Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
Speaker 1: long time listeners of tech Stuff have heard me and
Speaker 1: probably some of my co hosts of tech Stuff's past
Speaker 1: talk about the Pebble smart watch. That's a device I
Speaker 1: ultimately chose to purchase for myself, though I did so
Speaker 1: after the famous first Kickstarter campaign. I did it as
Speaker 1: a pre order. But that being said, the cherry red
Speaker 1: edition I have does say Kickstarter Edition on the back
Speaker 1: of it, you know. So that's what's up. But the
Speaker 1: company Pebble no longer exists. In fact, it hasn't existed
Speaker 1: since the end of the first watches shipped in twenty
Speaker 1: three teen, and then three years later the company had disappeared,
Speaker 1: most of it getting gobbled up by Fitbit. So today
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the story behind Pebble and
Speaker 1: the technology that made the watches work, as well as
Speaker 1: what went wrong, and that'll be our next episode is
Speaker 1: sort of the death of Pebble. What caused the company
Speaker 1: to collapse because in the beginning at least once the
Speaker 1: actual Pebble smart watch entered into the scene, it looked
Speaker 1: like everything was gonna be rosy for the company. But
Speaker 1: I get ahead of myself. Let's start at the very beginning,
Speaker 1: and that is a story that begins with its founder,
Speaker 1: which was a guy named Eric Midjyakovsky, and Midchakovsky grew
Speaker 1: up in Canada. He attended the University of Waterloo. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm not allowed to sing, Abba Tari tells me, it's
Speaker 1: against our protocol. But he studied engineering at the University
Speaker 1: of Waterloo, including stuff like robe botics and system engineering,
Speaker 1: so really, you know, light subject matter. He spent a
Speaker 1: one semester in the Netherlands on a special industrial design
Speaker 1: engineering program in two thousand eight as part of the studies,
Speaker 1: and it was while he was there that apparently he
Speaker 1: started to get the idea for a wearable computer. And
Speaker 1: when you think about the history of computers, seems to
Speaker 1: point us toward a wearable device in our future if
Speaker 1: you think about it, because let's let's just take a
Speaker 1: moment here. The very first computers were enormous, right, these
Speaker 1: gigantic machines that some of them were electro mechanical computers
Speaker 1: in the early early days. They would take up an
Speaker 1: entire room or sometimes an entire floor of a building,
Speaker 1: and they were limited in purpose. They couldn't do just anything.
Speaker 1: They had a pretty strict set of limitations of what
Speaker 1: they could and could not do. His early computers could
Speaker 1: be first stuff like you know, computing ballists six, information
Speaker 1: for the war. Over time, you started to see mainframe computers,
Speaker 1: where you would have a centralized mainframe computer and a
Speaker 1: bunch of dumb terminals attached to it, which would allow
Speaker 1: multiple people to access the computing power of a mainframe,
Speaker 1: and you saw more general purpose computing in this era.
Speaker 1: Programming was not easy during the main frame era. Computing
Speaker 1: in general was not easy during the main frame era,
Speaker 1: but it did open up access to more people. At
Speaker 1: that point, that era gave way to the mini computer, which,
Speaker 1: despite what the name suggests, was still a pretty big
Speaker 1: honkin style of computer. It was, however, more versatile, and
Speaker 1: it took up less space, like instead of the size
Speaker 1: of a room, it was sort of the size of
Speaker 1: a filing cabinet or a desk, but still pretty darn big.
Speaker 1: The development of the transistor allowed for maturization, so we
Speaker 1: started to see smaller and smaller components for these, which
Speaker 1: allowed us to shrink the size of a computer down,
Speaker 1: and Gordon Moore observed that the technological and economic push
Speaker 1: for more transistors per square inch of silicon would result
Speaker 1: in progressively smaller and more powerful machines. And then by
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies we saw the micro computer, which we
Speaker 1: would now think of as your your standard desktop. And
Speaker 1: then the laptop came along in the nineteen eighties, and
Speaker 1: the smartphone would really pop up in the two thousands.
Speaker 1: So the general trend was to move from large special
Speaker 1: purpose devices too smaller general purpose devices capable of doing
Speaker 1: lots of little things. So if you keep following that line,
Speaker 1: you could easily come to the conclusion that Midchaikovski had reached,
Speaker 1: which was that wearable computers are the future. He started
Speaker 1: to think about this while he was in the Netherlands,
Speaker 1: and according to the story uh he was riding a
Speaker 1: bicycle pretty much everywhere, and like a lot of folks,
Speaker 1: he had become very much attached to his phone. He
Speaker 1: stayed in contact with friends and family back over in Canada.
