The Origin of Pebble

a pre order. But that being said, the cherry red edition I have does say Kickstarter Edition on the back of it, you know. So that's what's up. But the company Pebble no longer exists. In fact, it hasn't existed since the end of the first watches shipped in twenty three teen, and then three years later the company had disappeared,

most of it getting gobbled up by Fitbit. So today I want to talk about the story behind Pebble and the technology that made the watches work, as well as what went wrong, and that'll be our next episode is sort of the death of Pebble. What caused the company to collapse because in the beginning at least once the actual Pebble smart watch entered into the scene, it looked like everything was gonna be rosy for the company. But

I get ahead of myself. Let's start at the very beginning, and that is a story that begins with its founder, which was a guy named Eric Midjyakovsky, and Midchakovsky grew up in Canada. He attended the University of Waterloo. I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to sing, Abba Tari tells me, it's against our protocol. But he studied engineering at the University of Waterloo, including stuff like robe botics and system engineering,

so really, you know, light subject matter. He spent a one semester in the Netherlands on a special industrial design engineering program in two thousand eight as part of the studies, and it was while he was there that apparently he started to get the idea for a wearable computer. And when you think about the history of computers, seems to point us toward a wearable device in our future if you think about it, because let's let's just take a

moment here. The very first computers were enormous, right, these gigantic machines that some of them were electro mechanical computers in the early early days. They would take up an entire room or sometimes an entire floor of a building, and they were limited in purpose. They couldn't do just anything. They had a pretty strict set of limitations of what they could and could not do. His early computers could be first stuff like you know, computing ballists six, information

for the war. Over time, you started to see mainframe computers, where you would have a centralized mainframe computer and a bunch of dumb terminals attached to it, which would allow multiple people to access the computing power of a mainframe, and you saw more general purpose computing in this era. Programming was not easy during the main frame era. Computing in general was not easy during the main frame era,

but it did open up access to more people. At that point, that era gave way to the mini computer, which, despite what the name suggests, was still a pretty big honkin style of computer. It was, however, more versatile, and it took up less space, like instead of the size of a room, it was sort of the size of a filing cabinet or a desk, but still pretty darn big.

The development of the transistor allowed for maturization, so we started to see smaller and smaller components for these, which allowed us to shrink the size of a computer down, and Gordon Moore observed that the technological and economic push for more transistors per square inch of silicon would result in progressively smaller and more powerful machines. And then by the nineteen seventies we saw the micro computer, which we

would now think of as your your standard desktop. And then the laptop came along in the nineteen eighties, and the smartphone would really pop up in the two thousands. So the general trend was to move from large special purpose devices too smaller general purpose devices capable of doing lots of little things. So if you keep following that line, you could easily come to the conclusion that Midchaikovski had reached,

which was that wearable computers are the future. He started to think about this while he was in the Netherlands, and according to the story uh he was riding a bicycle pretty much everywhere, and like a lot of folks, he had become very much attached to his phone. He stayed in contact with friends and family back over in Canada.

With his phone. He would get messages all the time, but he said, You know, checking your phone means that you have to pull it out of a pocket repeatedly, and if you're riding a bicycle everywhere, that's not really convenient all the time. You know, you come to a stop and then you have to shuffle around to try and reach into your pocket, pull out your phone, look to see if there's anything notable there, and then either

act on it or put your phone away. It's a hassle, So wouldn't it be nice, he thought, if you could just wear a device on your wrist or or something like that, and just take a quick glance to see if you have any notifications that you should respond to. Maybe you get an alert if there's an incoming message or an incoming phone call, and maybe you even see who it is that's reaching out to you, or perhaps you can even read the full incoming message and then

decide what to do from that point. And maybe it's worth it to stop someplace and pull out your phone and return a message or return a call. This thought inspired Eric to get to work on a design for such a device, and he started off with a very broad proof of concept, and this was not even remotely going to resemble something that would become a consumer product. He just wanted to figure out, can I make this work? Can I make something that can do what I'm thinking

it should be able to do? And I'll worry about refining that design later. So is what I want to do possible? He gets to work, He goes back to his room in the Netherlands, and he starts to build a device. And he uses essentially an electronic breadboard, some guts from a Nokia thirty three cell phone, and an Arduino micro controller as his um as his collection of materials to build this proof of concept. And just in case you're wondering what all that is, a breadboard is

the foundation for building circuits. It's frequently used in the design and prototype stage of building a device. Typically we use the term to talk about a specific subset of bread boards. Uh. These are platforms that allow for solderless connections. Mean you don't have to solder wires together and make permanent connections. You can it's sort of plug and play.

