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, am the executive producer at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works, and I love all things tech. And
Speaker 1: in our last episode, which was about Pebble, if you
Speaker 1: have not heard that episode, I recommend you listen to
Speaker 1: it because this is a continuation. But in that episode,
Speaker 1: I I ended by talking about how Eric Mitchakovsky, the
Speaker 1: the founder of Pebble, had launched a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was at the time the most successful
Speaker 1: Kickstarter campaign, and by the end of two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: beginning in two thousand thirteen, he was getting ready. In
Speaker 1: fact that the opening month of two thousand thirty started
Speaker 1: shipping out units of the Pebble smart watch two Kickstarter backers,
Speaker 1: and then after he got through those, he started sending
Speaker 1: them to preorder customers. We're going to pick up from
Speaker 1: there and look at what the company did over the
Speaker 1: following three years when Pebble would cease to exist as
Speaker 1: a company, and then I'll do a little follow up
Speaker 1: at the end with some more recent news, because even
Speaker 1: after the company ended, it kind of kept going a
Speaker 1: little bit until recently. More reviews for the Pebble smart
Speaker 1: Watch once it came out, we're generally positive. They weren't gushing,
Speaker 1: they weren't overwhelming, but they generally said nice things about
Speaker 1: the product. They pointed out that the watch was limited
Speaker 1: in what it could do. It was essentially a timetelling
Speaker 1: piece that would give you a heads up on incoming
Speaker 1: notifications on your phone, and there was the promise of
Speaker 1: some other apps that would be UH compatible in the future,
Speaker 1: but there wasn't a whole lot to do with it
Speaker 1: raw the gate. You could you could do stuff like
Speaker 1: read text messages that came in on your phone. You
Speaker 1: could read things like Twitter responses, email. Essentially, stuff that
Speaker 1: was coming into your phone be relayed to your your
Speaker 1: Pebble smart watch, and you would use the physical buttons
Speaker 1: on the side of the watch to navigate those messages.
Speaker 1: You could scroll up or down. You could use your
Speaker 1: watch to decline an incoming phone call. You get a
Speaker 1: phone call, you look at your your wrist. You see, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a call coming in from so and so. I
Speaker 1: don't have time to talk to that person. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna go ahead and send that to voicemail. You could
Speaker 1: do that from your watch as well, and had a
Speaker 1: vibrating motor inside of it that would help alert you
Speaker 1: to those incoming calls or act as an alarm to
Speaker 1: remind you about upcoming appointments. So it was useful, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't super flashy, right. It was just a monochromatic
Speaker 1: screen and had some very basic functions. It did what
Speaker 1: it did well, but it wasn't incredibly versatile, so I
Speaker 1: wasn't trying to be a smartphone for your wrist, which
Speaker 1: some other smart watches had kind of tried to go
Speaker 1: down that route, and that ended up complicating things because
Speaker 1: typically it meant that you had so many features in
Speaker 1: your smart watch that it either didn't do them very
Speaker 1: well or it really had a terrible battery life because
Speaker 1: you were trying to pack so many different components into
Speaker 1: a very small form factor, so it didn't leave very
Speaker 1: much room for a battery. So Pebble took a different approach,
Speaker 1: and it helped also keep the price down. So uh,
Speaker 1: some people like me liked the Pebble because we knew
Speaker 1: what we were going to get. We understood, all right,
Speaker 1: this is a limited set of features. It's not the
Speaker 1: end all be all of technology, but it is kind
Speaker 1: of neat and you know what it can do, and
Speaker 1: it's at the price point, and so, uh, people like me,
Speaker 1: we were on board. Now, other people felt it just
Speaker 1: didn't have enough features to be worth the purchase, which
Speaker 1: is a totally valid point of view. I might add,
Speaker 1: if you look at this and you say, uh, it's
Speaker 1: just telling me stuff that I can look at just
Speaker 1: by glancing at my phone, I'm not going to spend
Speaker 1: a d fifty dollars on that, that's a legitimate argument. Well,
Speaker 1: the kick started campaign helped Pebble in more ways than one.
Speaker 1: It gave them the starting capital they needed to get
Speaker 1: manufacturing rolling right to start this process, to start generating
Speaker 1: these these watches, to build out these watches and then
Speaker 1: ship them and hopefully start laying the groundwork for customers.
Speaker 1: But the truth of the matter was that the company
Speaker 1: was going to need more money to make good on
Speaker 1: the pre orders and Kickstarter orders because they were offering
Speaker 1: those Kickstarter ones at any rate at a discount. So
Speaker 1: you started discounting the product before you've actually started to
Speaker 1: build it. Sometimes the costs can end up overshadowing the
Speaker 1: money you're bringing in, so Midchaikovsky sought investment, and this
Speaker 1: time he founded. If you listen to my last episode,
Speaker 1: you know he had a real hard time finding investors
Speaker 1: because they were shy about supporting what appeared to be
Speaker 1: an upstart hardware company. Hardware is a very risky business.
Speaker 1: The historic success of the crowdfunding campaign, however, change the minds.
Speaker 1: You saw investors say, huh, there. People seemed to put
Speaker 1: a lot of stock in this not not in stock
Speaker 1: exchange kind of way, but in people seem to put
Speaker 1: a lot of value in this company, so maybe we
Speaker 1: should invest in it. So Pebble received about fifteen million
Speaker 1: dollars in investment, and that helped the fledgling company fill
Speaker 1: all of its Kickstarter orders and many of its pre orders.