Speaker 1: With his phone. He would get messages all the time,
Speaker 1: but he said, You know, checking your phone means that
Speaker 1: you have to pull it out of a pocket repeatedly,
Speaker 1: and if you're riding a bicycle everywhere, that's not really
Speaker 1: convenient all the time. You know, you come to a
Speaker 1: stop and then you have to shuffle around to try
Speaker 1: and reach into your pocket, pull out your phone, look
Speaker 1: to see if there's anything notable there, and then either
Speaker 1: act on it or put your phone away. It's a hassle,
Speaker 1: So wouldn't it be nice, he thought, if you could
Speaker 1: just wear a device on your wrist or or something
Speaker 1: like that, and just take a quick glance to see
Speaker 1: if you have any notifications that you should respond to.
Speaker 1: Maybe you get an alert if there's an incoming message
Speaker 1: or an incoming phone call, and maybe you even see
Speaker 1: who it is that's reaching out to you, or perhaps
Speaker 1: you can even read the full incoming message and then
Speaker 1: decide what to do from that point. And maybe it's
Speaker 1: worth it to stop someplace and pull out your phone
Speaker 1: and return a message or return a call. This thought
Speaker 1: inspired Eric to get to work on a design for
Speaker 1: such a device, and he started off with a very
Speaker 1: broad proof of concept, and this was not even remotely
Speaker 1: going to resemble something that would become a consumer product.
Speaker 1: He just wanted to figure out, can I make this work?
Speaker 1: Can I make something that can do what I'm thinking
Speaker 1: it should be able to do? And I'll worry about
Speaker 1: refining that design later. So is what I want to
Speaker 1: do possible? He gets to work, He goes back to
Speaker 1: his room in the Netherlands, and he starts to build
Speaker 1: a device. And he uses essentially an electronic breadboard, some
Speaker 1: guts from a Nokia thirty three cell phone, and an
Speaker 1: Arduino micro controller as his um as his collection of
Speaker 1: materials to build this proof of concept. And just in
Speaker 1: case you're wondering what all that is, a breadboard is
Speaker 1: the foundation for building circuits. It's frequently used in the
Speaker 1: design and prototype stage of building a device. Typically we
Speaker 1: use the term to talk about a specific subset of
Speaker 1: bread boards. Uh. These are platforms that allow for solderless connections.
Speaker 1: Mean you don't have to solder wires together and make
Speaker 1: permanent connections. You can it's sort of plug and play.
Speaker 1: So you plug elements into this bread board that connect
Speaker 1: to each other and form a circuit, and you test
Speaker 1: it and if it works great, and if it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: you can easily swap stuff out and replace it with
Speaker 1: other stuff to build a circuit that works better, or
Speaker 1: maybe just plane works. Sometimes you build a circuit and
Speaker 1: nothing happens, and you have to go through the whole
Speaker 1: thing and say, well, where did I mess up? But
Speaker 1: this allows you to rapidly test different designs and debug
Speaker 1: those designs very quickly before you move from a sort
Speaker 1: of proof of concept into a prototype model or a
Speaker 1: a an early production model. The Nokia thirty three ten
Speaker 1: stuff is pretty easy to understand. He needed some sort
Speaker 1: of cell phone components to create a device that could
Speaker 1: receive messages and send notifications of things like incoming calls,
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. The Arduino micro controller's kind of
Speaker 1: like the brains of this device. Micro Controllers are essentially
Speaker 1: computers that are on a single integrated circuit, and they
Speaker 1: typically have a CPU which has also access to some
Speaker 1: random access memory, so some memories also on the micro
Speaker 1: controller chip and it can accept data from inputs, it
Speaker 1: can perform operations on that data and then send the
Speaker 1: resulting now transformed information through outputs. And the reason being
Speaker 1: very vague about this is because they can be put
Speaker 1: to all sorts of different uses. They tend to be
Speaker 1: great special purpose computers. They're different from desktops and laptops.
Speaker 1: Those are general purpose computers. You can do lots of
Speaker 1: different stuff on those, like you can run productivity software,
Speaker 1: you can play video games, you can check social media networks,
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Um, micro controllers are meant to
Speaker 1: be much more focused. And the flip side of that
Speaker 1: is while they are more focused and can do fewer things,
Speaker 1: they tend to be able to do those few things
Speaker 1: really really well. Now, the Arduino is a programmable micro controller,
Speaker 1: so you can actually reprogram in our dwin know to
Speaker 1: be really good at different tasks, not simultaneously necessarily, but
Speaker 1: you could use in our dw know in one set
Speaker 1: up and then say, well that was fun, but now
Speaker 1: I'm gonna break it all down. I'm gonna retrieve the Arduino.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna completely rewrite it the programming too, that our dwino,
Speaker 1: and now I'm going to put it into a totally
Speaker 1: different implementation. And you can do that. Some micro controllers
Speaker 1: are more geared toward a very specific purpose and you
Speaker 1: can't You can't easily reprogram them to do something different.