So you plug elements into this bread board that connect to each other and form a circuit, and you test it and if it works great, and if it doesn't work, you can easily swap stuff out and replace it with other stuff to build a circuit that works better, or maybe just plane works. Sometimes you build a circuit and nothing happens, and you have to go through the whole

thing and say, well, where did I mess up? But this allows you to rapidly test different designs and debug those designs very quickly before you move from a sort of proof of concept into a prototype model or a a an early production model. The Nokia thirty three ten stuff is pretty easy to understand. He needed some sort of cell phone components to create a device that could receive messages and send notifications of things like incoming calls,

that sort of stuff. The Arduino micro controller's kind of like the brains of this device. Micro Controllers are essentially computers that are on a single integrated circuit, and they typically have a CPU which has also access to some random access memory, so some memories also on the micro controller chip and it can accept data from inputs, it can perform operations on that data and then send the

resulting now transformed information through outputs. And the reason being very vague about this is because they can be put to all sorts of different uses. They tend to be great special purpose computers. They're different from desktops and laptops. Those are general purpose computers. You can do lots of different stuff on those, like you can run productivity software, you can play video games, you can check social media networks, that kind of stuff. Um, micro controllers are meant to

be much more focused. And the flip side of that is while they are more focused and can do fewer things, they tend to be able to do those few things really really well. Now, the Arduino is a programmable micro controller, so you can actually reprogram in our dwin know to be really good at different tasks, not simultaneously necessarily, but you could use in our dw know in one set up and then say, well that was fun, but now I'm gonna break it all down. I'm gonna retrieve the Arduino.

I'm gonna completely rewrite it the programming too, that our dwino, and now I'm going to put it into a totally different implementation. And you can do that. Some micro controllers are more geared toward a very specific purpose and you can't You can't easily reprogram them to do something different. They're just meant to do whatever it was they were

designed to do whatever system they were designed to work within. Now, this was back in two thousand and eight when he starts working on this, when he's in the Netherlands, and keep in mind, two thousand eight was a very different technological landscape from what we see today. In in two thousand eight, when Midchakovsky began to work out this idea,

the iPhone wasn't yet a year old. It had debuted in two thousand seven, and the app store for the iPhone would not launch until June two thousand eight, and a commercial release for Google Android wouldn't appear until the fall of two thousand eight. There was a version of Android that had been out in Badeau since two thousand seven, but the general public really didn't have access to Google

Android until the fall of two thousand eight. So Korski wasn't really looking at iOS or Android as the foundation for his project when he first got started. He was instead looking at BlackBerry from Research in Motion. He was looking at that because it was a smartphone that was really the most popular in the United States at that time. In North America at that time, it was most frequently

associated with corporate executives. Everyone thought of BlackBerrys as being sort of the white collar smartphone, but this was an arrow in the smartphone and not really started to filter into the general population beyond early adopters with Apple's iPhone, and even then, like I said, there was no app store. So Midschakovski would move forward with developing a smart watch that could connect to a BlackBerry phone via Bluetooth, and

he formed a company for this purpose. That company was called Alert to a L L E R T A, which, as I understand it now, is also the name for an allergy medication. But his focus was to build a working consumer smart watch product, and the product's name would ultimately be known as Impulse. I in Pulse and Mischakovsky would participate in a program called Velocity or Vella City if you wanted to say it the way that some people spell it, because it's V E L O big C I T y um. But I've also seen it

spelled just like Velocity. Anyway, he was attending this. This is a program that actually is overseen by the University of Waterloo, and Velocity is a startup incubator, so that means it's a space where students can actually work on ideas for startup businesses. They can get a bit of

a boost invisibility to potential investors. They can learn lessons about how to form good business plans, what sort of strategies you need to follow follow, what sort of things do you need to look out for as potential pitfalls, as well as perhaps get a chance to meet some people, influential people who might be able to pour some money into your idea if they think it's a really good one.

