Our story behind the story

This year’s Product of the Year Awards, by far, were the most interesting since I started with Electronic Products . First, we changed the way we conducted the meetings and our internal communications. Second, the economy seemed to play a role of its own in the release of products that were submitted for the awards.

The POY awards went social and high-tech well, at least a bit. The entire award discussions were noted each day via Twitter at http://twitter.com/EP_POY_Awards. We let followers know what products we were discussing so they could check on the Product of the Year process. So if you have a Twitter account, make sure to follow us for next year’s awards.

We also, for the first time, went completely online with our conference calls via Skype, connecting our West Coast and South East editors, Jim Harrison and Paul O’Shea, with the editors here in our home office in New York. While Twitter and Skype gave us all the communication tools we needed both internally and externally, we did experience some issues with them, mostly when their user bases reached high volumes.

I’m sure you’re sick of hearing how bad the economy was last year and you’re hoping, like the rest of us, for 2010 to be better. Last year’s economy seemed to even take its toll on products being released throughout the year.

Most of the products submitted for award consideration either had launch dates within the first or the last quarter of the year. I’m not sure whether the companies whose products won were more innovative to get the products to market quicker or just took the time to improve the technology behind them. Either way, they produced some really remarkable products last year, products that in the near future may change how you design, test, and even help explore new applications.

So take a look at what the editors of Electronic Products think were the most important products from last year.

Bryan DeLuca

Managing Editor