Pebble Hits a Boulder

for Pebble watches. And yet this smart watch company, with so much public backing, went from crowdfunding success to complete stop in just a few short years. So let's travel slightly back in time and learn how a meteoric rise turned into a rock slide of misfortune for Pebble Watches. On the Brink. Hi, I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm aerial casting. You guys are listening to the Brink today. We're talking about Pebble watches, a subject that I might have a

slight bias tour. I was about to say you were an owner of a Pebble watch. Im I still am. I still am. I'm not wearing it today, but I do have it. Now, You're an owner of a very unsupported piece of technology. I mean, it still tells time, but yeah, I'm not going to be getting any new apps for it, so I was not a Kickstarter campaign funder for the Pebble Watch. However, I did pre order the watch before it officially was available, uh in store shelves.

I'll talk about that a little bit, But technically I saw it at CS. I went to C E S. There was a a m meeting in a big conference room, not on the regular show floor where the pebble Watch folks were there showing off pebble watches. This was post kick started campaign, pre store or availability, and I got a chance to see it, and it was impressive enough for me to go ahead and put a pre order in and they sent me a Kickstarter edition. That's nice.

You know, I kind of always wanted a pebble watch myself, but I'm glad I don't have one, because currently I have a tablet sitting on my desk that I can't use because I switched phone providers, and I feel bad even owning that piece of technology that is no longer really useful. But pebble watches are still somewhat useful. And we're going to take you back to the very beginning of pebble watches, which is even before there was a pebble. Yes, and technically pebble Watch was started out of a brink

moment of a previous company. Yes, so way back in two thousand eight, which is ancient times for modern technology companies. Right ten years ago the Stone Age, there was a guy named Eric Mischakovsky, and Midchakovsky he uh, he was twenty two at the time, and if you read the series of Wired articles we read, you would learn that he has six ft six because I'm pretty sure that that was sent. And so he had come from Canada.

He had attended the University of Waterloo. And the story is that he was in the Netherlands and he had taken a semester to study industrial design over there. And while he was over there, he was riding his bike everywhere, and he was still wanted to stay in touch with his friends back in Canada. A and that man he was using his his cell phone. But the problem is, you're riding your bicycle everywhere, you can't easily check your

cell phone. It's hard to dig into your pocket and pull your cell phone out without potentially ramming your bike into a pedestrian or going out in the traffic. And so he thought wouldn't it be nice if there were some sort of device that I could quickly check to

see what incoming call I'm getting or incoming message. Maybe I could read the whole message, or I could at least see who's calling me, and I could determine, Oh, maybe I should pull over to the side take this phone call, or no, I can let this go to voicemail. That actually led him to go back to his room that night, and he started tinkering around with basic electronic components to see if he could build something that could

do what he was thinking. Now, this was not meant to be like a finished product, This was just a proof of concept, but that led him down the path

towards this idea of yeah, this is possible. I'm going to make a device that compare with a phone and give you notifications and you don't have to take your phone out to look at you just glance at your wrist and hey, what the heck, I'm gonna let it tell time to which you know, makes total sense because you're already used to looking at your wrist for a time, and and also coming up with a small device to take care of your phone needs is not a bad line.

Of logic, because computers over history have been getting smaller and smaller until recently when they're kind of getting big

in right. And I think this is sort of what spurred his imagination, was this idea of if you look at the history of computers, then you see them going from the size of a floor of a building to the size of a room, to the size of a desk or a filing cabinet, to the size of a desktop computer to a laptop too, smartphones and tablets, and the trend is going from specific purpose where it's really good at doing very specific things but it can't do

anything else, to general purpose and smaller and eventually mobile. And he thought, well, with this trend, which has been going on since computers started, let's look at what's the next logical step, and that's wearable computers. And so that's what I was thinking, was that let's see if we can I think the world is ready for it. As it turns out, that was an assumption that I think

has yet to bear out. We can talk more about why that hasn't quite panned out yet towards the end of this episode, But that was the premise, Yes, it

was now unfortunately for him. The start of this whole story comes about at a time where he was just slightly ahead of his time because he made a company called Alerta, and he decided to make a product called Impulse, which was a watch that did all the things that we previously talked about, specifically with the BlackBerry operating system, which you know, was a good phone for a while well and and again, to be fair like, he started

