The Decline and Fall of Pebble

it because this is a continuation. But in that episode, I I ended by talking about how Eric Mitchakovsky, the the founder of Pebble, had launched a successful Kickstarter campaign. In fact, it was at the time the most successful Kickstarter campaign, and by the end of two thousand twelve,

beginning in two thousand thirteen, he was getting ready. In fact that the opening month of two thousand thirty started shipping out units of the Pebble smart watch two Kickstarter backers, and then after he got through those, he started sending

them to preorder customers. We're going to pick up from there and look at what the company did over the following three years when Pebble would cease to exist as a company, and then I'll do a little follow up at the end with some more recent news, because even after the company ended, it kind of kept going a little bit until recently. More reviews for the Pebble smart

Watch once it came out, we're generally positive. They weren't gushing, they weren't overwhelming, but they generally said nice things about the product. They pointed out that the watch was limited in what it could do. It was essentially a timetelling piece that would give you a heads up on incoming notifications on your phone, and there was the promise of some other apps that would be UH compatible in the future, but there wasn't a whole lot to do with it

raw the gate. You could you could do stuff like read text messages that came in on your phone. You could read things like Twitter responses, email. Essentially, stuff that was coming into your phone be relayed to your your Pebble smart watch, and you would use the physical buttons on the side of the watch to navigate those messages. You could scroll up or down. You could use your watch to decline an incoming phone call. You get a phone call, you look at your your wrist. You see, oh,

that's a call coming in from so and so. I don't have time to talk to that person. I'm just gonna go ahead and send that to voicemail. You could do that from your watch as well, and had a vibrating motor inside of it that would help alert you to those incoming calls or act as an alarm to remind you about upcoming appointments. So it was useful, but it wasn't super flashy, right. It was just a monochromatic

screen and had some very basic functions. It did what it did well, but it wasn't incredibly versatile, so I wasn't trying to be a smartphone for your wrist, which some other smart watches had kind of tried to go down that route, and that ended up complicating things because typically it meant that you had so many features in your smart watch that it either didn't do them very well or it really had a terrible battery life because you were trying to pack so many different components into

a very small form factor, so it didn't leave very much room for a battery. So Pebble took a different approach, and it helped also keep the price down. So uh, some people like me liked the Pebble because we knew what we were going to get. We understood, all right, this is a limited set of features. It's not the end all be all of technology, but it is kind of neat and you know what it can do, and it's at the price point, and so, uh, people like me,

we were on board. Now, other people felt it just didn't have enough features to be worth the purchase, which is a totally valid point of view. I might add, if you look at this and you say, uh, it's just telling me stuff that I can look at just by glancing at my phone, I'm not going to spend a d fifty dollars on that, that's a legitimate argument. Well, the kick started campaign helped Pebble in more ways than one.

It gave them the starting capital they needed to get manufacturing rolling right to start this process, to start generating these these watches, to build out these watches and then ship them and hopefully start laying the groundwork for customers. But the truth of the matter was that the company was going to need more money to make good on the pre orders and Kickstarter orders because they were offering

those Kickstarter ones at any rate at a discount. So you started discounting the product before you've actually started to build it. Sometimes the costs can end up overshadowing the money you're bringing in, so Midchaikovsky sought investment, and this time he founded. If you listen to my last episode, you know he had a real hard time finding investors because they were shy about supporting what appeared to be an upstart hardware company. Hardware is a very risky business.

The historic success of the crowdfunding campaign, however, change the minds. You saw investors say, huh, there. People seemed to put a lot of stock in this not not in stock exchange kind of way, but in people seem to put a lot of value in this company, so maybe we should invest in it. So Pebble received about fifteen million dollars in investment, and that helped the fledgling company fill all of its Kickstarter orders and many of its pre orders.

By May and in all, one thousand people had signed up to pre order a Kickstarter watch or a Pebble watch rather. By July seven of two thousand, thirteen, Pebble smart watches could be found on the shelves of Best Buy stores. This originally was an exclusive arrangement for best Buy, so it was the only retail store that was carrying

Pebble watches at the beginning. Uh and at first, at least they only had the jet black version of the smart watch available, But this helps cement Pebble as a quote unquote real product and not just some internet dream. You know. It wasn't just mail order. You could find these in honest to goodness, real stores, and for some people that kind of sign is the only way they'll

accept it as being a legitimate business. Well, Pebble spent its first year making and shipping those basic watches to buyers, and by the end of the company had shipped three hundred thousand watches to customers. Back in April, Pebble also introduced a sort of proto software Developer Kit or s d K, and it was limited in scope that original one.

