Shortlisted as one of the top five entries
Plantronics has been a market leader in communication equipment for personal and professional use since the 1960s. One of their recent and most exciting products has been the Voyager series headsets, which have proximity sensors to detect when the user has worn the earphones. Plantronics had recently announced a contest inviting contestants from 33 countries to suggest innovative ideas to make use of this earphones-with-sensors concept for producing innovative business applications.
We at BitCot had suggested making use of the sensors in the Plantronics headphones and connecting it to mobile devices via an Android or iOS application in order to detect a sudden collision. We had also suggested a few other methods by which the user can raise an SOS when he/she is in trouble or gets caught in an emergency by just a few taps on the headphones.
The catch is that the user would need to be wearing the Plantronics headphones while driving. While this would be handy to the users at times of emergencies, this would also be a great platform for Plantronics to innovate their products by integrating it in a relatively new business area. From among a pile of hundreds of contestants, we at BitCot were shortlisted to the last twenty, when the results for quarterfinals were announced on November 2014.
In the quarterfinals, we had presented a more detailed idea of how we plan to implement our idea with a detailed working model and our proposed marketing strategy for the app. While we were confident in our idea, we were also a little apprehensive that the competition was going to be tougher. On March 02, the list of the last ten semi-finalists was announced and BitCot Technologies were among them!
As a part of the semi-finals submissions, we had presented the proposed idea in a presentation along with the screenshots of the working prototype of the app that we have developed. Our hard work was acknowledged after it was announced that we were among the only five selected for the finals of the event, as per the results announced on April 25, 2015.
We are now headed to the finals of the competition, where have to build a functional working app that uses the model that we have submitted before the Plantronics jury. The results would be announced by the mid of May. Wish us luck!