Speaker 1: By May and in all, one thousand people had signed
Speaker 1: up to pre order a Kickstarter watch or a Pebble
Speaker 1: watch rather. By July seven of two thousand, thirteen, Pebble
Speaker 1: smart watches could be found on the shelves of Best
Speaker 1: Buy stores. This originally was an exclusive arrangement for best Buy,
Speaker 1: so it was the only retail store that was carrying
Speaker 1: Pebble watches at the beginning. Uh and at first, at
Speaker 1: least they only had the jet black version of the
Speaker 1: smart watch available, But this helps cement Pebble as a
Speaker 1: quote unquote real product and not just some internet dream.
Speaker 1: You know. It wasn't just mail order. You could find
Speaker 1: these in honest to goodness, real stores, and for some
Speaker 1: people that kind of sign is the only way they'll
Speaker 1: accept it as being a legitimate business. Well, Pebble spent
Speaker 1: its first year making and shipping those basic watches to buyers,
Speaker 1: and by the end of the company had shipped three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand watches to customers. Back in April, Pebble also
Speaker 1: introduced a sort of proto software Developer Kit or s
Speaker 1: d K, and it was limited in scope that original one.
Speaker 1: It allowed developers to create new watch faces for the
Speaker 1: Pebble and some basic applications, but the following month they
Speaker 1: debuted the Pebble Kit s d K, and that would
Speaker 1: allow developers to create apps that used two way communication
Speaker 1: between the watch is and their paired devices, and it
Speaker 1: opened up a lot of other opportunities for UH integration
Speaker 1: with various apps. In early fourteen, Pebble announced a new
Speaker 1: take on this basic watch and it was called the
Speaker 1: Pebble Steel s T E E l so as in
Speaker 1: the metal, not as in thievery. The original Pebble watches
Speaker 1: had plastic bodies and they were more sporty. According to Midchakovsky,
Speaker 1: the Pebble Steel marked a move to try and tap
Speaker 1: into the more traditional watch market, something that you might
Speaker 1: wear if you were dressing up, maybe your business person,
Speaker 1: and you want to have a watch that kind of
Speaker 1: reflects that, and you don't want some something that's bright
Speaker 1: and colorful and plastic on your wrist. So these watches
Speaker 1: were about a hundred dollars more expensive than the original
Speaker 1: Pebbles when they were first announced. They looked more professional.
Speaker 1: They had different options for wrist bands or for watch bands.
Speaker 1: You could get a leather watch band, or you could
Speaker 1: get um, you know, sort of that chain based kind
Speaker 1: of watch band. And these new watch designs also meant
Speaker 1: that the Pebble had to change up the charging cable
Speaker 1: for the steel. The the form factor for the Pebble
Speaker 1: Steel was different from the original Pebble and so the
Speaker 1: charging cable that they had made for the original Pebble
Speaker 1: would not fit on the steel. So classic cables were
Speaker 1: not compatible with the new watch. That got some criticism
Speaker 1: from some folks. They said, well, now you're confusing things
Speaker 1: because if you're going to have a line of Pebble
Speaker 1: watches and some people collect watches, well, now you're going
Speaker 1: to have to have different cables for different models. That's
Speaker 1: very confusing, but it's the way they went. Under the hood,
Speaker 1: the Pebble Steel mostly resembled its Sport Year predecessor. One
Speaker 1: difference was that the new watch had twice the onboard memory.
Speaker 1: They went from four megabytes up to eight megabytes for memory,
Speaker 1: but otherwise things were pretty much the same now. The
Speaker 1: reason for that is the company did want to try
Speaker 1: and avoid fragmentation as much as they could, especially on
Speaker 1: the app side. So if they made too many changes
Speaker 1: to the design of the Pebble, it would make things
Speaker 1: messier for developers and for customers. So it could be
Speaker 1: hard to explain to a customer base that because you
Speaker 1: own an older watch, you aren't able to use certain
Speaker 1: apps because those apps depend upon features that are absent
Speaker 1: in earlier models. I can get very frustrating, and so
Speaker 1: Pebble made a very careful move to avoid shaking things
Speaker 1: up too much. Along with the Pebble Steel, the company
Speaker 1: launched version two point oh of its software and an
Speaker 1: app store as well, and included apps from big names
Speaker 1: like Pandora, four Square, and ESPN. There were also some
Speaker 1: games that were designed to play on the watch, and
Speaker 1: all apps in the app store were free. It was
Speaker 1: actually a requirement Pebble set. He said, well, he Eric
Speaker 1: Machakovsky said that bowl apps in the app store had
Speaker 1: to be free, uh in order to be featured on
Speaker 1: the app store. However, developers were allowed to create their
Speaker 1: own companion apps for the Pebble and they could have
Speaker 1: those listed in the app store over an Apple or
Speaker 1: Google Play, and they could charge money for those. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't be featured in the Pebble app but you could
Speaker 1: have these companion apps and you can charge whatever you liked. Um.
