Are You A Blowhard? Zyxio Wants Your Help With Product Ideas

Zyxio is a Las Vegas based startup that we’ve been tracking for a while now. They’ve developed proprietary technology called SensaWaft that lets people control computers via air flow. As in, you can control a mechanical device, or a mouse pointer on a screen, or whatever, by blowing. How hard you blow, as well as minute differences in direction, are converted to commands.

The possible products from the technology are limitless. Combine this with voice recognition for less dangerous in-car computing. Or design applications to help the handicapped. You can get an idea for how the technology works in the video above.

The company is busy productizing the technology. But today they’re launching a contest to crowdsource new product ideas. If you have an amazing idea for the technology, you can get paid to help them build a product around it. And if you just want to vote on ideas from others, you can do that too.

Go to BeAMindBlower and register for more details. Submit your idea in as much or as little detail as you like. Others can register and vote. At the end of November the company will take the top ranked ideas and put them to a final round of voting, which ends on December 13.

Five winners will be selected in each of five categories: PC/laptops/netbooks, games/multimedia/entertainment, assistive/multimodal/virtual reality, smartphones/in-vehicle/enterprise and digital music/graphic design. The winners will each be offered paid advisory board positions at Zyxio and asked to spend 10 hours per month for six months working on their projects. They’ll spend some of that time in Las Vegas (all expenses paid, except, I imagine, anything involving illegal substances or sexual activities). They’ll be paid $6,000 for their time, and have the chance to see their ideas become reality.

And people have an incentive to vote on ideas, too. Anyone who votes is entered into a sweepstakes. Two Samsung Go netbooks and two Verizon Droid phones will be awarded.

We’ll check back in on the contest over the coming weeks to see how things are going. And we’ll likely be interviewing some of the people with interesting ideas. I love stuff like this.