really working on this in two thousand eight. In two thousand and eight, the iPhone was not even a year old yet. The iPhone had come out in the summer of two thousand seven. I mean, Blackberries were still in popular use, and even if you wanted to develop for the iPhone, you couldn't because they had not introduced the app store yet. That didn't get introduced till the summer of two thousand eight. Android was not ready for public

release until the fall of two thousand eight. So he developed a prototype of the Impulse that worked only with BlackBerry and uh, but it did all the things he wanted it to do. It if you've got a BlackBerry message, which BlackBerry has their own encrypted version of messaging, you could actually display it on the watch and it was a cool companion piece of tech chnology. It wasn't actually from Research in Motion, which is the company that made BlackBerry. Yeah.

I know a lot of people who own Blackberries, and I know a lot of who did own Blackberries, and a lot of people who do have smart watches. Despite the iffiness of its popularity and in a big company meeting, blackberries were largely you know, business phones. You know, it's a lot more polite to glance at your watch than it is to pick up your phone and look at it.

Not that that has stopped any people still do, but yeah, these days, Uh, if you were with any tech podcasters, I think people in general this is true, but definitely true for tech podcasters because I've been there. If you ever diner, yeah, I am one, and then I hang out with them. Sometimes when a group of tech podcasters go to dinner, the first thing that happens is, however many tech podcasters you have, you have at least that many phones hit the table, probably more phones than there

are people for each pockets. Yeah, sometimes people carry more than one. Uh Well. In two thousand eleven, the company Alerta was invited to participate in a group is called the y Combinator and this is what they call an accelerator. An accelerator is a company that is designed to help startups get a foundation. So they pair people with mentors to teach about forming business plans and uh, what sort of of pitfalls to look out for. And they also

attempt to match up companies with potential investors. And that's what was going on with y Combinator. And by the time the Impulse was ready to be shown off there, it had already been available for purchase and they had expanded beyond BlackBerry. Now they were also compatible with the Android upbreaking system, but not iOS, not yet. But the thing is, even though everybody at this Y Combinator incubator got a hundred and fifty k, yeah, everyone, everybody got it,

Alertor had a really hard time getting investors. They only got about three hundred. They only doubled that initial investment. Like some of those companies or some of those startups were able to get significantly more investment, but Alerta was limited to three thousand, which sounds like a lot of money. But the problem is Alerta was also is a hardware company. Yeah, so you're having to buy all these different components as

opposed to just exactly. Yeah, so you have to figure out supply chain, you have to figure out where where are we going to manufacture these things. Now, in the early days they went pretty low rent with that. They did. They only sold fifteen hundred units of Impulses. They didn't have to worry about bulk production, half of which they made in their garage and the other half they made it a small local factory that they hired out. Yeah, at that scale, it doesn't make sense to look overseas,

which is what Pebble would do later on. They would start looking at manufacturing facilities in China. But you don't do that if you've got if you're only making a thousand or so units, you don't that that would be overkill. Yeah. So they have used all of this money that they've made at the incubator to make these units, and nobody wanted to buy him. Yeah, so we are at a point where the company, the idea that that Eric had just wasn't taking off. Investors didn't seem interested, customers didn't

seem interested. He had not found a way to tap into anyone's desire for technology. It was like, could he have been totally off base with his earlier assessment that this wearable computing model was the way to go. And I think for a lot of first time business owners, they would look at this and say, I'm on the

wrong track. I'm going to go do something else. I'm going to take some time, I'm going to come up with a different idea, especially when you come from a background where Eric Maschakovsky he had been through two different accelerators at this point, because there was one at the University of waterlooka Velocity had already done that one, and then why Combinator he did another one. So he had at least had the benefit of being able to work with people who had experience in launching startups. So he

could have just stepped away, but he didn't. He he was like, well, I still think this is a good idea. I still think people wanted I just definite hit that sweet spot yet. Yeah. And by this time it's getting close to two thousand twelve, the landscape had changed quite a bit. Both Apple and Google were really starting to

take over the market share of smartphones. There was a rising interest in developing for those platforms, developing apps for those platforms, and Mitchakovsky said, I think I'm ready to take another stab at this, but I think it's going to require rethinking my approach. And we'll talk about what he did next in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So we talked about how Mitchikovsky wanted to rethink his ideas

