CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In its annual ode to enterprise technology innovation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology honored eBay as the Business of the Year and named the founder of wireless networking firm Atheros Communications its Innovator of the Year at its 2002 eBusiness Awards.

In all, nine companies or individuals were recognized for their successful innovations or business application of technology.

The eBAs, organized and run by students in MIT's Sloan School of Management, were launched in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, but have evolved as the industry's focus has shifted away from dot-coms to the power of IT to transform business processes and communications.

At this year's awards, companies inventing or providing wireless communications services came up big winners: Atheros, Vodaphone, NTT DoCOMo and Research in Motion --maker of the Blackberry mobile device-- all captured awards for their technology advances and services.

In the only award given to an individual, Atheros Communications' CTO Theresa Meng was named Innovator of the Year, beating out leaders from Nortel's Xros division, ReplayTV, Visionics and General Electric. Meng's California-based company is pioneering 802.11 chipsets used for wireless networking. The technology will enable the connection of computing, audio, and video devices into a single wireless network, expanding the possibilities for content access and user applications.

Among the other wireless winners, Vodaphone, which operates the largest mobile phone network in the world with more than 95 million customers, won in the Global Reach category. Japan's NTT DoCoMo, creator of the W-CDMA air interface technology launched the world's first 3G service, won in the Enabling Technology category.

Disruptive Technology of the Year award went to Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry device, in part because of its widespread and rapid acceptance among enterprises arming their executives and field staffers with the devices to communicate via email anywhere. RIM won over Kodak (nominated for digital cameras), SONICblue (personal video recorders), PayPal (online peer-to-peer money exchange), and Sony (Playstation 2).

Other eBA categories and winners were:

• Business of the Year: eBay, the online auction site, for building an online auction powerhouse connecting millions of buyers and sellers around the world, with 42.4 million registered users.
• Rookie of the Year: Orbitz, the online travel reservation site, for its proprietary fare-finding technology.
• Social Responsibility: Grameen Bank, which is using technology to provide micro-credit loans to villagers in rural Bangladesh.
• Business Transformation: IBM, which is solidifying its position as a leading enterprise IT solutions providers and, among other things, making its latest, exploratory technologies available on the Web (alphaWorks) for download at the earliest stages of development.
• MIT Students' Choice: Google.com, for its leading search-engine technology.

Earlier, MIT gave out six awards in specific vertical industry categories. Winners were:

• Communications Technology: Research in Motion
• Financial Services: E-Trade
• Health Care: Inhale Theraputic Systems
• Internet Services: eBay
• Media/Entertainment: ReplayTV, for its SONICblue recorder
• Operations: General Electric

David Aponovich is senior editor of CIN.Earthweb.com, an internet.com site.