Speaker 1: They're just meant to do whatever it was they were
Speaker 1: designed to do whatever system they were designed to work within. Now,
Speaker 1: this was back in two thousand and eight when he
Speaker 1: starts working on this, when he's in the Netherlands, and
Speaker 1: keep in mind, two thousand eight was a very different
Speaker 1: technological landscape from what we see today. In in two
Speaker 1: thousand eight, when Midchakovsky began to work out this idea,
Speaker 1: the iPhone wasn't yet a year old. It had debuted
Speaker 1: in two thousand seven, and the app store for the
Speaker 1: iPhone would not launch until June two thousand eight, and
Speaker 1: a commercial release for Google Android wouldn't appear until the
Speaker 1: fall of two thousand eight. There was a version of
Speaker 1: Android that had been out in Badeau since two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: but the general public really didn't have access to Google
Speaker 1: Android until the fall of two thousand eight. So Korski
Speaker 1: wasn't really looking at iOS or Android as the foundation
Speaker 1: for his project when he first got started. He was
Speaker 1: instead looking at BlackBerry from Research in Motion. He was
Speaker 1: looking at that because it was a smartphone that was
Speaker 1: really the most popular in the United States at that time.
Speaker 1: In North America at that time, it was most frequently
Speaker 1: associated with corporate executives. Everyone thought of BlackBerrys as being
Speaker 1: sort of the white collar smartphone, but this was an
Speaker 1: arrow in the smartphone and not really started to filter
Speaker 1: into the general population beyond early adopters with Apple's iPhone,
Speaker 1: and even then, like I said, there was no app store.
Speaker 1: So Midschakovski would move forward with developing a smart watch
Speaker 1: that could connect to a BlackBerry phone via Bluetooth, and
Speaker 1: he formed a company for this purpose. That company was
Speaker 1: called Alert to a L L E R T A, which,
Speaker 1: as I understand it now, is also the name for
Speaker 1: an allergy medication. But his focus was to build a
Speaker 1: working consumer smart watch product, and the product's name would
Speaker 1: ultimately be known as Impulse. I in Pulse and Mischakovsky
Speaker 1: would participate in a program called Velocity or Vella City
Speaker 1: if you wanted to say it the way that some
Speaker 1: people spell it, because it's V E L O big
Speaker 1: C I T y um. But I've also seen it
Speaker 1: spelled just like Velocity. Anyway, he was attending this. This
Speaker 1: is a program that actually is overseen by the University
Speaker 1: of Waterloo, and Velocity is a startup incubator, so that
Speaker 1: means it's a space where students can actually work on
Speaker 1: ideas for startup businesses. They can get a bit of
Speaker 1: a boost invisibility to potential investors. They can learn lessons
Speaker 1: about how to form good business plans, what sort of
Speaker 1: strategies you need to follow follow, what sort of things
Speaker 1: do you need to look out for as potential pitfalls,
Speaker 1: as well as perhaps get a chance to meet some people,
Speaker 1: influential people who might be able to pour some money
Speaker 1: into your idea if they think it's a really good one.
