Vitaminwater wants to give you $100,000 if you can live without your smartphone for a year

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Cohen Coberly - TECHSPOT


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What just happened? Companies are always looking for ways to grab your attention, but Vitaminwater's latest contest may take the cake. On Twitter, the beverage maker announced the #NoPhoneForAYear contest, which (as the name implies) challenges one contestant to live without mobile screens for a full year, with a $100,000 prize on offer if they succeed.

Obviously, the rules of the context are not nearly as simple as that brief summary suggests. After all, Vitaminwater isn't going to give $100,000 to just anybody.

As such, the company is weeding out the time-wasters by requiring all would-be entrants to publish a Tweet (or an Instagram post) explaining how they would spend their smartphone-free time if they are accepted into the contest.

The Tweet must be submitted by January 8, and it has to contain the #NoPhoneforaYear and #contest hashtags. It also has to be original, relevant, and it must stay up throughout the entirety of the contest.

The first phase of the contest will involve a panel of "qualified judges" reviewing each submission, and looking at things like creativity, brand relevance, overall quality, and humor to select a single entrant.
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Once an entrant has been selected, they must submit to a background check and agree to a "contract" laying out various rules (which are unknown to the general public) they will need to stick to during the following 365 days.

Of course, Vitaminwater and its sponsors understand that some form of cell phone is effectively a must-have for the average individual to function in the modern world. Emergencies happen, and the last thing you want to do is allow yourself or a loved one to get hurt merely because of a contest.

As such, the company will be providing the sole contestant with a free 1996-era cell phone and an accompanying phone plan for them to use at will. Furthermore, all tablets and smartphones are off-limits, though it sounds like laptops and desktops are perfectly fine.

[Muddy]

Im not writing all that shit.. :hand: Gimme the money... :x

[Teh One Who Knocks]

You'd need a Twitter or Instagram account first :nono:

[Griffin]

This would be so easy for me, but I would have to first borrow someones phone then open an account and learn how to submit my tweet.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

This would be so easy for me, but I would have to first borrow someones phone then open an account and learn how to submit my tweet.I don't think you world be picked. I'm sure that they do their due diligence and check and make sure the people entering have fairly active Twitter and/or Instagram accounts first. They want someone that's always on their phone and active on social media because (presumably) those would be the ones that would have the hardest time going without their smartphones for an entire year.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Oddity Central


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Remember Vitaminwater’s “scroll free for a year” challenge that dared people to go smartphone free for a whole year to win $100,000? Well, this New York woman is eight months into her smartphone-free year, and just four months away from claiming grand prize.

Vitaminwater made news headlines last December when it announced its unique challenge. Thousands of people applied to be chosen as the perfect candidate to spend a year without touching their smartphone, but in the end, the only person who got to try and survive for an entire year without a handheld was Elana Mugdan, a 29-year-old fiction writer from Queens, New York. Eight months into the challenge, she claims it’s been a freeing and eye-opening experience that showed her just how dependent she had become to her smartphone. Even though there are times when she misses her handheld, she plans to go on living without it even after the challenge ends.

“I’ve decided that I will never go back to smartphone use once the one-year contest is up,” Mugdan told CNN. “I don’t think I can be trusted with the technology — if I have access to a smartphone, I suspect I’ll go right back to abusing it, wasting time, staying up all hours of the night on it, and getting addicted to social media, and I really don’t want to go back to all that.”

When she started the “Scroll Free For a Year” challenge, Elana Mugdan had to trade her iPhone 5s for a Kyocera flip phone that she could only use to call and text. She still has access to her laptop, desktop PC and high-tech devices like Amazon Echo, but not having access to her smartphone really made certain situations a lot harder than she could have imagined them before.

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“Once, I almost got stranded in the SeaTac airport because the phone number I’d written down was wrong, and I had no way of looking up the right one, no way of calling a cab or Uber, and no one in the state who could help me,” the young fantasy writer said.

Another time, her car’s “check engine” light turned on while she was driving in an unfamiliar area, at night. She couldn’t use her phone’s GPS location feature, or even check what the light meant on Google or find a nearby car repair shop. Still, she learned to overcome these situations and claims the last eight months of smartphone-free life have been one of the best adventures of her life.

If she manages to go another four months without using a smartphone, the 29-year-old New-Yorker stands to pocket $100,000, but according to the rules, she will also have to undergo a lite-detector test to prove that she didn’t cheat during the one-year challenge.