[4] On Feb 15, 2006, during the Open Source Business Conference, San Francisco, Terry Bayne was announced the grand prize winner of the contest and received US$50,000 for his creation "Kibble," a tool for building integration solutions between the host PC and the BlackDog device using a SOAP-based RPC mechanism to send arbitrary LUA code to be executed on the host PC from the BlackDog.

Promotional literature shows the form factor to be the same as the intermediate iD3 prototype a very thin chrome model resembling an iPod Nano, but all black with a rubberized exterior.

It was announced as being part of the iDentity product series and was, for instance, showcased on the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA (April 3–7, 2006).

A short Engadget review stated that "it runs Firefox fine, and should be great for taking your own browser, e-mail, and chat clients for use wherever you are, though that will probably be about all this little 400MHz guy can handle.

It contained some sample default applications such as xterm, XBlast, and XGalaga and allowed installation of the Firefox web browser, an email client and other additional software available through official and community APT repositories hosted by the project.

A SDK with a QEMU emulator environment for Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X was released to facilitate the creation and porting of applications to the BlackDog system.

The official repository for the project disappeared in mid-February 2007 due to Realm Systems Inc. closing and was reactivated by its successor Inaura Inc. as of late-June 2007.

The official website for the project www.projectblackdog.org still appears to be up as of December 2013, but has been defaced by several "quick cash" money lenders that have compromised the site via the WordPress content management system it uses.

In January 2007, two then-unidentified groups containing former Realm Systems employees and investors attempted, independently, to license or move the K9 hardware and software to a separate company to continue development and production, due to the dissolution of Realm Systems and continued developer community interest in the concept, as well as rumored successful pilot programs.

Based on unconfirmed community reports (September 2007), it appears new developer prototypes of the K9 have been seeded to the Project BlackDog contest winners.

The K9 device is now being branded as the K9 Ultra Mobile Authentication Key (UMAK) and marketed as "solving the problem of trust within all computing environments".