Speaker 1: And so this looked like it was just the very
Speaker 1: beginning for Pebble. The watches would allow for eight slots
Speaker 1: for apps for third party apps, and if you wanted
Speaker 1: more than eight apps, well you would choose whichever ones
Speaker 1: you load onto the watch, and you would have to
Speaker 1: unload apps if you had more than eight, you'd have
Speaker 1: to decide, all right, well, these eight I want, but
Speaker 1: these other two that I had on there, I'm going
Speaker 1: to take off those unloaded apps would go into what
Speaker 1: they called a locker on the companion Pebble app for
Speaker 1: your smartphone, the thing that you would pair the watch too,
Speaker 1: and that way you could swap those older apps back
Speaker 1: in easily. You could say, all right, well, I'm going
Speaker 1: to reinstall this app I put into the locker because
Speaker 1: I wanted again still that that was kind of a
Speaker 1: limitation and it rubbed some folks the wrong way, because
Speaker 1: it's kind of a hassle to have to manage apps
Speaker 1: like that, you know, to to fill up once you
Speaker 1: hit eight and then you have to swap stuff out
Speaker 1: if you happen to like having a lot of apps
Speaker 1: at your disposal, it was it was a little frustrating.
Speaker 1: Kneeli Patel reviewed the Steel for The Verge, and he
Speaker 1: lamented that the apps weren't quite advanced enough for his tastes.
Speaker 1: He pointed out that the experiences were not really location based,
Speaker 1: which meant if you wanted to use your watch, and
Speaker 1: let's say you want you had the four Square app
Speaker 1: activated on your watch and you want to check into
Speaker 1: the location that you were going into, you maybe you're
Speaker 1: at a restaurant, because back in those days, four Square
Speaker 1: did that that was back when four Square was a
Speaker 1: check in service. They have since change what they do,
Speaker 1: but that's an episode for a different time. Anyway, if
Speaker 1: you were using your watch to do this your Pebble,
Speaker 1: and then that you were pressing the physical buttons on
Speaker 1: the watch a lot in order for you to navigate
Speaker 1: through the app and to activate the right place for
Speaker 1: you to check in, and that this was not very
Speaker 1: user friendly. Why would you do that when you could
Speaker 1: just take your phone out and do the same thing
Speaker 1: much more quickly. Patel said, what really should happen is
Speaker 1: there should be some more predictive elements to the Pebble.
Speaker 1: It should be able to pull information from your paired
Speaker 1: phone and say, all right, well, clearly this person that
Speaker 1: my wearer just walked into this restaurant. So when my
Speaker 1: wearer checks the phone, I'm going to suggest the four
Speaker 1: Square app and I'm already going to have the place
Speaker 1: pulled up for them to check in if they want to.
Speaker 1: But that was not something that was happening in those
Speaker 1: early apps. Some of the companion apps got pretty neat.
Speaker 1: For example, developers created a Companion nap that would let
Speaker 1: you use the Pebble with certain WiFi enabled cameras, so
Speaker 1: you can actually use it like a remote control for
Speaker 1: those cameras. I think that's kind of cool. The Pebble Steel,
Speaker 1: like its predecessor, landed a distribution deal at best Buy.
Speaker 1: Customers would be able to buy a steal for two
Speaker 1: nine dollars, but they were only able to get it
Speaker 1: with the leather straps. So this is kind of similar
Speaker 1: to how when the original Pebble came out, the only
Speaker 1: color you could get was jet black. It's it's similar
Speaker 1: to that. Well, I've got a lot more to say
Speaker 1: about Pebble's decline, but first let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. In the summer of fourteen, Google
Speaker 1: was getting ready to unveil Android Wear, which is a
Speaker 1: version of the Android operating system. It's a platform for
Speaker 1: wearable computing. It makes sense just from the name. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Pebble continued to foster it's developer community and to make
Speaker 1: deals with other companies, such as a wearable company called
Speaker 1: Misfit that made activity trackers. So Misfit made an app
Speaker 1: for Pebble that would take data from the watch's accelerometer
Speaker 1: and essentially turned the watch into a pedometer and a
Speaker 1: step tracker. In other words, the first Android ware watch
Speaker 1: to hit the market was the LGG Watch. This watch
Speaker 1: was the first to use Android ware as its operating system,
Speaker 1: and other companies also announced their own Android based smart
Speaker 1: watches in the summer of fourteen, But Google's approach was
Speaker 1: different from what Apple would do. Google's approach was to
Speaker 1: create a platform, you know, Android war and to let
Speaker 1: other companies produce the actual hardware. And that meant that
Speaker 1: there were a lot of competing watches that were on
Speaker 1: the way without really a clear front runner in those
Speaker 1: early days. So there wasn't one single Android based watch
Speaker 1: you would point to and say, this is the Pebble killer.
Speaker 1: But it had to be worrisome because there were a
Speaker 1: bunch of different ones that were coming out, and there
Speaker 1: was a lot of interest in that original LGG watch,
Speaker 1: and that was a pretty limited implementation of Android ware.
Speaker 1: When it came out. In September, Pebble reduced the price
Speaker 1: of its two watch lines, The Classic Pebble, the sporty
Speaker 1: version would drop down to and the Pebble Steel was
Speaker 1: reduced to one. Pebble also made new agreements with companies
Speaker 1: like Jawbone and swim dot Com, which helped expand the
Speaker 1: Pebble's utility as a fitness and sleep tracker. Again mostly
Speaker 1: just detecting movements through the accelerometer, so pretty simplistic variation
Speaker 1: of fitness tracker. They a lot of the more advanced
Speaker 1: fitness trackers take into account more information than just an accelerometer.