It allowed developers to create new watch faces for the Pebble and some basic applications, but the following month they debuted the Pebble Kit s d K, and that would allow developers to create apps that used two way communication between the watch is and their paired devices, and it opened up a lot of other opportunities for UH integration with various apps. In early fourteen, Pebble announced a new take on this basic watch and it was called the Pebble Steel s T E E l so as in

the metal, not as in thievery. The original Pebble watches had plastic bodies and they were more sporty. According to Midchakovsky, the Pebble Steel marked a move to try and tap into the more traditional watch market, something that you might wear if you were dressing up, maybe your business person, and you want to have a watch that kind of reflects that, and you don't want some something that's bright

and colorful and plastic on your wrist. So these watches were about a hundred dollars more expensive than the original Pebbles when they were first announced. They looked more professional. They had different options for wrist bands or for watch bands. You could get a leather watch band, or you could get um, you know, sort of that chain based kind of watch band. And these new watch designs also meant that the Pebble had to change up the charging cable

for the steel. The the form factor for the Pebble Steel was different from the original Pebble and so the charging cable that they had made for the original Pebble would not fit on the steel. So classic cables were not compatible with the new watch. That got some criticism from some folks. They said, well, now you're confusing things because if you're going to have a line of Pebble watches and some people collect watches, well, now you're going

to have to have different cables for different models. That's very confusing, but it's the way they went. Under the hood, the Pebble Steel mostly resembled its Sport Year predecessor. One difference was that the new watch had twice the onboard memory. They went from four megabytes up to eight megabytes for memory, but otherwise things were pretty much the same now. The reason for that is the company did want to try and avoid fragmentation as much as they could, especially on

the app side. So if they made too many changes to the design of the Pebble, it would make things messier for developers and for customers. So it could be hard to explain to a customer base that because you own an older watch, you aren't able to use certain apps because those apps depend upon features that are absent in earlier models. I can get very frustrating, and so Pebble made a very careful move to avoid shaking things

up too much. Along with the Pebble Steel, the company launched version two point oh of its software and an app store as well, and included apps from big names like Pandora, four Square, and ESPN. There were also some games that were designed to play on the watch, and all apps in the app store were free. It was actually a requirement Pebble set. He said, well, he Eric Machakovsky said that bowl apps in the app store had to be free, uh in order to be featured on

the app store. However, developers were allowed to create their own companion apps for the Pebble and they could have those listed in the app store over an Apple or Google Play, and they could charge money for those. It wouldn't be featured in the Pebble app but you could have these companion apps and you can charge whatever you liked. Um. And so this looked like it was just the very

beginning for Pebble. The watches would allow for eight slots for apps for third party apps, and if you wanted more than eight apps, well you would choose whichever ones you load onto the watch, and you would have to unload apps if you had more than eight, you'd have to decide, all right, well, these eight I want, but these other two that I had on there, I'm going to take off those unloaded apps would go into what they called a locker on the companion Pebble app for

your smartphone, the thing that you would pair the watch too, and that way you could swap those older apps back

in easily. You could say, all right, well, I'm going to reinstall this app I put into the locker because I wanted again still that that was kind of a limitation and it rubbed some folks the wrong way, because it's kind of a hassle to have to manage apps like that, you know, to to fill up once you hit eight and then you have to swap stuff out if you happen to like having a lot of apps at your disposal, it was it was a little frustrating.

Kneeli Patel reviewed the Steel for The Verge, and he lamented that the apps weren't quite advanced enough for his tastes. He pointed out that the experiences were not really location based, which meant if you wanted to use your watch, and let's say you want you had the four Square app activated on your watch and you want to check into the location that you were going into, you maybe you're at a restaurant, because back in those days, four Square did that that was back when four Square was a

check in service. They have since change what they do, but that's an episode for a different time. Anyway, if you were using your watch to do this your Pebble, and then that you were pressing the physical buttons on the watch a lot in order for you to navigate through the app and to activate the right place for you to check in, and that this was not very user friendly. Why would you do that when you could just take your phone out and do the same thing

