Thalmic Takes A Cue From Google, Launches #ifihadMYO Campaign To Give Away MYO Armbands

Thalmic Labs, the Waterloo startup behind the upcoming MYO armband motion control device, is giving away five of its devices, to be delivered to the lucky winners early next year. The campaign may seem familiar, since it’s called “#ifihadMYO,” which is a direct lift of Google’s recent #ifihadGlass Twitter-based giveaway of its own wearable tech product.

Google Glass and Thalmic’s MYO offer similar quandaries to their respective creators: these are crazy new gadgets that have little or no precedents in terms of shipping consumer devices, and people aren’t quite sure what to make of them. The #ifihad mechanic is uniquely well suited to this, as it crowdsources reasons for the device to exist. This sparks both developer and consumer imaginations, providing use cases that even Thalmic themselves (or an ad agency paid to create a similar campaign) likely never would’ve come up with on their own.

Thalmic’s process when determining winners is a little more transparent than Google’s too, as it will be featuring a live stream of all the entries on its website, and will allow viewers to upvote their top picks. That’s not the final say in voting, however; Thalmic says that it will consider user votes when picking winners, but ultimately the decision will rest with Thalmic Labs judges.

So far, there are already a few entries, including people who want to plug it into RC cars to help get kids interested in coding, using it in tandem with Google Glass, and building gesture-based passwords for physical locks. All in all, some pretty good ideas emerging, and there’s likely many more to come between now and the contest close date of August 31. So far, the company has racked up over 30,000 pre-orders for its device, so there’s definitely an appetite out there; this contest will help provide a better idea of what all those people are going to be able to do with their MYOs.