Speaker 1: Midchakovsky learned how to create a pitch for his ideas
Speaker 1: to potential investors at this program, and he would later
Speaker 1: come back and give guest lectures for students who were
Speaker 1: in the Velocity program at the University of Waterloo. Minschakovsky
Speaker 1: be and to lay foundations for some of the features
Speaker 1: he would later incorporate into Pebble. He built a smart
Speaker 1: watch that could display not just the time, but notifications
Speaker 1: from a BlackBerry phone, including BlackBerry messages UH and complete
Speaker 1: messages of that, not just a notification that you got one,
Speaker 1: but you could actually read the message on the phone
Speaker 1: on the watch rather And by two thousand nine, Alerta
Speaker 1: was taking pre orders for the Impulse smart watch. The
Speaker 1: Invulse was compatible with BlackBerry devices and was pitched as
Speaker 1: a companion device, not a smartphone on your wrist, nothing
Speaker 1: like that, non official research in motion gadget, uh And
Speaker 1: it boasted a one point three inch oh Lad color display,
Speaker 1: had Bluetooth connectivity at a micro USB port for charging,
Speaker 1: had a little vibrating motor for alerts and notifications, and
Speaker 1: the battery life, according to Alerta, was approximately four days
Speaker 1: of normal use. It was priced at about one fifty
Speaker 1: dollars at pre order, which is not bad for a
Speaker 1: smart watch. So this was kind of setting the ground
Speaker 1: for the next phase in Eric's quest to create wearable computers,
Speaker 1: which of course would be the Pebble. I'll talk about
Speaker 1: that more in just a second, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsor. By the beginning
Speaker 1: of two thousand eleven, Alerta had created app support for
Speaker 1: the Impulse which would allow developers to build their own
Speaker 1: apps for the hardware, and developers did that. You could
Speaker 1: do exciting stuff with your Impulse smart watch, like control
Speaker 1: of PowerPoint presentation, all from the convenience of your watch,
Speaker 1: but sales were still not going crazy. It was a
Speaker 1: neat proof of concept. It was a neat project for
Speaker 1: developers to work on, but they weren't really reaching very
Speaker 1: many actual customers. Later, in two thousand eleven, Alerta got
Speaker 1: to participate in a Y Combinator session. And why Combinator
Speaker 1: calls itself an accelerator, it's similar to Velocity in many ways.
Speaker 1: So it's a similar organization where startups are invited to participate.
Speaker 1: They can work with experts for three months to develop
Speaker 1: business plans, they can meet with potential investors, they can
Speaker 1: pitch their ideas, and so forth. In two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: Midyakovsky's Alerta was part of this group, and at one
Speaker 1: point investors Uri Milner and Ron Conway promised every startup
Speaker 1: participating in that round of the Y Combinator a one
Speaker 1: hundred fifty thousand dollar investment. Midyakovsky was able to secure
Speaker 1: another hundred fifty thousand on top of that, and while
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars is a princely sum, it's actually
Speaker 1: not all that much when you remember that Midyakovsky's business
Speaker 1: included producing hardware, not just software, not a service. It
Speaker 1: meant that you had to build something. According to Midyakovski,
Speaker 1: it was this hardware focus that actually discouraged a lot
Speaker 1: of investors from supporting him because hardware was seen as
Speaker 1: a pretty big risk on investment, and there's no surprise there.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind hardware is really tricky to pull off.
Speaker 1: You can prototype quickly with stuff like three D printers,
Speaker 1: right like, you can print off design after design after
Speaker 1: design and figure out which one you like. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to making actual production models the stuff that
Speaker 1: you're going to sell in stores or online, you need
Speaker 1: a facility capable of producing quality stuff in large quantities.
Speaker 1: And you also have to figure out where you're going
Speaker 1: to buy the various components that go into your product,
Speaker 1: like the CPUs and the Bluetooth adapters and screens and
Speaker 1: batteries and all this kind of stuff. So in many cases,
Speaker 1: the most cost effective approach is to look to China.
Speaker 1: China's manufacturing facilities are efficient, they're modernized. Wages in China
Speaker 1: are lower than many other nations, although there are several
Speaker 1: Asian countries near China to have even lower wages. And
Speaker 1: someday I'm going to have to do a full episode
Speaker 1: about China's manufacturing industry because so many of the products
Speaker 1: that we enjoy and depend upon are either made in China,
Speaker 1: or they have components that are made in China. And
Speaker 1: this is a pretty complicated issue, not just logistically but
Speaker 1: also ethically, but that's a discussion for another time. We're
Speaker 1: not going to get into it here. So Midchakovsky's team
Speaker 1: was actually working on a much smaller scale. So while
Speaker 1: they could have looked to China to produce stuff, the
Speaker 1: numbers that they were producing, the number of units they
Speaker 1: were producing were small enough where that really didn't need
Speaker 1: to be a huge concern. So instead they opted to
Speaker 1: use a local factory and a garage as the assembly
Speaker 1: points for the Impulse Watch. They would actually physically put
Speaker 1: stuff together in a garage themselves, and at the scale