Speaker 1: The company had also moved beyond its exclusive deal with
Speaker 1: best Buy. It was already available in Target and also
Speaker 1: on Amazon dot Com, but in the fall of it
Speaker 1: also started to show up in stores like Fries and
Speaker 1: Sam's Club, and it also became available in the UK
Speaker 1: and across Scandinavia. And perhaps it was a combination of
Speaker 1: all of these different efforts that pushed Pebble sales to
Speaker 1: hit one million units by the end of so For
Speaker 1: a new company, brand new hardware company with an unproven
Speaker 1: form factor smart watches had not really taken off before this,
Speaker 1: this seemed like a pretty good pace to hit a
Speaker 1: million sales in its second year. Not bad. However, something
Speaker 1: else happened in the fall of two thousand fourteen that
Speaker 1: might have been of some concern. Apple, the company that
Speaker 1: had dominated by creating the iPod and really defining the
Speaker 1: MP three era. I mean, we call them podcasts because
Speaker 1: Apple really did have a stranglehold on that market. Apple
Speaker 1: also was able to essentially define the consumer smartphone market,
Speaker 1: at least in the United States, as well as create
Speaker 1: the first successful consumer tablet with the iPad. They decided
Speaker 1: to throw their hat in the ring and they finally
Speaker 1: confirmed suspicions and rumors that had been going on all year,
Speaker 1: and in September they announced that the company had designed
Speaker 1: and branded its own smart watch and it was on
Speaker 1: the way and it would come out the following year.
Speaker 1: In now mid Yakovski greeted this announcement with a pretty
Speaker 1: calm and even welcome tone. He postulated that Apple's market
Speaker 1: was going to be for a different type of customer
Speaker 1: than pebbles target market, and that sounds pretty reasonable because
Speaker 1: it was clear, even early on, when we knew very
Speaker 1: little about the Apple Watch, that that smart watch was
Speaker 1: going to be a luxury item. It was not going
Speaker 1: to be your basic, you know, uh, ground level smart
Speaker 1: aren't watch. This was something that was going to be
Speaker 1: a bit of a luxury purchase. So the Pebble was
Speaker 1: marketed as a useful piece of technology that was at
Speaker 1: a reasonable price point, and the Apple Watch was clearly
Speaker 1: going to be able to do a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff that Pebble could not do. But Mitschakovsky maintained that
Speaker 1: as long as what Pebble did, it did well, and
Speaker 1: as long as it maintained expectations, there would be plenty
Speaker 1: of room for both the Pebble and the Apple Watch.
Speaker 1: And besides, the Apple Watch was only going to be
Speaker 1: in the domain of Apple. You know, there was no
Speaker 1: one out there who thought Apple was going to come
Speaker 1: out with a smart watch that would also be compatible
Speaker 1: with Android smartphones. Everyone knew from the get go because Apple.
Speaker 1: Apple's approach always has been try and get everybody into
Speaker 1: the Apple ecosystem and keep them there. So no one
Speaker 1: was operating under the assumption that this was going to
Speaker 1: work with Android operating system phones. So that meant the
Speaker 1: Pebble was definitely going to still have an audience as
Speaker 1: be all the people who don't have an iPhone. Still,
Speaker 1: with both Google and Apple unveiling new technologies for wearables,
Speaker 1: some people were starting to get a little concerned about Pebble.
Speaker 1: Would the pioneering company be able to stand up for
Speaker 1: itself with these looming giants gaining momentum on it The
Speaker 1: Apple question would go unanswered for the time being. While
Speaker 1: the company would announce the watch in September two fourteen,
Speaker 1: pre orders of the device wouldn't even start until April,
Speaker 1: so that question was kind of tabled for several months.
Speaker 1: As for Android ware watches, that number is actually kind
Speaker 1: of hard to track. It's kind of hard to say
Speaker 1: how many Android wear watches were sold in There were
Speaker 1: multiple companies that were making Android based watches by the
Speaker 1: end of fourteen, and not all of them shared sales figures.
Speaker 1: Some of them would only talk about how many units
Speaker 1: were shipped, not sold, So that's not necessarily the same thing.
Speaker 1: So if you're shipping watches to retail locations, those don't
Speaker 1: count as sales. That they've just been moved to a
Speaker 1: retail location and they could be just gathering dust. But
Speaker 1: according to the research firm kennelsts c A in A
Speaker 1: l y S companies shipped seven twenty thousand Android ware
Speaker 1: watches in Again, those are not sales, it's shipp numbers,
Speaker 1: not sale numbers. But it did take Pebble two years
Speaker 1: to reach one million units sold, and Android ware had
Speaker 1: only been around since the summer of that year, so
Speaker 1: I've only been on the market for six months, so
Speaker 1: clearly there was a lot of movement in the smart
Speaker 1: watch space even in before the Apple Watch came out,
Speaker 1: and Pebble, while it led the way, was not necessarily
Speaker 1: going to be the mark get leader for very long.
Speaker 1: By early Pebble said there were more than six thousand
Speaker 1: various apps available for their smart watches, and they're also
Speaker 1: watch faces among that number, and that more than twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand developers were part of the Pebble developer community,
Speaker 1: which was a pretty nice thing to be able to
Speaker 1: point to and say, we have a very healthy community
Speaker 1: of developers that are creating innovative apps for our smart watch.
Speaker 1: You can do all sorts of stuff besides just see
Speaker 1: what time it is and see who's calling you. In February,
Speaker 1: Pebble announced that they were coming out with the next
Speaker 1: generation of their watch. This one they called the Pebble Time.
Speaker 1: What a great name for a watch, calling it the
Speaker 1: time Do you have the time rights itself? It had
Speaker 1: a sixty four color e paper display, so it moved
Speaker 1: beyond the monochromatic though, I should say this e paper
Speaker 1: display it looked kind of like a comic book, like
Speaker 1: like the way the inside pages of a comic look. Look,
Speaker 1: you know, has that that almost slightly faded look to it.
