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Funny story about the Myo. It was a promising device and seemed to me like it had great niche applications (such as medical). Founders weren't interested in tha

Funny story about the Myo. It was a promising device and seemed to me like it had great niche applications (such as medical). Founders weren't interested in that I guess and moved to smart glasses. Last summer they sold the patents for Myo to a company called CTRL Labs for about $20M. In the fall Facebook snatched up CTRL Labs for $500M - $1B, and their product description was basically that of the Myo. More info: https://betakit.com/ctrl-labs-acquires-norths-patents-for-myo-armband-technology/ https://betakit.com/ctrl-labs-acquires-norths-patents-for-my... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21058975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21058975

rattray 6y ago
Wow!
ricardobeat 6y ago
IIRC the reviews for the armband were unanimously bad, with the device barely working. If the device wasn't fit for gaming, it definitely would not be fit for any medical or industrial use at the time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chabons 6y ago
  I had the chance to use one at a hackathon, and can confirm the device barely worked. It had huge difficulties differentiating between different input gestures, and the employee who demo'd it admitted as much.
  - 0x5345414e 6y ago
    In order to make it reliable you had to make a custom classifier. The one that shipped with their software was garbage.
macspoofing 6y ago
>It was a promising device and seemed to me like it had great niche applications (such as medical) Medical what? I actually had an early version of the armband and SDK, and apart from it just not working well, it aggravated my latent repetitive stress injury, just playing around with it. More importantly, though, it was a solution in search of a problem. There was no real use-case for it.
baybal2 6y ago
> Last summer they sold the patents for Myo to a company called CTRL Labs for about $20M. Holly molly! They once talked with Recon Instruments about them for a few hundred thousand bucks...

rattray 6y ago

Wow!

ricardobeat 6y ago

IIRC the reviews for the armband were unanimously bad, with the device barely working. If the device wasn't fit for gaming, it definitely would not be fit for any medical or industrial use at the time.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chabons 6y ago
I had the chance to use one at a hackathon, and can confirm the device barely worked. It had huge difficulties differentiating between different input gestures, and the employee who demo'd it admitted as much.
- 0x5345414e 6y ago
  In order to make it reliable you had to make a custom classifier. The one that shipped with their software was garbage.

macspoofing 6y ago

>It was a promising device and seemed to me like it had great niche applications (such as medical) Medical what? I actually had an early version of the armband and SDK, and apart from it just not working well, it aggravated my latent repetitive stress injury, just playing around with it. More importantly, though, it was a solution in search of a problem. There was no real use-case for it.

baybal2 6y ago

> Last summer they sold the patents for Myo to a company called CTRL Labs for about $20M. Holly molly! They once talked with Recon Instruments about them for a few hundred thousand bucks...