much more quickly. Patel said, what really should happen is there should be some more predictive elements to the Pebble. It should be able to pull information from your paired phone and say, all right, well, clearly this person that my wearer just walked into this restaurant. So when my wearer checks the phone, I'm going to suggest the four Square app and I'm already going to have the place pulled up for them to check in if they want to. But that was not something that was happening in those

early apps. Some of the companion apps got pretty neat. For example, developers created a Companion nap that would let you use the Pebble with certain WiFi enabled cameras, so you can actually use it like a remote control for those cameras. I think that's kind of cool. The Pebble Steel, like its predecessor, landed a distribution deal at best Buy. Customers would be able to buy a steal for two nine dollars, but they were only able to get it

with the leather straps. So this is kind of similar to how when the original Pebble came out, the only color you could get was jet black. It's it's similar to that. Well, I've got a lot more to say about Pebble's decline, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In the summer of fourteen, Google was getting ready to unveil Android Wear, which is a version of the Android operating system. It's a platform for

wearable computing. It makes sense just from the name. Meanwhile, Pebble continued to foster it's developer community and to make deals with other companies, such as a wearable company called Misfit that made activity trackers. So Misfit made an app for Pebble that would take data from the watch's accelerometer and essentially turned the watch into a pedometer and a step tracker. In other words, the first Android ware watch

to hit the market was the LGG Watch. This watch was the first to use Android ware as its operating system, and other companies also announced their own Android based smart watches in the summer of fourteen, But Google's approach was different from what Apple would do. Google's approach was to create a platform, you know, Android war and to let

other companies produce the actual hardware. And that meant that there were a lot of competing watches that were on the way without really a clear front runner in those early days. So there wasn't one single Android based watch you would point to and say, this is the Pebble killer. But it had to be worrisome because there were a bunch of different ones that were coming out, and there was a lot of interest in that original LGG watch, and that was a pretty limited implementation of Android ware.

When it came out. In September, Pebble reduced the price of its two watch lines, The Classic Pebble, the sporty version would drop down to and the Pebble Steel was reduced to one. Pebble also made new agreements with companies like Jawbone and swim dot Com, which helped expand the Pebble's utility as a fitness and sleep tracker. Again mostly just detecting movements through the accelerometer, so pretty simplistic variation

of fitness tracker. They a lot of the more advanced fitness trackers take into account more information than just an accelerometer. The company had also moved beyond its exclusive deal with best Buy. It was already available in Target and also on Amazon dot Com, but in the fall of it also started to show up in stores like Fries and Sam's Club, and it also became available in the UK

and across Scandinavia. And perhaps it was a combination of all of these different efforts that pushed Pebble sales to hit one million units by the end of so For a new company, brand new hardware company with an unproven form factor smart watches had not really taken off before this, this seemed like a pretty good pace to hit a million sales in its second year. Not bad. However, something else happened in the fall of two thousand fourteen that

might have been of some concern. Apple, the company that had dominated by creating the iPod and really defining the MP three era. I mean, we call them podcasts because Apple really did have a stranglehold on that market. Apple also was able to essentially define the consumer smartphone market, at least in the United States, as well as create

the first successful consumer tablet with the iPad. They decided to throw their hat in the ring and they finally confirmed suspicions and rumors that had been going on all year, and in September they announced that the company had designed and branded its own smart watch and it was on the way and it would come out the following year. In now mid Yakovski greeted this announcement with a pretty

calm and even welcome tone. He postulated that Apple's market was going to be for a different type of customer than pebbles target market, and that sounds pretty reasonable because it was clear, even early on, when we knew very little about the Apple Watch, that that smart watch was going to be a luxury item. It was not going to be your basic, you know, uh, ground level smart aren't watch. This was something that was going to be

a bit of a luxury purchase. So the Pebble was marketed as a useful piece of technology that was at a reasonable price point, and the Apple Watch was clearly going to be able to do a lot of the stuff that Pebble could not do. But Mitschakovsky maintained that as long as what Pebble did, it did well, and as long as it maintained expectations, there would be plenty of room for both the Pebble and the Apple Watch. And besides, the Apple Watch was only going to be

in the domain of Apple. You know, there was no one out there who thought Apple was going to come out with a smart watch that would also be compatible with Android smartphones. Everyone knew from the get go because Apple. Apple's approach always has been try and get everybody into the Apple ecosystem and keep them there. So no one was operating under the assumption that this was going to

work with Android operating system phones. So that meant the Pebble was definitely going to still have an audience as be all the people who don't have an iPhone. Still, with both Google and Apple unveiling new technologies for wearables, some people were starting to get a little concerned about Pebble. Would the pioneering company be able to stand up for itself with these looming giants gaining momentum on it The