instead of give up. So the first thing he did was he rebranded, renamed his watch to Pebble, and eventually the company would also be called this Yes. And then he decided to make it work with multiple oss Yes, multiple operating systems. Now you've got all these people who are interested in making apps for Apple and Google, they're going to be interested in making apps for his watch as well. So this opened it up to a whole

new market of people. And then he also made the watch waterproof, and he decided to make some other changes to the technology. So the original Impulse watch had an O LED screen US organic LED if you prefer, and it was a full color screen and you had to plug a charging cable into the watch. That's what would make it not water resistant, right, because you have an opening there. So for the Pebble, he decides, well, let's let's make it monochromatic screen, will use e paper as

the display, which had a lot of benefits to it. Yeah. It removes it removes a lot of the power requirements because it's not back lit, and it also takes off a lot of glare so you can see it in brighter light. Yeah, it's like paper. You need that external light to be able to see what's on there. So this decision to go with a brand new approach, a brand new name, a new design model. All of that's great, except where are you going to get the money to

fund the research and development, the prototyping, the manufacturing. I mean, you don't have revenue coming in from the impulse, Yeah, and you don't have investors who want to buy hardware. So where do you turn if you if you can't get any angel investors. Well, Midchakovsky decides to turn to a relatively new form of fundraising. It it had been around for a few years, but he was one of the early birds on this platform. I would say yes,

he launched a Kickstarter campaign in two thousand twelve. It would be the first of three, and it would be, as we said in the opening, incredibly successful spoiler alerts. In this case, they had set their goal at one hundred thousand dollars, and they gave themselves thirty seven days or so to hit that goal. How long did it take them to hit one hundred thousand dollars? Two hours? And then they hit a million in twenty eight hours? Shikes?

And they hit ten million, two hundred sixty six thousand, eight hundred and forty five dollars overall. Yeah, which is watch orders approximately. Yeah, although when you look at the full number, because you know, if you start going at the higher ends, there were other other elements that you could get. I think they ultimately said it was around sixty nine thousand watches total that they ended up selling pre selling through Kickstarter, and only that they could have

made more. Yes, Yes, they end in their campaign a whole week early because they didn't want to get greedy. Honestly, if I were really putting critical thinking to it, I would say that this was a combination of a couple of different things that Midjakovsky was taking into account when he said, let's end it early. We've made ten million dollars and we have this number of commitments. I think

there are two things that he's probably thinking. One is I want to make sure that the number doesn't get so far ahead of us that will be in trouble trying to meet our commitment. And the second is that if you're making hardware, in order to create an incentive, you typically offer that hardware at a discount, sometimes a

substantial discount. They planned on selling the Pebble at d fifty dollars, but the early bird on a Kickstarter Pebble was you also want to make sure that you haven't grossly underestimated how much it's going to cost you to make those things. Yeah. Well, and also one thing that is common in kickstarters there are stretch goals. So if we reach this goal, we're going to add this feature.

And if they add too many features to the smart watch, it either may not be producible or it gets too expensive, gets too expensive or doesn't work right, and then you end up sabotaging yourself. And then you either come out with something that's less than what you promised, which upsets everybody, or you don't come out with anything at all, which really everybody. Fortunately, Pebble is not one of the though in fact, this first Kickstarter campaign that they did is

still the fifth most funded kickstarter in history. The Kickstarter campaign. That was part of what got them over the brink, and it was that and their commitment toward developers. I think that helped establish a good reputation for Pebble. Turns out that would not be enough to keep things going, but we aren't there yet. So two thousand thirteen, the

watch comes out. The end of two thousand thirteen, you see them sell three thousand units, which is pretty good for a brand new company with brand new hardware, a brand new concept to many people. Yeah, and one that's already reliant upon you owning a smartphone because it connects via Bluetooth. It cannot on its own connect to the Internet so that you get updates and notifications. It has to connect to a smartphone. So you've already said, my demographic is a smaller pie because it has to be

people who own smartphones. Yes. Despite this early success, in two thousand fourteen, Apple announced that it was making a smart watch as a competitor to Pebble. Now, Mischakovsky was not really upset about this. Yeah, he felt like this is a space where lots of folks could play, and he was pretty sure that whatever Apple would produce would not be a direct competitor with Pebble because secret here is coming close coming us. I mean, here's your secret.