Speaker 1: they were working at, this made the most sense. They
Speaker 1: didn't need to move up another level. So once you've
Speaker 1: determined where stuff is going to come from, you have
Speaker 1: to make agreements with all the different parties and set
Speaker 1: up as a supply chains that you know you you
Speaker 1: can get the different components on a regular basis when
Speaker 1: you need them. Components need to go from one end
Speaker 1: to ty to the next in order to put it
Speaker 1: together into a final product. All of that eventually has
Speaker 1: to be shipped to some sort of distribution center. Usually
Speaker 1: on a very small operation like the original Alert to Impulse,
Speaker 1: you could probably do this all out of a home,
Speaker 1: and in fact they did. But if you grow, then
Speaker 1: you need to kind of delegate that to like a
Speaker 1: distribution center, because it will be much more efficient. But
Speaker 1: lots of stuff can go wrong in this model. Right
Speaker 1: when you're working with hardware, there's so many different points
Speaker 1: of failure. If some company along the supply chain has
Speaker 1: a shortage that holds everything up. If the manufacturing facility
Speaker 1: breaks down, that holds everything up. If they're shipping delays
Speaker 1: that holds everything up. There's so many different stential fail
Speaker 1: points that a lot of investors shy away from putting
Speaker 1: money into hardware based businesses because the risk is seen
Speaker 1: as being too great, Like, yeah, you might make your
Speaker 1: money back, but there are a lot of different ways
Speaker 1: you could lose your money. And so that's what they
Speaker 1: were discovering with this y combinator. They were able to get,
Speaker 1: you know, three dollars in funding, and that's nothing to
Speaker 1: sneeze at, but it was a small amount when you
Speaker 1: think how much goes into just producing a product. So
Speaker 1: the Impulse did not exactly set the world by Storm,
Speaker 1: which didn't help things, right, Uh, it would add support
Speaker 1: for the Android operating system by the time it came out,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't just a BlackBerry device by the time
Speaker 1: it debuted, but it wasn't getting a lot of buzz
Speaker 1: or notice outside of like BlackBerry forums. You can do
Speaker 1: a search today on alerta Impulse, and a lot of
Speaker 1: those hits you're going to see are from forums like Crackberry,
Speaker 1: which are that's a BlackBerry like, not an advocacy group,
Speaker 1: but like a fan group or enthusiast group if you
Speaker 1: prefer its enthusiasts of Blackberries. So there are a lot
Speaker 1: of articles and forum posts over there, but in your
Speaker 1: general text space, there wasn't as much talk going on.
Speaker 1: The company only sold around one units, and that's no
Speaker 1: way to run a business. You're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to sustain a business that way. So Midchakovsky went
Speaker 1: back to the drawing board and he and his team
Speaker 1: decided that they should try again with a new approach
Speaker 1: on smart watches. They're gonna get rid of the color screen,
Speaker 1: they're gonna go monochromatic. They go within a battery friendly
Speaker 1: e paper technology, which would greatly extend the lifespan of
Speaker 1: the watch. Between charges, you could go a week without
Speaker 1: having to charge the thing. They wanted to ensure interoperability
Speaker 1: with iOS and Android, to make sure they built out
Speaker 1: an app that would work on both of those platforms,
Speaker 1: because they were both gaining huge amounts of market share
Speaker 1: in those early days. They wanted to make sure that
Speaker 1: the platform was developer friendly, that they gave tools for
Speaker 1: people to make apps for these watches and encouraged it,
Speaker 1: and that that would help support the sales. They wanted
Speaker 1: to make it water resistant, uh, and they didn't want
Speaker 1: to go to bonkers with features. They didn't want to
Speaker 1: throw in so many features that navigation would become difficult
Speaker 1: or it would end up obscuring some of the more
Speaker 1: important things that this watch could do. And the new
Speaker 1: product needed a new name. Midchakovski's team decided to call
Speaker 1: their new project Pebble, and eventually the company would be
Speaker 1: called that too. But how are they going to get
Speaker 1: the money needed to go through the whole process of design, prototyping, refining,
Speaker 1: and manufacturing such a smart watch. And the answer turned
Speaker 1: out to be a fairly young emerging platform for raising
Speaker 1: cash that would be Kickstarter. Now the original Pebble Kickstarter
Speaker 1: campaign because there were other ones that we'll talk about
Speaker 1: in the next episode. Launched in the spring of twelve,
Speaker 1: the kick started campaign showed off the new smart watch design,
Speaker 1: complete with different watch faces, and a discussion about developers
Speaker 1: and future features for the smart watch. Early backers could
Speaker 1: contribute ars, and in return they would get a black
Speaker 1: Pebble watch, which retailed for or was going to retail
Speaker 1: for one fifty dollars. Only two hundred backers would be
Speaker 1: allowed to get a watch at that price. Once those
Speaker 1: ran out, then you could pledge for an amount of
Speaker 1: a hundred fifteen dollars and get a black watch. You're
Speaker 1: still getting a significant discount. If you wanted one an
Speaker 1: arctic white or cherry red, then it would cost a
Speaker 1: hundred dollars. They also said that they would hold a
Speaker 1: vote and backers could vote on what other color would
Speaker 1: be offered on top of Arctic white or cherry red.