Apple question would go unanswered for the time being. While the company would announce the watch in September two fourteen, pre orders of the device wouldn't even start until April, so that question was kind of tabled for several months. As for Android ware watches, that number is actually kind

of hard to track. It's kind of hard to say how many Android wear watches were sold in There were multiple companies that were making Android based watches by the end of fourteen, and not all of them shared sales figures. Some of them would only talk about how many units were shipped, not sold, So that's not necessarily the same thing. So if you're shipping watches to retail locations, those don't count as sales. That they've just been moved to a

retail location and they could be just gathering dust. But according to the research firm kennelsts c A in A l y S companies shipped seven twenty thousand Android ware watches in Again, those are not sales, it's shipp numbers,

not sale numbers. But it did take Pebble two years to reach one million units sold, and Android ware had only been around since the summer of that year, so I've only been on the market for six months, so clearly there was a lot of movement in the smart watch space even in before the Apple Watch came out, and Pebble, while it led the way, was not necessarily going to be the mark get leader for very long.

By early Pebble said there were more than six thousand various apps available for their smart watches, and they're also watch faces among that number, and that more than twenty five thousand developers were part of the Pebble developer community, which was a pretty nice thing to be able to point to and say, we have a very healthy community of developers that are creating innovative apps for our smart watch. You can do all sorts of stuff besides just see

what time it is and see who's calling you. In February, Pebble announced that they were coming out with the next generation of their watch. This one they called the Pebble Time. What a great name for a watch, calling it the time Do you have the time rights itself? It had a sixty four color e paper display, so it moved beyond the monochromatic though, I should say this e paper display it looked kind of like a comic book, like

like the way the inside pages of a comic look. Look, you know, has that that almost slightly faded look to it. That's kind of how the e paper looked. And that was because of the technology. You only had sixty or four colors to work with. You didn't have so many different variations that you could have lots of different vibrancy there, but it was still a color display. It also had a microphone that would let users make voice notes and

voice replies to incoming messages. The screen had a protective layer made of gorilla glass, which was an upgrade from the Pebble and Pebble steel. The bezel on the watch was of stainless steel, and the watch was available in three colors. Like the original Pebble. You could get it in white, black, or red, although they were uh not exactly the same versions of white, black and red as the original Pebble, but still kind of in line with

the company's history. And here's the Kicker, or rather I guess I should say here's the Kickstarter because Pebble launched the Pebble Time on Kickstarter, as they had with the original Pebble two years earlier, and the Pebble Time also performed really well on that platform, early bird backers could pledge a hundred fifty nine dollars for a Pebble Time. Once those pledges were used up, backers could then reserve

one for one seventy nine, so early bird kickstarter. The way it typically works is that you limit how many people can reserve at that price point. Whatever it may be, whether it's a watch like in this case, or it's other special swag or giveaways, or whatever it might be that's related to your campaign. You can say, all right, well, the first two hundred to pledge at this amount can get this reward, but after that you have to pledge higher in order to get that same stuff. That's what

Pebble did. And the retail price for the watch was on so if you were an early bird you got forty dollars off. If you weren't an early bird, you still got twenty dollars off their retail price. So how did that kick start a campaign do? Well? The answer is really really well. It took half an hour for the Pebble Time campaign to hit its goal of one million dollars. Actually, I'm sorry, that's twice its goal. Its original goal was five thousand dollars. So in half an hour,

they had doubled what their goal was. Already the campaign had already raised twelve million dollars when Pebble actually added another option, and upgrade option, just as the Pebble got the professional upgrade version with the Pebble Steel, so two to the Pebble Time So you could get the basic Pebble Time model, or you could opt for the more expensive Pebble Time Steel. And just like Pebble versus Pebble Steel,

same sort of thing. It was kind of a move to make it look a little more professional grade, like something you would wear two a business outing for business. Existing Kickstarter backers could upgrade their pledge while maintaining their place in the shipping queue once the watches were ready. So if you decided, oh, now that you've announced this, this newer version, this steel version, I would much prefer that.