Speaker 1: That's kind of how the e paper looked. And that
Speaker 1: was because of the technology. You only had sixty or
Speaker 1: four colors to work with. You didn't have so many
Speaker 1: different variations that you could have lots of different vibrancy there,
Speaker 1: but it was still a color display. It also had
Speaker 1: a microphone that would let users make voice notes and
Speaker 1: voice replies to incoming messages. The screen had a protective
Speaker 1: layer made of gorilla glass, which was an upgrade from
Speaker 1: the Pebble and Pebble steel. The bezel on the watch
Speaker 1: was of stainless steel, and the watch was available in
Speaker 1: three colors. Like the original Pebble. You could get it
Speaker 1: in white, black, or red, although they were uh not
Speaker 1: exactly the same versions of white, black and red as
Speaker 1: the original Pebble, but still kind of in line with
Speaker 1: the company's history. And here's the Kicker, or rather I
Speaker 1: guess I should say here's the Kickstarter because Pebble launched
Speaker 1: the Pebble Time on Kickstarter, as they had with the
Speaker 1: original Pebble two years earlier, and the Pebble Time also
Speaker 1: performed really well on that platform, early bird backers could
Speaker 1: pledge a hundred fifty nine dollars for a Pebble Time.
Speaker 1: Once those pledges were used up, backers could then reserve
Speaker 1: one for one seventy nine, so early bird kickstarter. The
Speaker 1: way it typically works is that you limit how many
Speaker 1: people can reserve at that price point. Whatever it may be,
Speaker 1: whether it's a watch like in this case, or it's
Speaker 1: other special swag or giveaways, or whatever it might be
Speaker 1: that's related to your campaign. You can say, all right, well,
Speaker 1: the first two hundred to pledge at this amount can
Speaker 1: get this reward, but after that you have to pledge
Speaker 1: higher in order to get that same stuff. That's what
Speaker 1: Pebble did. And the retail price for the watch was
Speaker 1: on so if you were an early bird you got
Speaker 1: forty dollars off. If you weren't an early bird, you
Speaker 1: still got twenty dollars off their retail price. So how
Speaker 1: did that kick start a campaign do? Well? The answer
Speaker 1: is really really well. It took half an hour for
Speaker 1: the Pebble Time campaign to hit its goal of one
Speaker 1: million dollars. Actually, I'm sorry, that's twice its goal. Its
Speaker 1: original goal was five thousand dollars. So in half an hour,
Speaker 1: they had doubled what their goal was. Already the campaign
Speaker 1: had already raised twelve million dollars when Pebble actually added
Speaker 1: another option, and upgrade option, just as the Pebble got
Speaker 1: the professional upgrade version with the Pebble Steel, so two
Speaker 1: to the Pebble Time So you could get the basic
Speaker 1: Pebble Time model, or you could opt for the more
Speaker 1: expensive Pebble Time Steel. And just like Pebble versus Pebble Steel,
Speaker 1: same sort of thing. It was kind of a move
Speaker 1: to make it look a little more professional grade, like
Speaker 1: something you would wear two a business outing for business.
Speaker 1: Existing Kickstarter backers could upgrade their pledge while maintaining their
Speaker 1: place in the shipping queue once the watches were ready.
Speaker 1: So if you decided, oh, now that you've announced this,
Speaker 1: this newer version, this steel version, I would much prefer that.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to swap my pledge from what it
Speaker 1: was to this new one, but I maintain my place
Speaker 1: in line. So as soon as like, if I was
Speaker 1: number thirty seven in line for a Pebble Time and
Speaker 1: I switched over to Pebble Time Steel, I will be
Speaker 1: at a comparable waiting point for that nearly seventy eight thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred people backed this project, and the campaign raised
Speaker 1: twenty million, three hundred thirty eight thousand, nine hundred eighty
Speaker 1: six dollars. That makes the Pebble Time the all time
Speaker 1: champion and kickstarted campaign fundraising. As of the recording of
Speaker 1: this podcast, the Coolest Cooler had actually knocked the original
Speaker 1: Pebble off the top of the list, but the Pebble
Speaker 1: Time reclaimed that spot and it holds it to this day.
Speaker 1: But why would you use a kickstarter for a product
Speaker 1: when you've already got a successful company? That would become
Speaker 1: clear later on I'll talk about in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: By the time the Pebble Time was announced by this
Speaker 1: doesn't get old, does it, Pebble had grown into a
Speaker 1: company with one thirty employees. And then, according to tech Crunch,
Speaker 1: it was sometime around this this area in twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: that a watch company called Citizen approached Midyakovsky with an
Speaker 1: offer to purchase Pebble. Tech Crunch's source said the offer
Speaker 1: was somewhere around seven hundred forty million dollars, an acquisition
Speaker 1: of seven forty million dollars. I think we can all
Speaker 1: agree that is a princely some Midyakovsky declined. He said, nope,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep it. He made this choice, and then
Speaker 1: later on some people would criticize him for making that decision.
Speaker 1: Of course, in hindsight, it becomes clear that that probably
Speaker 1: would have been the best move, but there was no
Speaker 1: way of knowing at that time. By the end of
Speaker 1: it was probably a decision Midchaikovski was ruing because mid
Speaker 1: would be the last time Kickstarter would make a profit.
Speaker 1: It would lose money starting in the second half of
Speaker 1: and it would never quite recover. The company was encountering
Speaker 1: lots of different problems, mostly in the form of lagging sales.