Speaker 1: The campaign's goal was set at one thousand dollars. They
Speaker 1: reached it in the first two hours of the campaign
Speaker 1: going live. By the end of the campaign, the fundraiser
Speaker 1: had hit more than ten million, two hundred sixty six
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. All told, backers ordered nearly sixty nine thousand watches.
Speaker 1: Midchakovsky actually chose to conclude the campaign more than a
Speaker 1: week early to make sure he and his team would
Speaker 1: be able to meet the commitment they had made with
Speaker 1: this campaign, and it looked like Midchakovsky had found the
Speaker 1: solution to his funding problem. But as it turns out,
Speaker 1: it would ultimately just be like a a peak, but
Speaker 1: not an indication of how the company was going to
Speaker 1: perform from that point forward. I'll explain more in just
Speaker 1: a second, but first let's take another quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsors. One of the things Pebble did well
Speaker 1: in that early phase was that it kept backers updated
Speaker 1: on how things were going through the Kickstarter platform. So
Speaker 1: on Kickstarter, if you've never backed to anything on Kickstarter,
Speaker 1: one thing that you can do is you can get
Speaker 1: updates through the actual Kickstarter service. They get posted to
Speaker 1: the website and they can be emailed out to backers.
Speaker 1: And Eric Midjakovski found it really important that his backers,
Speaker 1: who were after all, investors in his company, were informed
Speaker 1: of progress and also knew about any challenges that the
Speaker 1: team was running into. So originally the plan was to
Speaker 1: produce watches and send them out to backers beginning in
Speaker 1: the fall of two thousand twelve. September two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: delays would end up pushing that back to early two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen and early two thousand third team was when
Speaker 1: I got a chance to see the Pebble. I was
Speaker 1: actually at c E S and Eric and a couple
Speaker 1: of his team members were there at the show to
Speaker 1: demonstrate the watch. They had a conference room that they
Speaker 1: were able to use for an hour and they gave
Speaker 1: a presentation and allowed press to come up and take
Speaker 1: photos and to get a closer look at the devices.
Speaker 1: So I did. I got an up close look at it.
Speaker 1: I really liked what I saw, and that weekend I
Speaker 1: put in a pre order. As the watches had not
Speaker 1: yet started shipping. The kickstarting campaign and closed, but pre
Speaker 1: orders were still open and the watches had not yet
Speaker 1: shipped out to people. By the end of January, Pebble
Speaker 1: was sending out watches to backers. So January two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: people started getting their Kickstarter watches. And here's another spot
Speaker 1: where I think the team really got it right, and
Speaker 1: it seems like a no brainer, right that that you
Speaker 1: send out the thing that you told people you would
Speaker 1: give them when they pledged their money to you. But
Speaker 1: I've seen other companies mess this up. Pebble sent out
Speaker 1: watches to Kickstarter backers. First, you had the Kickstarter backers,
Speaker 1: you had the pre orders, and Pebble said, we are
Speaker 1: going to make sure we make good on those pledges first.
Speaker 1: Because you guys were there from the very beginning. You
Speaker 1: were the reason why we were able to move forward.
Speaker 1: But if you listen to my episode about Kickstarter failures,
Speaker 1: you might remember I talked about the Coolest Cooler, which
Speaker 1: was the first kickstarted campaign to actually pass Pebble in
Speaker 1: the amount of funds raised, because Pebble had set a
Speaker 1: record when it hit that ten million plus mark in
Speaker 1: dollars raised on a campaign, and it wasn't until the
Speaker 1: Coolest Cooler came around more than two years later for
Speaker 1: someone to break that record. But the creator of Coolest
Speaker 1: Cooler misjudged how expensive it was going to be to
Speaker 1: produce the actual cooler, and to make matters worse, they
Speaker 1: decided to sell the coolers on Amazon before they had
Speaker 1: made good on all the backer pledgers. So in pledges
Speaker 1: rather so in other words, you might have pledged a
Speaker 1: certain amount to support coolest cooler. You know, you put
Speaker 1: forward your a couple hundred bucks and you're waiting anxiously
Speaker 1: to get this phenomenal cooler with like a speaker built
Speaker 1: into it and stuff. And meanwhile you then here that
Speaker 1: they've put the cooler up for sale on Amazon, but
Speaker 1: you have yet to receive your your unit, and you
Speaker 1: might think, well, what's the deal here? I paid the money,
Speaker 1: I supported the company, Why aren't they sending one to
Speaker 1: me before they put it in a store. And it
Speaker 1: can really turn supporters against you. For good reason, Pebble
Speaker 1: did not make that mistake. I suspect Midchakovski even pulled
Speaker 1: that plug a little early on the campaign, specifically so
Speaker 1: that he and his company would be able to build
Speaker 1: out the Kickstarter editions of the Pebble and send them
Speaker 1: out without incurring a huge loss that would necessitate finding
Speaker 1: some other revenue or investment stream to keep the is going.