So I'm going to swap my pledge from what it was to this new one, but I maintain my place in line. So as soon as like, if I was number thirty seven in line for a Pebble Time and I switched over to Pebble Time Steel, I will be at a comparable waiting point for that nearly seventy eight thousand, five hundred people backed this project, and the campaign raised twenty million, three hundred thirty eight thousand, nine hundred eighty six dollars. That makes the Pebble Time the all time

champion and kickstarted campaign fundraising. As of the recording of this podcast, the Coolest Cooler had actually knocked the original Pebble off the top of the list, but the Pebble Time reclaimed that spot and it holds it to this day. But why would you use a kickstarter for a product when you've already got a successful company? That would become clear later on I'll talk about in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.

By the time the Pebble Time was announced by this doesn't get old, does it, Pebble had grown into a company with one thirty employees. And then, according to tech Crunch, it was sometime around this this area in twenty fifteen that a watch company called Citizen approached Midyakovsky with an offer to purchase Pebble. Tech Crunch's source said the offer was somewhere around seven hundred forty million dollars, an acquisition of seven forty million dollars. I think we can all

agree that is a princely some Midyakovsky declined. He said, nope, I'm gonna keep it. He made this choice, and then later on some people would criticize him for making that decision. Of course, in hindsight, it becomes clear that that probably would have been the best move, but there was no way of knowing at that time. By the end of it was probably a decision Midchaikovski was ruing because mid would be the last time Kickstarter would make a profit.

It would lose money starting in the second half of and it would never quite recover. The company was encountering lots of different problems, mostly in the form of lagging sales. So there's always issues when you're making hardware. You know, their supply chain problems, manufacturing problems, shipping problems, there's processing returns and refunds, there's all that stuff. But on top of that, uh, they were just seeing a lack of

interest in the market. There there would be an initial interest during the Kickstarter campaigns, the first one raising more than ten million, the second one raising more than twenty million, but once that died down, there wasn't just a steady inflow of orders for these watches, and it was just it seemed like it was difficult to expand that that core of hardcore customers, the people who were really eager to see these smart watches come out, the ones who

were supporting the kickstart campaigns. It was hard to expand that to a larger consumer base. To make matters worse, Apple's watch finally debuted in April, and most estimates said that the company sold a million units really quickly. But to be fair, Apple never published their sales figures for the watches. Those numbers are almost always lumped in under some other category, like the other category when Apple is reporting its earnings. Uh, that means that it gets grouped

in with stuff like Apple TV. So you can't really break it down by unit because you don't you don't know how much of that is represented by watches versus other items. But it sounded like Apple was able to accomplish in just a few days what it took two years for Pebble to to do, you know, to to hit that million units sold mark. The basic Pebble time

began shifting shortly after the conclusion of the campaign. By July, it was available in best Buy, and in August that extended to Target, and the Pebble Time Steel followed suit just a bit later, And meanwhile, the company was getting ready to reveal yet another new watch. This one took the Pebble Time platform, so it's same basic technology as

the Pebble Time, but it changed the form factor. It was called the Pebble Time Round and it was you guessed it, a watch with a round watch face, which is actually harder to do with a smart watch than you might think. Electronics tend to be designed in square or at tangular form factors because that's what circuit boards tend to be printed on. Creating round circuit boards is challenging,

not because it's hard to cut a circle. It's not hard to cut a circle and create a circular circuit board, but it's hard to lay out the actual elements on the circuit board when you're using a round shape as your basis as your platform. So it's also hard to design a display that looks good when it's in a

round form factor and does not cut off edges. So if you have a round display and really it's it's underneath, you have a square screen, but you've got a bezel that covers the corners, so it looks like it's just a round screen to you, but if you were to take the bezel off, you would see that was rectangular underneath. Well, then you might run into problems where the ends of words or the beginnings of words might get cut off by the slope of the circle. So it is actually

a pretty tricky thing to do well. The Pebble Time Round did have a bezel surrounding the round screen, so while the watch face the round watch face was listed a certain diameter, you had to remember that was actually smaller because the bezel covered up a lot of the space along the edge. And unlike the other watches and Pebble's inventory, the Round had a relatively short battery life. Most Pebble watches were advertised as being able to last a week on a single charge. The Pebble Time Round