Speaker 1: So there's always issues when you're making hardware. You know,
Speaker 1: their supply chain problems, manufacturing problems, shipping problems, there's processing
Speaker 1: returns and refunds, there's all that stuff. But on top
Speaker 1: of that, uh, they were just seeing a lack of
Speaker 1: interest in the market. There there would be an initial
Speaker 1: interest during the Kickstarter campaigns, the first one raising more
Speaker 1: than ten million, the second one raising more than twenty million,
Speaker 1: but once that died down, there wasn't just a steady
Speaker 1: inflow of orders for these watches, and it was just
Speaker 1: it seemed like it was difficult to expand that that
Speaker 1: core of hardcore customers, the people who were really eager
Speaker 1: to see these smart watches come out, the ones who
Speaker 1: were supporting the kickstart campaigns. It was hard to expand
Speaker 1: that to a larger consumer base. To make matters worse,
Speaker 1: Apple's watch finally debuted in April, and most estimates said
Speaker 1: that the company sold a million units really quickly. But
Speaker 1: to be fair, Apple never published their sales figures for
Speaker 1: the watches. Those numbers are almost always lumped in under
Speaker 1: some other category, like the other category when Apple is
Speaker 1: reporting its earnings. Uh, that means that it gets grouped
Speaker 1: in with stuff like Apple TV. So you can't really
Speaker 1: break it down by unit because you don't you don't
Speaker 1: know how much of that is represented by watches versus
Speaker 1: other items. But it sounded like Apple was able to
Speaker 1: accomplish in just a few days what it took two
Speaker 1: years for Pebble to to do, you know, to to
Speaker 1: hit that million units sold mark. The basic Pebble time
Speaker 1: began shifting shortly after the conclusion of the campaign. By July,
Speaker 1: it was available in best Buy, and in August that
Speaker 1: extended to Target, and the Pebble Time Steel followed suit
Speaker 1: just a bit later, And meanwhile, the company was getting
Speaker 1: ready to reveal yet another new watch. This one took
Speaker 1: the Pebble Time platform, so it's same basic technology as
Speaker 1: the Pebble Time, but it changed the form factor. It
Speaker 1: was called the Pebble Time Round and it was you
Speaker 1: guessed it, a watch with a round watch face, which
Speaker 1: is actually harder to do with a smart watch than
Speaker 1: you might think. Electronics tend to be designed in square
Speaker 1: or at tangular form factors because that's what circuit boards
Speaker 1: tend to be printed on. Creating round circuit boards is challenging,
Speaker 1: not because it's hard to cut a circle. It's not
Speaker 1: hard to cut a circle and create a circular circuit board,
Speaker 1: but it's hard to lay out the actual elements on
Speaker 1: the circuit board when you're using a round shape as
Speaker 1: your basis as your platform. So it's also hard to
Speaker 1: design a display that looks good when it's in a
Speaker 1: round form factor and does not cut off edges. So
Speaker 1: if you have a round display and really it's it's underneath,
Speaker 1: you have a square screen, but you've got a bezel
Speaker 1: that covers the corners, so it looks like it's just
Speaker 1: a round screen to you, but if you were to
Speaker 1: take the bezel off, you would see that was rectangular underneath. Well,
Speaker 1: then you might run into problems where the ends of
Speaker 1: words or the beginnings of words might get cut off
Speaker 1: by the slope of the circle. So it is actually
Speaker 1: a pretty tricky thing to do well. The Pebble Time
Speaker 1: Round did have a bezel surrounding the round screen, so
Speaker 1: while the watch face the round watch face was listed
Speaker 1: a certain diameter, you had to remember that was actually
Speaker 1: smaller because the bezel covered up a lot of the
Speaker 1: space along the edge. And unlike the other watches and
Speaker 1: Pebble's inventory, the Round had a relatively short battery life.
Speaker 1: Most Pebble watches were advertised as being able to last
Speaker 1: a week on a single charge. The Pebble Time Round
Speaker 1: had a watch battery life of two days. But in
Speaker 1: order to kind of take the sting out of that,
Speaker 1: Pebble said that the way they designed the Pebble Time Round,
Speaker 1: it could recharge twenty four hours worth of battery life
Speaker 1: in just fifteen minutes of charging, so it wasn't all
Speaker 1: doom and gloom. Now. The Round was the first Pebble
Speaker 1: watch to be available in two sizes for the straps now,
Speaker 1: the actual watch faces, they were the same size no
Speaker 1: matter what you got, So if you were to put
Speaker 1: a men's Pebble Time Round next to a women's Pebble
Speaker 1: Time Round back to back, they would be exactly the
Speaker 1: same size. But the men's style would accept twenty millimeter
Speaker 1: watch strap sizes, so that's by width, and the women's
Speaker 1: was set to fourteen millimeter watch watch strap sizes, so
Speaker 1: the if you looked at the ends the little prongs
Speaker 1: that would hold the bands in place, they were closer
Speaker 1: together for the women's watches, but otherwise it was pretty
Speaker 1: much the same thing. Oh and you could get the
Speaker 1: fourteen millimeter the women's watch version in rose gold, which,
Speaker 1: as I understand it used to be really trendy, but
Speaker 1: I never paid attention and only learned about it well
Speaker 1: after everyone else did, so I know about it after
Speaker 1: it's no longer cool. Tari's judging me. Pebble began sending
Speaker 1: the Pebble Time Round watches out in early November. The company, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: was definitely struggling. It was not bringing in enough money
Speaker 1: to cover costs. The employee out at this point had
Speaker 1: grown to one hundred sixty not a huge company, but
Speaker 1: a hundred sixty people. And while the kick started campaigns
Speaker 1: were getting enthusiastic responses and raising millions of dollars each
Speaker 1: time they held one, the company as a whole was
Speaker 1: starting to accrue debt and that was starting to get worrisome.