Speaker 1: It doesn't do you any good to have an incredibly
Speaker 1: successful Kickstarter campaign if it turns out that the production
Speaker 1: costs are going to be such that you'll never recapture them. Right, So,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're offering a huge discount on what
Speaker 1: is going to be the retail price for your proposed
Speaker 1: hardware product, and enough people support it, well, that eats
Speaker 1: into your margins, right, you know, you usually want to
Speaker 1: sell something for more than what it cost you to
Speaker 1: make it. If you're offering this huge discount in order
Speaker 1: for you to get some startup capital so that you
Speaker 1: can actually get things moving, but that discount is too steep,
Speaker 1: then you're really shooting yourself in the foot. You're you're
Speaker 1: starting off like that's a recipe for a creating debt,
Speaker 1: and I think the Jakovski was being cognizant of that
Speaker 1: and being careful, and that's one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: he ended the Kickstarter campaign before it would have timed out,
Speaker 1: because it was getting to the point where they were
Speaker 1: worrying about being able to meet that demand, and so
Speaker 1: I think it was a responsible move. After the Kickstarter watches,
Speaker 1: Pebble started to send out the preorder watches and that's
Speaker 1: when I got mine, and again mine even though it
Speaker 1: was not I didn't back the Kickstarter project, I got
Speaker 1: a Kickstarter edition. If you look at the back of
Speaker 1: my cherry red Pebble watch, it says Kickstarter addition on it,
Speaker 1: and I kind of like that because I'm a geek,
Speaker 1: although it makes me feel a little like a poser
Speaker 1: because I did not back it on Kickstarter. I just
Speaker 1: got the watch. So let's talk about the technology that's
Speaker 1: actually inside this original Pebble watch. The CPU in the
Speaker 1: original Pebble was an arm Cortex M three. This is
Speaker 1: a type of thirty two bit processor, and it's most
Speaker 1: commonly found in things like automotive systems or industrial control systems,
Speaker 1: so it's not the sort of thing you would typically
Speaker 1: find in a watch. On the circuit board of the watch,
Speaker 1: there was also an accelerometer chick up that would detect
Speaker 1: changes in speed or direction. This could tell the watch
Speaker 1: that you were looking at it. For example, so when
Speaker 1: you lift your your wrist up so that you could
Speaker 1: take a look at the watch face, it could detect
Speaker 1: the change in acceleration or that there is an acceleration happening.
Speaker 1: I keep saying change in acceleration. It could detect that
Speaker 1: there is an acceleration and then activate the screen so
Speaker 1: that you can see what time it is. Uh. The
Speaker 1: watch also had a Bluetooth adapter. I'm sure you are
Speaker 1: all familiar with Bluetooth, so you know, it's just a
Speaker 1: wireless communications protocol that allows for low energy data transfers,
Speaker 1: typically small data packets. And the watch really just had
Speaker 1: to display short notifications or alert you to income and calls,
Speaker 1: so that was the perfect protocol for it. The screen
Speaker 1: also was a sharp l C D. It was monochromatic
Speaker 1: and used E paper display technology, which requires less power
Speaker 1: than typical backlit screens. Any paper is really cool stuff.
Speaker 1: Inside a monochromatic E paper display, typically it works like this.
Speaker 1: You have capsules, and those capsules there, you know, they
Speaker 1: look like little plastic balls, just they're very very very tiny,
Speaker 1: and they typically are in one of two colors. Again
Speaker 1: we're talking monochromatic here, so black or white. All the
Speaker 1: black capsules when they are pulled up onto the back
Speaker 1: side of the screen would show up as text or
Speaker 1: illustrations or whatever it may be. Uh, And they all
Speaker 1: carry the same electrical charge all the black capsules. The
Speaker 1: white capsules carry the opposite electrical charge. Then when you
Speaker 1: pass a you apply a charge across a transparent electrode
Speaker 1: which is on the underside of the screen of the display.