Midchakovsky learned how to create a pitch for his ideas to potential investors at this program, and he would later come back and give guest lectures for students who were in the Velocity program at the University of Waterloo. Minschakovsky be and to lay foundations for some of the features

he would later incorporate into Pebble. He built a smart watch that could display not just the time, but notifications from a BlackBerry phone, including BlackBerry messages UH and complete messages of that, not just a notification that you got one, but you could actually read the message on the phone on the watch rather And by two thousand nine, Alerta

was taking pre orders for the Impulse smart watch. The Invulse was compatible with BlackBerry devices and was pitched as a companion device, not a smartphone on your wrist, nothing like that, non official research in motion gadget, uh And it boasted a one point three inch oh Lad color display, had Bluetooth connectivity at a micro USB port for charging, had a little vibrating motor for alerts and notifications, and the battery life, according to Alerta, was approximately four days

of normal use. It was priced at about one fifty dollars at pre order, which is not bad for a smart watch. So this was kind of setting the ground for the next phase in Eric's quest to create wearable computers, which of course would be the Pebble. I'll talk about that more in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. By the beginning of two thousand eleven, Alerta had created app support for the Impulse which would allow developers to build their own

apps for the hardware, and developers did that. You could do exciting stuff with your Impulse smart watch, like control of PowerPoint presentation, all from the convenience of your watch, but sales were still not going crazy. It was a neat proof of concept. It was a neat project for developers to work on, but they weren't really reaching very many actual customers. Later, in two thousand eleven, Alerta got

to participate in a Y Combinator session. And why Combinator calls itself an accelerator, it's similar to Velocity in many ways. So it's a similar organization where startups are invited to participate. They can work with experts for three months to develop business plans, they can meet with potential investors, they can

pitch their ideas, and so forth. In two thousand eleven, Midyakovsky's Alerta was part of this group, and at one point investors Uri Milner and Ron Conway promised every startup participating in that round of the Y Combinator a one hundred fifty thousand dollar investment. Midyakovsky was able to secure another hundred fifty thousand on top of that, and while three hundred thousand dollars is a princely sum, it's actually not all that much when you remember that Midyakovsky's business

included producing hardware, not just software, not a service. It meant that you had to build something. According to Midyakovski, it was this hardware focus that actually discouraged a lot of investors from supporting him because hardware was seen as a pretty big risk on investment, and there's no surprise there. Keep in mind hardware is really tricky to pull off. You can prototype quickly with stuff like three D printers, right like, you can print off design after design after

design and figure out which one you like. But when it comes to making actual production models the stuff that you're going to sell in stores or online, you need a facility capable of producing quality stuff in large quantities. And you also have to figure out where you're going to buy the various components that go into your product, like the CPUs and the Bluetooth adapters and screens and

batteries and all this kind of stuff. So in many cases, the most cost effective approach is to look to China. China's manufacturing facilities are efficient, they're modernized. Wages in China are lower than many other nations, although there are several Asian countries near China to have even lower wages. And someday I'm going to have to do a full episode about China's manufacturing industry because so many of the products that we enjoy and depend upon are either made in China,

or they have components that are made in China. And this is a pretty complicated issue, not just logistically but also ethically, but that's a discussion for another time. We're not going to get into it here. So Midchakovsky's team was actually working on a much smaller scale. So while they could have looked to China to produce stuff, the numbers that they were producing, the number of units they were producing were small enough where that really didn't need

to be a huge concern. So instead they opted to use a local factory and a garage as the assembly points for the Impulse Watch. They would actually physically put stuff together in a garage themselves, and at the scale they were working at, this made the most sense. They

didn't need to move up another level. So once you've determined where stuff is going to come from, you have to make agreements with all the different parties and set up as a supply chains that you know you you can get the different components on a regular basis when you need them. Components need to go from one end to ty to the next in order to put it together into a final product. All of that eventually has

to be shipped to some sort of distribution center. Usually on a very small operation like the original Alert to Impulse, you could probably do this all out of a home, and in fact they did. But if you grow, then you need to kind of delegate that to like a distribution center, because it will be much more efficient. But lots of stuff can go wrong in this model. Right when you're working with hardware, there's so many different points of failure. If some company along the supply chain has

a shortage that holds everything up. If the manufacturing facility breaks down, that holds everything up. If they're shipping delays that holds everything up. There's so many different stential fail points that a lot of investors shy away from putting money into hardware based businesses because the risk is seen as being too great, Like, yeah, you might make your money back, but there are a lot of different ways you could lose your money. And so that's what they

were discovering with this y combinator. They were able to get, you know, three dollars in funding, and that's nothing to sneeze at, but it was a small amount when you think how much goes into just producing a product. So the Impulse did not exactly set the world by Storm, which didn't help things, right, Uh, it would add support for the Android operating system by the time it came out, so it wasn't just a BlackBerry device by the time it debuted, but it wasn't getting a lot of buzz