had a watch battery life of two days. But in order to kind of take the sting out of that, Pebble said that the way they designed the Pebble Time Round, it could recharge twenty four hours worth of battery life in just fifteen minutes of charging, so it wasn't all

doom and gloom. Now. The Round was the first Pebble watch to be available in two sizes for the straps now, the actual watch faces, they were the same size no matter what you got, So if you were to put a men's Pebble Time Round next to a women's Pebble Time Round back to back, they would be exactly the

same size. But the men's style would accept twenty millimeter watch strap sizes, so that's by width, and the women's was set to fourteen millimeter watch watch strap sizes, so the if you looked at the ends the little prongs that would hold the bands in place, they were closer together for the women's watches, but otherwise it was pretty

much the same thing. Oh and you could get the fourteen millimeter the women's watch version in rose gold, which, as I understand it used to be really trendy, but I never paid attention and only learned about it well after everyone else did, so I know about it after it's no longer cool. Tari's judging me. Pebble began sending the Pebble Time Round watches out in early November. The company, meanwhile, was definitely struggling. It was not bringing in enough money

to cover costs. The employee out at this point had grown to one hundred sixty not a huge company, but a hundred sixty people. And while the kick started campaigns were getting enthusiastic responses and raising millions of dollars each time they held one, the company as a whole was starting to accrue debt and that was starting to get worrisome. At some point, Intel approached Pebble with an offer to

buy the company. And this was another one of those stories that would get passed around by sources to journalists, so this was never something that was really publicly addressed. The story is that the offer Intel made was about one tenth of what Citizen had offered. Remember Suitizan had said, well, we'll buy you for seven forty million in Midyakovsky said no thanks. Intel said we'll buy you at seventy million, one tenth. Midyakovsky turned that offered down as well, just

as he had the earlier larger offer. As Pebble entered, things were starting to look a little grim. The smart watch and wearable markets had not followed the same trend of adoption as smartphones and tablets. Now, whether that was because customers couldn't see the value in a watch that

did a few smartphone things. Or maybe the market was already saturated with Android and iOS competitors, or maybe fitness trackers had taken a lot of that market share away, or maybe it was a combination of a whole bunch of different factors. The sales just were not there. Midchaikovski again found it difficult to get investors interested in his company, and he didn't have the money to launch a new product. So he had a tough decision to make, and in the spring of Seen he made the first of those

tough decisions. The company was losing money, so he made the call to cut twenty five percent of the jobs at Pebble in March. Now, without a new product, his company was going to go under, and so he turned once again to the platform they got him started, Kickstarter. This would be the third and final campaign or Pebble. The campaign was officially for a trio of products. You had the Pebble Too, so the successor to the original smart watch, the Pebble Time Too, and the Pebble Core.

The Pebble Too went back to that monochromatic display that was made famous by the original smart watch, but The new version also had a heart rate sensor, the little light that can detect how when blood is passing through your veins, so it can start counting up your heart beats that way and tell you what your heart rate is. The time to also had a heart rate sensor, and its color screen was larger than the previous time watch.

The Core was a totally different kind of product. It was meant to be an activity tracker for runners, and it had its own cellular antenna, so you could have this hooked up to an account and you would not have to carry a smartphone with you. You would just jog around with this this device, this this little square called the Core, and it could snap up on to

either your shirt or your waistband. It would act as a pedometer and do other features as well, and it could just dial directly into the cellular network to send that information onto your account. You didn't have to have a smartphone with you, so you didn't have to carry your phone. You could also use the Core to dial in an S O S signal if you needed it

if you encountered some sort of emergency situations. So that was to help tell runners, yeah, you don't need to carry your phone with you, you still will be fine. If there's an emergency situation, you can use the device to do this. But the device didn't have like a display or anything. It did have a h an audio jack, so you could plug headphones into it and listen to music and stuff, so it's kind of interesting. It was a very different style product than what Pebble had been doing.