Speaker 1: So if you were to remove the display from the
Speaker 1: watch and you were to look at the underside, that's
Speaker 1: where you would see this transparent electrode. It would create
Speaker 1: this electric charge that was opposite that of the UH
Speaker 1: apsules it wants to attract. So let's say that the
Speaker 1: black capsules have a positive electrical charge on it, you
Speaker 1: would put a negative electrical charge across this electrode. That
Speaker 1: would pull those positively charged black capsules up to the
Speaker 1: surface and it would that's what allowed the watch to
Speaker 1: actually display stuff like fonts, you know, letters, numbers, pictures,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. And UH, all you have to
Speaker 1: do is change that charge to change the shape of
Speaker 1: what you're looking at on the display. The capsules stick
Speaker 1: to the opposite charged areas and the patterns that were
Speaker 1: designated by the CPU, and they stay that way until
Speaker 1: a new signal is sent. So the watch really only
Speaker 1: needs to expend energy whenever the messaging on the display
Speaker 1: has to change. So if you look at your watch
Speaker 1: and it's three, and then you look at your watch
Speaker 1: twenty seconds later, it's still well, the watch hasn't had
Speaker 1: to send any extra energy to display that three twenty five.
Speaker 1: It just had to form the number of three twenty five.
Speaker 1: The first time you looked at it, and until it's
Speaker 1: three twenty six, it doesn't have to spend any energy
Speaker 1: at all, at least not for the display. The displays
Speaker 1: are reflective and they rely upon outside lighting for view
Speaker 1: and they work great in bright lights like outdoors, which
Speaker 1: is sometimes a thing that makes it difficult to see
Speaker 1: traditional backlit displays. Right. So if you are looking at
Speaker 1: something like a typical L C D or L E
Speaker 1: D screen, usually you have light coming from behind the
Speaker 1: screen that highlights what you're looking at well in a
Speaker 1: brightly lit area, that can be canceled out and you
Speaker 1: can't really see very well. I'm sure you've had this experience.
Speaker 1: But the e paper displays are more reflective, so you're
Speaker 1: actually dependent upon that external light to be able to
Speaker 1: see the stuff. The pebble had physical buttons for navigation
Speaker 1: rather than a touch screen interface, and it ditched the
Speaker 1: USB port of the impulse for a magnetic charging strip
Speaker 1: on the side of the watch, so the watches charging
Speaker 1: cable had a magnetic section that was of course an
Speaker 1: opposite charge, so that they would or they would attract
Speaker 1: each other, so you have like a north pole in
Speaker 1: the south pole attracting each other. And that would allow
Speaker 1: the charging cable to snap into place properly against the
Speaker 1: pebble and allow it to charge. The nice thing about
Speaker 1: this is because there was no port for you to
Speaker 1: plug a cord into, the team was able to make
Speaker 1: the case water resistant. It wasn't totally water proof, but
Speaker 1: it was water resistant to a depth of thirty seven
Speaker 1: meters or a hundred twenty feet, so pretty significant. Inside
Speaker 1: the watch was also a motor with an offset weight.
Speaker 1: So when the motor would spin, uh, whenever you get
Speaker 1: incoming notification, it would create a vibration in the watching
Speaker 1: you would feel and let you know, hey, I just
Speaker 1: got a notification, just like the vibrating motor in a
Speaker 1: cell phone or a video game controller. Now, when you
Speaker 1: paired this watch, you did so using the Pebble app.
Speaker 1: There's an app that would run on top of Android
Speaker 1: or iOS that kind of thing, and that would allow
Speaker 1: users to customize their watch faces. They could choose from
Speaker 1: several different watch faces right out of the gate. But
Speaker 1: it also allowed access to a growing developer community, and
Speaker 1: developers were creating their own watch faces. Sometimes they're developing
Speaker 1: other types of apps that could take advantage of the
Speaker 1: fact that your Watch would become essentially a little Bluetooth
Speaker 1: remote control for all sorts of different stuff. So this
Speaker 1: was again Pebble deciding to create a platform that would
Speaker 1: support a community not just of customers, but of developers,
Speaker 1: and really anyone could become a developer if they really
Speaker 1: wanted to. So this was the beginning for Pebble, and
Speaker 1: the reaction to the crowdfunding campaign seemed to validate Michaikovsky's
Speaker 1: belief that wearable computing was ready for prime time. But
Speaker 1: the following years would put that to the test. So
Speaker 1: in our next episode, I'll talk about how Pebble followed
Speaker 1: up their first watch, the obstacles the company faced, and
Speaker 1: it's ultimate and sad fate. Spoiler alert, but that wraps
Speaker 1: up this episode. If you have suggestions for future topics
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