Speaker 1: At some point, Intel approached Pebble with an offer to
Speaker 1: buy the company. And this was another one of those
Speaker 1: stories that would get passed around by sources to journalists,
Speaker 1: so this was never something that was really publicly addressed.
Speaker 1: The story is that the offer Intel made was about
Speaker 1: one tenth of what Citizen had offered. Remember Suitizan had said, well,
Speaker 1: we'll buy you for seven forty million in Midyakovsky said
Speaker 1: no thanks. Intel said we'll buy you at seventy million,
Speaker 1: one tenth. Midyakovsky turned that offered down as well, just
Speaker 1: as he had the earlier larger offer. As Pebble entered,
Speaker 1: things were starting to look a little grim. The smart
Speaker 1: watch and wearable markets had not followed the same trend
Speaker 1: of adoption as smartphones and tablets. Now, whether that was
Speaker 1: because customers couldn't see the value in a watch that
Speaker 1: did a few smartphone things. Or maybe the market was
Speaker 1: already saturated with Android and iOS competitors, or maybe fitness
Speaker 1: trackers had taken a lot of that market share away,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was a combination of a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of different factors. The sales just were not there. Midchaikovski
Speaker 1: again found it difficult to get investors interested in his company,
Speaker 1: and he didn't have the money to launch a new product.
Speaker 1: So he had a tough decision to make, and in
Speaker 1: the spring of Seen he made the first of those
Speaker 1: tough decisions. The company was losing money, so he made
Speaker 1: the call to cut twenty five percent of the jobs
Speaker 1: at Pebble in March. Now, without a new product, his
Speaker 1: company was going to go under, and so he turned
Speaker 1: once again to the platform they got him started, Kickstarter.
Speaker 1: This would be the third and final campaign or Pebble.
Speaker 1: The campaign was officially for a trio of products. You
Speaker 1: had the Pebble Too, so the successor to the original
Speaker 1: smart watch, the Pebble Time Too, and the Pebble Core.
Speaker 1: The Pebble Too went back to that monochromatic display that
Speaker 1: was made famous by the original smart watch, but The
Speaker 1: new version also had a heart rate sensor, the little
Speaker 1: light that can detect how when blood is passing through
Speaker 1: your veins, so it can start counting up your heart
Speaker 1: beats that way and tell you what your heart rate is.
Speaker 1: The time to also had a heart rate sensor, and
Speaker 1: its color screen was larger than the previous time watch.
Speaker 1: The Core was a totally different kind of product. It
Speaker 1: was meant to be an activity tracker for runners, and
Speaker 1: it had its own cellular antenna, so you could have
Speaker 1: this hooked up to an account and you would not
Speaker 1: have to carry a smartphone with you. You would just
Speaker 1: jog around with this this device, this this little square
Speaker 1: called the Core, and it could snap up on to
Speaker 1: either your shirt or your waistband. It would act as
Speaker 1: a pedometer and do other features as well, and it
Speaker 1: could just dial directly into the cellular network to send
Speaker 1: that information onto your account. You didn't have to have
Speaker 1: a smartphone with you, so you didn't have to carry
Speaker 1: your phone. You could also use the Core to dial
Speaker 1: in an S O S signal if you needed it
Speaker 1: if you encountered some sort of emergency situations. So that
Speaker 1: was to help tell runners, yeah, you don't need to
Speaker 1: carry your phone with you, you still will be fine.
Speaker 1: If there's an emergency situation, you can use the device
Speaker 1: to do this. But the device didn't have like a
Speaker 1: display or anything. It did have a h an audio jack,
Speaker 1: so you could plug headphones into it and listen to
Speaker 1: music and stuff, so it's kind of interesting. It was
Speaker 1: a very different style product than what Pebble had been doing.
Speaker 1: The goal for this campaign was one million dollars, so
Speaker 1: twice that for the time, and like the other campaigns,
Speaker 1: it also was a big success. By the conclusion, it
Speaker 1: raised nearly twelve point eight million dollars, which means that
Speaker 1: Pebble has three of the top five performing Kickstarter campaigns
Speaker 1: of all time. Three of those all came from the
Speaker 1: same company. Unfortunately, while the campaign funded successfully, those products
Speaker 1: would never actually emerge and go out to backers. Pebble
Speaker 1: was a sinking ship. Its debt had grown and it
Speaker 1: wasn't making enough in fundraising or sales to keep it afloat.
Speaker 1: By December twenty sixteen, Midchaikovsky could no longer say no
Speaker 1: to any proposed deals, So when Fitbit came in and
Speaker 1: proposed an acquisition that would include the intellectual property of
Speaker 1: Pebble and also some of their engineers, but not Pebble's
Speaker 1: hardware or its debt. He agreed to the sale, and
Speaker 1: the deal amount was not made public, but analysts estimated
Speaker 1: was somewhere between thirty four million and forty million dollars,
Speaker 1: which might not have even been enough to cover Pebble's
Speaker 1: debt at that point. Pebble did promise to refund all
Speaker 1: the pledges that backers had made for the Pebble to
Speaker 1: the time, too, and the core and Fitbit promised to
Speaker 1: continue to support the Pebble service through the back end,
Speaker 1: at least for a little while, to have the service
Speaker 1: going so that you could still download apps, develop apps.