or notice outside of like BlackBerry forums. You can do a search today on alerta Impulse, and a lot of those hits you're going to see are from forums like Crackberry, which are that's a BlackBerry like, not an advocacy group, but like a fan group or enthusiast group if you prefer its enthusiasts of Blackberries. So there are a lot of articles and forum posts over there, but in your general text space, there wasn't as much talk going on. The company only sold around one units, and that's no

way to run a business. You're not going to be able to sustain a business that way. So Midchakovsky went back to the drawing board and he and his team decided that they should try again with a new approach on smart watches. They're gonna get rid of the color screen, they're gonna go monochromatic. They go within a battery friendly e paper technology, which would greatly extend the lifespan of the watch. Between charges, you could go a week without

having to charge the thing. They wanted to ensure interoperability with iOS and Android, to make sure they built out an app that would work on both of those platforms, because they were both gaining huge amounts of market share in those early days. They wanted to make sure that the platform was developer friendly, that they gave tools for people to make apps for these watches and encouraged it,

and that that would help support the sales. They wanted to make it water resistant, uh, and they didn't want to go to bonkers with features. They didn't want to throw in so many features that navigation would become difficult or it would end up obscuring some of the more important things that this watch could do. And the new product needed a new name. Midchakovski's team decided to call their new project Pebble, and eventually the company would be

called that too. But how are they going to get the money needed to go through the whole process of design, prototyping, refining, and manufacturing such a smart watch. And the answer turned out to be a fairly young emerging platform for raising cash that would be Kickstarter. Now the original Pebble Kickstarter campaign because there were other ones that we'll talk about

in the next episode. Launched in the spring of twelve, the kick started campaign showed off the new smart watch design, complete with different watch faces, and a discussion about developers and future features for the smart watch. Early backers could contribute ars, and in return they would get a black Pebble watch, which retailed for or was going to retail for one fifty dollars. Only two hundred backers would be

allowed to get a watch at that price. Once those ran out, then you could pledge for an amount of a hundred fifteen dollars and get a black watch. You're still getting a significant discount. If you wanted one an arctic white or cherry red, then it would cost a hundred dollars. They also said that they would hold a vote and backers could vote on what other color would be offered on top of Arctic white or cherry red.

The campaign's goal was set at one thousand dollars. They reached it in the first two hours of the campaign going live. By the end of the campaign, the fundraiser had hit more than ten million, two hundred sixty six thousand dollars. All told, backers ordered nearly sixty nine thousand watches.

Midchakovsky actually chose to conclude the campaign more than a week early to make sure he and his team would be able to meet the commitment they had made with this campaign, and it looked like Midchakovsky had found the solution to his funding problem. But as it turns out, it would ultimately just be like a a peak, but not an indication of how the company was going to perform from that point forward. I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to

thank our sponsors. One of the things Pebble did well in that early phase was that it kept backers updated on how things were going through the Kickstarter platform. So on Kickstarter, if you've never backed to anything on Kickstarter, one thing that you can do is you can get updates through the actual Kickstarter service. They get posted to the website and they can be emailed out to backers.

And Eric Midjakovski found it really important that his backers, who were after all, investors in his company, were informed of progress and also knew about any challenges that the team was running into. So originally the plan was to produce watches and send them out to backers beginning in the fall of two thousand twelve. September two thousand twelve, delays would end up pushing that back to early two thousand thirteen and early two thousand third team was when

I got a chance to see the Pebble. I was actually at c E S and Eric and a couple of his team members were there at the show to demonstrate the watch. They had a conference room that they were able to use for an hour and they gave a presentation and allowed press to come up and take photos and to get a closer look at the devices. So I did. I got an up close look at it. I really liked what I saw, and that weekend I put in a pre order. As the watches had not

yet started shipping. The kickstarting campaign and closed, but pre orders were still open and the watches had not yet shipped out to people. By the end of January, Pebble was sending out watches to backers. So January two thousand thirteen, people started getting their Kickstarter watches. And here's another spot where I think the team really got it right, and it seems like a no brainer, right that that you send out the thing that you told people you would

give them when they pledged their money to you. But I've seen other companies mess this up. Pebble sent out watches to Kickstarter backers. First, you had the Kickstarter backers, you had the pre orders, and Pebble said, we are going to make sure we make good on those pledges first. Because you guys were there from the very beginning. You were the reason why we were able to move forward.