The goal for this campaign was one million dollars, so twice that for the time, and like the other campaigns, it also was a big success. By the conclusion, it raised nearly twelve point eight million dollars, which means that Pebble has three of the top five performing Kickstarter campaigns of all time. Three of those all came from the same company. Unfortunately, while the campaign funded successfully, those products would never actually emerge and go out to backers. Pebble

was a sinking ship. Its debt had grown and it wasn't making enough in fundraising or sales to keep it afloat. By December twenty sixteen, Midchaikovsky could no longer say no to any proposed deals, So when Fitbit came in and proposed an acquisition that would include the intellectual property of Pebble and also some of their engineers, but not Pebble's

hardware or its debt. He agreed to the sale, and the deal amount was not made public, but analysts estimated was somewhere between thirty four million and forty million dollars, which might not have even been enough to cover Pebble's

debt at that point. Pebble did promise to refund all the pledges that backers had made for the Pebble to the time, too, and the core and Fitbit promised to continue to support the Pebble service through the back end, at least for a little while, to have the service going so that you could still download apps, develop apps. Things would still work with your Pebble Watch, but that would come to an end in June two eighteen, when Fitbit ended support for the Pebble so you can no

longer get Pebble apps. The voice recognition features no longer work because they depended upon servers that were on the back end. You can't respond to emails or SMS messages through your Pebble Watch. You can still get notifications, but you can't really act on those notifications in any big meaningful way. So, in other words, all the various Pebble watches behave more or less like the original Pebble before the App Store came out, but with even fewer options.

Notifications will continue to work on Pebble watches as long as the Vanion apps for iOS and Android continue to work, But should there ever come an OS update for either of those platforms that breaks that app functionality, those notifications are going to stop too, and then you'll just have a watch with limited utility. Midchaikovsky these days now works at y Combinator, that same accelerator where he got his company kind of off the ground, and there he tries

to help would be startup leaders. He shares his knowledge and his experience, both the good stuff and the bad stuff, to help other startup company launchings avoid those problems and take advantage of the things he knows. Fitbit, meanwhile, has had its own share of problems, which you know I've

talked about in previous episodes of Tech Stuff. The company traded at nearly fifty dollars per share back in fifteen, but by the time the acquisition came around in these shares were down to around seven dollars fifty cents per share, and today as I record this, they're trading at just around six dollars per share. So fitbed has also struggled

since well before and since acquiring Pebble. Whether they can get things moving again remains to be seen, but it does seem like the smart watch mode that that form factor. In general, I don't think anyone has really nailed at Apples come close. For Apple owners, people who own you know, iOS devices, Uh, it's an extension of that experience. And so I think out of all the smart watches I have personally seen, they are the closest to getting it right. But it's only right if you also happen to have

iOS devices. I do not, so I don't have an Apple watch. It would make no sense. I don't have an iPhone, so I wouldn't wouldn't really work for me. And I haven't seen an Android based smart watch that has truly blown me away. I've seen some that I thought were interesting, but none that I felt were a must have. And it makes me wonder if there is

such a thing as a must have smart watch. Maybe it means that someone just hasn't hit on the right formula yet, or maybe it just means that that's just a form factor that's never really going to reach must

have status. Maybe a fitness tracker that also has some timekeeping elements is all you need, because I think for a lot of people, at least you know, including myself, really, but I think more than just you know, people like me, fitness trackers have a lot more compelling use cases than smart watches, especially if you have a fitness tracker that

also gives you notifications. Um I have a fitness tracker that does that, And while I don't think it's as versatile as a Pebble smart watch was, it does enough stuff well or well enough that it suits my purpose. So will we ever see the ultimate smart watch? I don't know. I don't know if there's a market for it. But Pebble certainly gave it a shot, and for a while a lot of us thought they had really succeeded. And for a while they did. They always were able

to get enthusiasm and excitement from their community. They just weren't able to translate that into a long term working business. So here's hoping we see something come out of this that is positive in the long run. It may be that some of those features get worked into Fitbit we may have to wait around and find out, but in the meantime, let's wrap this up. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a person, a specific technology you would love

to hear more about, send me a message. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter handle for both of those is tech Stuff h s W. You can go and visit our merch store at t public dot com slash tech Stuff. That's t e public dot com slash tech stuff, and hey, we got new designs in there. You can get yourself a princely some T shirt. You bought that T shirt for a Princely Some, I actually did buy one. I did not request a

free one. I bought one of those. It's on its way to me. Now. You can be like me, or you can go and buy a different shirt. That's fine. I I appreciate it. Every purchase goes to help out the show, so we greatly appreciate that. And don't forget to follow us over on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot Com two