Speaker 1: Things would still work with your Pebble Watch, but that
Speaker 1: would come to an end in June two eighteen, when
Speaker 1: Fitbit ended support for the Pebble so you can no
Speaker 1: longer get Pebble apps. The voice recognition features no longer
Speaker 1: work because they depended upon servers that were on the
Speaker 1: back end. You can't respond to emails or SMS messages
Speaker 1: through your Pebble Watch. You can still get notifications, but
Speaker 1: you can't really act on those notifications in any big
Speaker 1: meaningful way. So, in other words, all the various Pebble
Speaker 1: watches behave more or less like the original Pebble before
Speaker 1: the App Store came out, but with even fewer options.
Speaker 1: Notifications will continue to work on Pebble watches as long
Speaker 1: as the Vanion apps for iOS and Android continue to work,
Speaker 1: But should there ever come an OS update for either
Speaker 1: of those platforms that breaks that app functionality, those notifications
Speaker 1: are going to stop too, and then you'll just have
Speaker 1: a watch with limited utility. Midchaikovsky these days now works
Speaker 1: at y Combinator, that same accelerator where he got his
Speaker 1: company kind of off the ground, and there he tries
Speaker 1: to help would be startup leaders. He shares his knowledge
Speaker 1: and his experience, both the good stuff and the bad stuff,
Speaker 1: to help other startup company launchings avoid those problems and
Speaker 1: take advantage of the things he knows. Fitbit, meanwhile, has
Speaker 1: had its own share of problems, which you know I've
Speaker 1: talked about in previous episodes of Tech Stuff. The company
Speaker 1: traded at nearly fifty dollars per share back in fifteen,
Speaker 1: but by the time the acquisition came around in these
Speaker 1: shares were down to around seven dollars fifty cents per share,
Speaker 1: and today as I record this, they're trading at just
Speaker 1: around six dollars per share. So fitbed has also struggled
Speaker 1: since well before and since acquiring Pebble. Whether they can
Speaker 1: get things moving again remains to be seen, but it
Speaker 1: does seem like the smart watch mode that that form factor.
Speaker 1: In general, I don't think anyone has really nailed at
Speaker 1: Apples come close. For Apple owners, people who own you know,
Speaker 1: iOS devices, Uh, it's an extension of that experience. And
Speaker 1: so I think out of all the smart watches I
Speaker 1: have personally seen, they are the closest to getting it right.
Speaker 1: But it's only right if you also happen to have
Speaker 1: iOS devices. I do not, so I don't have an
Speaker 1: Apple watch. It would make no sense. I don't have
Speaker 1: an iPhone, so I wouldn't wouldn't really work for me.
Speaker 1: And I haven't seen an Android based smart watch that
Speaker 1: has truly blown me away. I've seen some that I
Speaker 1: thought were interesting, but none that I felt were a
Speaker 1: must have. And it makes me wonder if there is
Speaker 1: such a thing as a must have smart watch. Maybe
Speaker 1: it means that someone just hasn't hit on the right
Speaker 1: formula yet, or maybe it just means that that's just
Speaker 1: a form factor that's never really going to reach must
Speaker 1: have status. Maybe a fitness tracker that also has some
Speaker 1: timekeeping elements is all you need, because I think for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, at least you know, including myself, really,
Speaker 1: but I think more than just you know, people like me,
Speaker 1: fitness trackers have a lot more compelling use cases than
Speaker 1: smart watches, especially if you have a fitness tracker that
Speaker 1: also gives you notifications. Um I have a fitness tracker
Speaker 1: that does that, And while I don't think it's as
Speaker 1: versatile as a Pebble smart watch was, it does enough
Speaker 1: stuff well or well enough that it suits my purpose.
Speaker 1: So will we ever see the ultimate smart watch? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know if there's a market for it.
Speaker 1: But Pebble certainly gave it a shot, and for a
Speaker 1: while a lot of us thought they had really succeeded.
Speaker 1: And for a while they did. They always were able
Speaker 1: to get enthusiasm and excitement from their community. They just
Speaker 1: weren't able to translate that into a long term working business.
Speaker 1: So here's hoping we see something come out of this
Speaker 1: that is positive in the long run. It may be
Speaker 1: that some of those features get worked into Fitbit we
Speaker 1: may have to wait around and find out, but in
Speaker 1: the meantime, let's wrap this up. If you guys have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's
Speaker 1: a company, a person, a specific technology you would love
Speaker 1: to hear more about, send me a message. The email
Speaker 1: address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter handle
Speaker 1: for both of those is tech Stuff h s W.
Speaker 1: You can go and visit our merch store at t
Speaker 1: public dot com slash tech Stuff. That's t e public
Speaker 1: dot com slash tech stuff, and hey, we got new
Speaker 1: designs in there. You can get yourself a princely some
Speaker 1: T shirt. You bought that T shirt for a Princely Some,
Speaker 1: I actually did buy one. I did not request a
Speaker 1: free one. I bought one of those. It's on its
Speaker 1: way to me. Now. You can be like me, or
Speaker 1: you can go and buy a different shirt. That's fine.
Speaker 1: I I appreciate it. Every purchase goes to help out
Speaker 1: the show, so we greatly appreciate that. And don't forget
Speaker 1: to follow us over on Instagram and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, visit how stuff works dot Com two