Apple is not known for making cheap discounts stuff, nor are they known for really integrating with other people. Yeah, so watch. Everyone was pretty sure one it was only going to be interoperable with iOS and to it was not going to be like a add on. Apple watches are expensive, yeah, for comparison, Pebble watches were about a hundred and fifty to two hundred fifty dollars cheaper than

an Apple watch like base level. Now, they did have some technical benefits, and we won't go too much into this, but you know their batteries lasted longer a week instead of a couple of days, and it had the open a p i um, but it didn't have a touch

screen like the Apple Watch. It didn't have like exotic sensors like heart rate monitors or things like that at that time, and it didn't have official designer names attached to it, like when you got sir Johnny, I've there as your designer for your your watch, and then you have all these other names for like the the wrist bands that are making thousands, thousands of dollars for a wrist band for your watch, and man must be nice and by watches. Yeah, listen, I got my Pebble and

must watch all right, so I hear you. But yeah, this was also a time where Android was starting to push smart watches as well. Actually, to be fair, the Google created a platform called Android War, but rather than Google getting into the hardware game directly, they created that for other manufacturers to use. Yes, you had Motorola and Samsung make their versions of a smart watch, and they were smarter technically than Pebble, but they weren't getting as

good of reviews. Right, It's hard to demonstrate the utility of a smart watch to the point where you feel like you have to have it. Like smartphones, you get they do so much, they do it really well. Smart watches you have smaller amount of real estate for you to be able to use green There are barriers there. I don't think anyone has hit upon the perfect smart watch implementation yet, but I think activity trackers are better about this than smart watches are. But it's for again,

a smaller piece of the pie. Yeah. Mitschikowski would come to realize this later on, but we'll get to that later in the episode. In two thousand fourteen, two thousand fifteen, right around the time that Apple announced their watch, Pebble was coming out with another watch, the Pebble Time. Yes, more advanced version of the Pebble. It's going to have a lot more higher end features than the Pebble did. The Pebble you can think of a sort of like

a bare bones smart watch. And actually that was one of the things that appealed to me, like the swatch of smart watches. Yeah, and I was totally fine with that. Pebble Time was a step up from that, And like the original Pebble, they decide that they would hold another kickstarter, Yes, and this kickstarter raised double the amount of money all

told that the first one did twenty million dollars. So this one had a color display, although it used an e paper display for this too, so it had sort of almost like a faded approach, like some people describe it as looking like a faded comic book. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't as graphically appealing as an Apple watch. And it had sixty four colors, so not nearly as many colors as what you would find in like a retina display.

Apple watch. It also had a microphone in it too, so you can make voice notes things like note to self charge watch. This, like I said, had sort of a step up from the original Pebble. And by this time they also had a pretty strong developer community, more than twenty thousand developers out there and six thousand apps yep, which shocked me because I was never really looking at the apps part. Now I can't, but I never was really looking at the apps part for Pebble except for

different watch faces. Well, you know, and you would have up to fifty watch faces if you wanted. Um. But the thing I liked about the Pebble time is that you you had your apps, and then you had like your eight top apps. They would just kind of display in a timeline, so you didn't have to like going click through, which is great because you didn't have a touch screen. In fact, they had decided that they wanted

to tie app notifications to timelines. So let's say you downloaded an app that would give you sports scores, then you would need to dial back into the timeline to the end of the game and that would give you the sports score. That kind of thing, just to make it easier to navigate your watch. Yeah, I think that's kind of I mean it makes sense. I mean the whole concept of a watches about. You know, it's a chronometer, right, it's measuring time. And by the end often Pebble looked

like it was in a really good position. It had sold a million units, which wasn't bad. We don't know what Apples sales figures are officially for the watch. They've never shared them. They always lump the Apple Watch in with the category of other Estimates have put it at slightly higher than a million units. In fact, I read one that said that in just the quarter that ended June, sold three and a half million. Yeah, that's that's in

one quarter of a year, not a full year. Also, it must be a little disheartening from Mischakovski and and you know Pebble who says, we think people are going to want our watch over Apple because it's cheaper. But then again, you're having to appeal to people who already have smartphones, which changes the landscape a bit. Now, next we're gonna really talk about the issues, the challenges that Pebble encountered and why the company is no longer around.

