11-14-2018, 01:34 PM
(11-13-2018, 09:15 PM)panamaniac Wrote: Did the Myo armband ever make any money?
The sold a good number of them, but they probably never turned a profit. It found a small niche in a few markets - there were a lot of stories around prosthetics especially - but almost certainly nothing close to enough to pay for all the growth over the past two years.
That wasn't really the point of the Myo though. Like most VC-funded companies, profit probably hasn't been a key metric. North (still as Thalmic) announced their $120 million investment from Amazon in fall 2016 and my guess (outsider speculation, no data) is that they used that money almost entirely to develop the glasses they've just announced and didn't push to increase viability of the Myo as a product. It could only go so far, and I think they wrung most everything they could out of it.
As wearables become more commonplace I wouldn't be too surprised if a successor of some sort is announced - the ring thing they have is a suitable interface, but I don't think it's a great one (pure uninformed opinion, I've never touched one I would just be irritated having it around). They're going hard on voice which might be good, but there's something about physicality that I think humans go for, and the Myo or something similar still seems like a pretty non-intrusive way to interact with a glasses-mounted display.