The Smartwatch Revolution, or How the Pebble Changed My Life
Sitting at my gym gear last night (for those in Melbourne I highly recommend Acumotum) waiting for my Urban Athlete class, yes I have graduated to athlete status, my wrist watch buzzed with an alert. “Hi, what time will you be home?,” It was a text message from my wife. I clicked a button to accept the alert and make it go away. My iPhone was in the men’s change rooms.
Fellow sweat junkies stared in disbelief. Meet Pebble I said.
My new Pebble smartwatch connects to my iphone when it’s within 10 meters via bluetooth. This piece of technological wonderment integrates with an increasing number of Apps and tells time as well. Technically it is a watch but not like any you’ve seen before.
Pebble is the first piece of wearable tech in the soon to be growing 21st-century category of “smartwatchs.”
So exactly how did Eric Migicovsky, a 25-year-old engineering grad with no money to his name promise to build a customizable watch that worked perfectly with iPhone and Android smartphones one year ago, beat Apple to the finishing line?
Simple – Kickstarter.
It’s always fascinated me to watch the world invent, adopt and then move onto the next business or marketing trend. Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and Pakistan is so 2004.
For the last few years I’ve followed the growth in Crowdsourcing sites. Wikipedia defines Crowdsourcing as “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers”.
Enter Eric, who, about eighteen months ago was having trouble getting funding to take his smartwatch past the conceptual phase. On the advice of San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator Eric decided to to take his pitch to the people using a crowdsourcing platform and asked for a mere $100,000.
Two weeks after posting his plans on Kickstarter keen supporters had pledged $7 million and eventually the Pebble team collected $10,266,845 to complete the project. In the months that followed the loyal backers, me included, were kept posted with a series of email updates. I think I have 40 so far – detailing every step of the smartwatch’s production process.
A total of 68,929 backers pledged anywhere from $1 to $10,000 to see this thing to fruition. In this faceless world of tech production with its dubious practices it was great to follow the transparent process of the Pebble Team struggling to control what they had created and then eventually deliver beyond all expectations.
You can preorder one for $150, but there’s no word on when it will officially ship to the general tech-toy-hungry public.
My Pebble can tell the time using a growing number of digital watch faces (one keeps time to a never-ending game of tic-tac-toe), display text messages, caller ID, controls music, and, as a bonus, plays the retro 1970s game Snake.
How? By seamlessly syncing with my iPhone using Bluetooth (same deal for Android users) and simply displaying the phone’s notifications as they appear on the locked screen.
The creators have release its SDK (software development kit) to developers to encourage all sorts of applications and custom watch faces already being brainstormed by its small and devoted community of programmers.
There’s also word that Pebble will work with the RunKeeper running app for iPhone and Android, too.
Impressed? I am.