But before we get into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So in two thousand fourteen, Pebble makes its millionth sale. Two thousand fifteen, the first half of the year is going well, but by the second half of the year things were already staring to kind of fall apart. And a large reason for that was Minschakovsky said people weren't as interested in buying wearable computers, and he said, I don't see this actually changing the

following year. I think we're in a little bit of a slump here. People were initially interested. Maybe the people who were most interested when out and bought one, and now they don't feel the need to buy another one. Yeah, Yeah, limited market. This is also kind of the difference between say, a smart watch and a phone. You know, a phone typically has enough things change from one iteration to the

next to at least tempt you. If you're an Apple iPhone user, you might be getting an updated Apple phone every single year, and that's not necessarily the same as smart watch. No, And you know, Pebble did take some of this into account, where you've got Apple and Android making these higher end watches with all the features all at once. They figured that they could at feed as they found a good providers for him and keep the costs low and kind of outpace updates and newer watches

from Apple and Motorola. But people were just going ahead and spending more money on these watches that had everything. Yeah, they tried to kind of compete a little bit more with Apple with some more upscale versions of the pebble, including one that was in the color of gold, if not made out of gold. But it didn't really matter what kind of trappings you changed around the Pebble watch. There were fundamental differences between the way the People watch

worked and say the Apple Watch. I mean they even came out with a pebble round which you know, was smaller and round in shape instead of the rectangular one, and came out with a new platform for it as well, so that as people developed things that could fit but not everything fit on around face. Yeah, that's a huge challenge. It sounds like it would be a minor issue, but it's actually quite hard to design electronics that are round

in shape. And they also to fit everything into this round face, they shrunk down the battery, So now you've got this watch that looks prettier to certain people. But now the battery only last two days, which is about as long as an Apple Watch battery lasts, and it doesn't have all the features. So they sold some, but it still was not making up for the market difference.

And beyond that, now that they've got all these different versions of their Pebble watch, out their third party manufacturers for smart bands because their watches and nately did not have GPS or Harrey monitors or health trackers and things like that. Right, you can have that incorporated in the band. Yeah,

and a smart band. But now these manufacturers of these third party smart bands are having a hard time figuring out what size bands to make and how many to make because the band sizes don't fit universally over all these different Pebble watches. So without knowing, like how you know what the sales figures are going to be for

each of the different types. Then as a third party manufacturing company that could make these smart bands, uh, it does make it much trickier, Like you don't want to sit there and invest in making way too many smart bands for one size and it turns out that that was the least popular. Yeah, so that also makes your watch less desirable. So, like you said, by the end of two thousand fifteen, things were not looking great. And this is despite them taking out a five million dollar

loan and a five million dollar line of credit. Yeah. So by the second half of Pebble is no longer in the black, it's in the red, it's losing money. UH. And in the beginning of things still looking bad. And it was one of those deals were in retrospect. And this was saying that Midchakovsky would actually admit to later on. UH. One of the reasons they went to kickstarters so frequently was because they were having trouble raising money through other methods.

Just as they had had trouble getting investors early, they were having trouble raising money to UH to to compete in this market space. So they had seen some success early on. It was a new category of product. It was a very kind of underdog sort of story, and a lot of bleeding edge technology adopters found it really compelling and so they jumped on board, including me, But it wasn't something that they were able to sustain as

an ongoing business. And um, Midchakovsky actually said that, you know, while they did go to kickstarter three times, he said, you know, I can't. We can't keep doing that because it sends it sends the message to our customers that the only way we can survive as a business is through their ongoing investment. And that's no way to run

a product company. It's not so. Unfortunately, in March of two thou sixteen, because of these financial woes, Mitchakovsky had to lay off about his workforce, which at that point was a hundred sixty people. And this was particularly rough timing. The company had just recently relocated from Palo Alto, California, to Redwood City, and they moved into a new office building. And originally they were supposed to take up two floors in this office building, and it was, you know, that

