EyeVerify with awards in the categories of “Rookie of the Year” and “Technology Innovation” – distinctions that company CEO Toby Rush will be able to place on the metaphorical mantle next to his Get In The Ring: Investment Battle win from November of last year.
“We continue to be humbled by the recognition we’ve received at previous competitions and from our peers in the technology industry here today,” said Rush via the EyeVerify website’s blog. “This one is special because the voting panel was comprised of industry experts as well as journalists and editors for major tech publications. We are excited heading into 2014 as we will be announcing several customers, strategic relationships as well as will become commercially available all in the first quarter.”
EyeVerify is the kind of mobile device authentication that was being heralded as the likely successor to the password before Apple’s Touch ID made its big splash in September of 2013, namely security SDKs that leverage hardware already featured on current generation smartphones and tablets.
The award winning technology leverages the front-facing camera that is standard on all major smartphone and tablet models to enroll the visible blood vessel patterns in the user’s eye. This “EyePrint” as EyeVerify calls it, is to be used as a biometric key for unlocking the device in question. When a user wishes to gain access to a phone protected by EyeVerify, the app prompts her to hold the phone at eye level and look up and to the left for less than a second. The program then authenticates the user (or rejects the impostor).
Now that the hype surrounding the iPhone 5S has died down and analysts like C. Maxine Most are seeing the smartphone as a naturally multifactor device, solutions – especially those receiving the kind of attention that EyeVerify is currently enjoying – stand to gain even more traction throughout the year to come.
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