Wareable picks: Wearable personality of the year

In the next instalment of our Wareable picks of 2014, we big up three of the best personalities, shaping the wearable landscape with their inspiration and creativity.

Essential reading: 50 best wearable tech of 2015

The Wareable team has picked out three of our favourite personalities of the year and then argued it out to decide the overall wearable tech personality of the year.

Paul Lamkin - Editor in chief

Sonny Vu isn't just the CEO of a successful wearable starup, he's the heartbeat of the industry. “We’re making the science available to anyone," he told us back in August. "We're in one smartwatch now and going to be in half a dozen smartwatches by the end of the year. We even have activity trackers that are competitors to the Shine that we're powering." His vision of how tech's latest mass consumer genre will evolve looks beyond single products and instead concentrates on the data and platforms that will enable people to enrich their lives.

James Stables - Senior editor

The Apple Watch made its debut complete with nods to Newson's past work on mechanical watches, so his arrival at Apple this year took no-one by surprise. An old pal of Jony Ive, Newson’s presence is a big coup for Apple, and it adds to their line up a designer who has serious credentials, and knows his onions when it comes to affairs of the wrist. While it’s unclear if Newson had input on the Apple Watch you can bet your Christmas bonus he’ll have major hand in the Apple Watch 2.

Sophie Charara - Contributing editor

Kovert Design’s Kate Unsworth’s wearables might not have changed the game in 2014, but her ideas might. Her philosophy is all about spending less time looking at emails, calls and messages, and her wearable – Altruis – helps to filter them out. While it’s early days for Kovert, Unsworth’s ideas about what wearables could be doing are years ahead of her peers.

Winner: Sonny Vu

The CEO and founder of Misfit has had a huge year in 2014, and the Silicon Valley startup is fast becoming a giant in the wearable space. Beyond releasing the Misfit Flash, one of the best budget fitness trackers on the market, Sonny has seen that convergence of fitness features into smartwatches could mean the death knell for the dedicated tracker – and started to change his business.

Misfit has since launched apps for smartwatches, helping the likes of Pebble offer fitness tracking from its devices. What's more, he's secured $40m of finance from China, which could see Misfit break into the most lucrative market in the world. In other words, Sonny and Misfit are hitting the big time.