Silicon Valley, super sleek design kind of stuff. But now with those layoffs, their team was smaller, and so small in fact, that what was originally spacious was now too spacious. So Midchakovsky made the call to consolidate everybody onto one floor and not draw quite as much attention to the fact that there was a lot of empty space around. Yeah, but that didn't That didn't solve things, No, it didn't. Sales did not pick up the wearables market had not

really taken on hold. Apple was not enjoying as far as we can tell, amazing sales either. They were selling well enough, but no one, like at least in literature, no one had been really blown away by wearables. It was, like I said, peop Will felt that no one had really hit upon it. It's just it's just another piece of technology that you have to charge, you have to keep track of, you have to man and again, like I think hardcore fitness tracker fans, that's a group you

can really market too. But your average consumer still is not quite ready. And other than Garman, even really well established fitness device companies have struggled. Oh yeah, there's some that went out of business. Jawbone went out of business, and for a while Pebble and jaw Bone we're working together now. Ultimately, the decision came down to Midchaikovsky, like, what do you do? Your company is not raising money. Uh, the market doesn't look like it's going to magically turn

around anytime soon. It's getting harder to stay afloat. What do you do? He ultimately decided the most responsible thing for him to do for everybody would be to sell the intellectual property of Pebble to an interested buyer, which turned out to be Fitbit had some interested buyers before and they kind of all fell through for various reasons. Yeah, and the Fitbit deal went through for reportedly less than

forty million dollars. It was supposed to go through for forty million, but then the thought is at least in the research I read that Fitbit had some bad numbers themselves. Fit that was also having its own struggles. Yeah. Originally Fitbit was supposed to buy the intelectual property, the patents affirmed, like everything, and most of the employees, and they ended up really just keeping the software and the employees that worked with the software, the engineers specifically with Pebble, and

everyone else was let go. That hardware was not part of the deal, and Fitbit kept support going for Pebble for a little while, but it was not going to be forever. Know, they were supposed to end support in two thousand seventeen, but they actually ended it later. They supported the Pebble community longer than they had initially said, which was very kind of them. Um. They stopped supporting Pebble in June of two eighteen this year. Yeah, so finally the end of the Heuble saga as it stands.

But I think there are a lot of interesting lessons to to learn from here. One is that the power of crowdfunding is real, and that, uh, it's a great way to to judge at least early interest in a product. Hardware products on crowdfunding are hard to do because it's hard to really estimate exactly how expensive it's going to be to make the thing, especially if it's a brand

new thing. And I've seen this happen with people I know you were producing, you know, stuff like card games, and they say, I got quotes before I did any of this, and then it turns out everything got more expensive. Is like, yeah, this is that's what contractor work does. That's how every contract I've ever seen how it works. Um, so that's a valuable lesson. Another valuable lesson is just really taking a hard look at the potential market for

your your idea. And it may be that you have a groundbreaking concept, but it might be too early for it to survive. And to end on a little bit of a positive note, Mitchakovsky, despite not coming out of this a rich man or super successful, he did learn a lot and so now he's working at why Combinator teaching people all these lessons that you just talked about. Yeah, he says, here, here's what I learned. And like I

would argue, Pebble is not a story of failure. Pebble's Pebbles a story of really there's this great success story in the first half. And I think the reason why Pebble ultimately wasn't able to stick around wasn't because of bad decisions on the part of the team at Pebble. It literally was that the market they thought was there just had not quite developed. That not enough people saw the product as being desirable or indispensable enough to adopt it.

And if you do, you don't necessarily feel the need to upgrade on a regular basis. So once you get one, you're like, no, I'm good, I got what I need. Does limited things. It does a limited things I need exactly. It's a product that is exactly what it promised to do, which is both a good thing and a bad thing, because coming out with a new version that has a few more bells and whistles doesn't necessarily, you know, get your attention. It has to be truly transformative. But I

really am still glad that I bought a Pebble. I still wear it occasionally. I'm not wearing it today. It's not supported, but it will still kind of work for yeah, and still tells time. I mean, you know, until until that Bluetooth chip gives out. I think I'll be able to be able to see the time that uh. And also I really like the watch face I guess, and it'll still SMS and email with an Android phone. Yeah,

so that's what I use. So you know, as far as I'm concerned, still works, Yes, But this was this was one of our first episodes where we decided to take a look at a company where they faced two brink moments, one of the very beginning and then one that sadly did not work out for them, and we'll look at other companies that also had smiler situations and similar fates. Kudos to everyone who worked on the Pebble. I mean, there were some really innovative ideas and hopefully

some of those are being incorporated into other technologies even today. Yes, all right, well until our next episode, I have been Jonathan Strickland and I have been aerial casting. If you would like to learn more about what we've talked about, as well as keep track of all of our episodes, make sure you visit our website at the Brink podcast dot show, or you can email us at Feedback at the brink podcast dot show.