But if you listen to my episode about Kickstarter failures, you might remember I talked about the Coolest Cooler, which was the first kickstarted campaign to actually pass Pebble in the amount of funds raised, because Pebble had set a record when it hit that ten million plus mark in dollars raised on a campaign, and it wasn't until the Coolest Cooler came around more than two years later for

someone to break that record. But the creator of Coolest Cooler misjudged how expensive it was going to be to produce the actual cooler, and to make matters worse, they decided to sell the coolers on Amazon before they had made good on all the backer pledgers. So in pledges rather so in other words, you might have pledged a

certain amount to support coolest cooler. You know, you put forward your a couple hundred bucks and you're waiting anxiously to get this phenomenal cooler with like a speaker built into it and stuff. And meanwhile you then here that they've put the cooler up for sale on Amazon, but you have yet to receive your your unit, and you might think, well, what's the deal here? I paid the money, I supported the company, Why aren't they sending one to me before they put it in a store. And it

can really turn supporters against you. For good reason, Pebble did not make that mistake. I suspect Midchakovski even pulled that plug a little early on the campaign, specifically so that he and his company would be able to build out the Kickstarter editions of the Pebble and send them out without incurring a huge loss that would necessitate finding some other revenue or investment stream to keep the is going.

It doesn't do you any good to have an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign if it turns out that the production costs are going to be such that you'll never recapture them. Right, So, if you're if you're offering a huge discount on what is going to be the retail price for your proposed hardware product, and enough people support it, well, that eats into your margins, right, you know, you usually want to sell something for more than what it cost you to

make it. If you're offering this huge discount in order for you to get some startup capital so that you can actually get things moving, but that discount is too steep,

then you're really shooting yourself in the foot. You're you're starting off like that's a recipe for a creating debt, and I think the Jakovski was being cognizant of that and being careful, and that's one of the reasons why he ended the Kickstarter campaign before it would have timed out, because it was getting to the point where they were worrying about being able to meet that demand, and so

I think it was a responsible move. After the Kickstarter watches, Pebble started to send out the preorder watches and that's when I got mine, and again mine even though it was not I didn't back the Kickstarter project, I got a Kickstarter edition. If you look at the back of my cherry red Pebble watch, it says Kickstarter addition on it, and I kind of like that because I'm a geek, although it makes me feel a little like a poser because I did not back it on Kickstarter. I just

got the watch. So let's talk about the technology that's actually inside this original Pebble watch. The CPU in the original Pebble was an arm Cortex M three. This is a type of thirty two bit processor, and it's most commonly found in things like automotive systems or industrial control systems, so it's not the sort of thing you would typically find in a watch. On the circuit board of the watch, there was also an accelerometer chick up that would detect

changes in speed or direction. This could tell the watch that you were looking at it. For example, so when you lift your your wrist up so that you could take a look at the watch face, it could detect the change in acceleration or that there is an acceleration happening. I keep saying change in acceleration. It could detect that there is an acceleration and then activate the screen so that you can see what time it is. Uh. The

watch also had a Bluetooth adapter. I'm sure you are all familiar with Bluetooth, so you know, it's just a wireless communications protocol that allows for low energy data transfers, typically small data packets. And the watch really just had to display short notifications or alert you to income and calls, so that was the perfect protocol for it. The screen also was a sharp l C D. It was monochromatic and used E paper display technology, which requires less power

than typical backlit screens. Any paper is really cool stuff. Inside a monochromatic E paper display, typically it works like this. You have capsules, and those capsules there, you know, they look like little plastic balls, just they're very very very tiny, and they typically are in one of two colors. Again we're talking monochromatic here, so black or white. All the black capsules when they are pulled up onto the back side of the screen would show up as text or

illustrations or whatever it may be. Uh, And they all carry the same electrical charge all the black capsules. The white capsules carry the opposite electrical charge. Then when you pass a you apply a charge across a transparent electrode which is on the underside of the screen of the display. So if you were to remove the display from the watch and you were to look at the underside, that's

where you would see this transparent electrode. It would create this electric charge that was opposite that of the UH apsules it wants to attract. So let's say that the black capsules have a positive electrical charge on it, you would put a negative electrical charge across this electrode. That would pull those positively charged black capsules up to the surface and it would that's what allowed the watch to actually display stuff like fonts, you know, letters, numbers, pictures,

that kind of thing. And UH, all you have to do is change that charge to change the shape of what you're looking at on the display. The capsules stick to the opposite charged areas and the patterns that were designated by the CPU, and they stay that way until a new signal is sent. So the watch really only needs to expend energy whenever the messaging on the display

has to change. So if you look at your watch and it's three, and then you look at your watch twenty seconds later, it's still well, the watch hasn't had to send any extra energy to display that three twenty five. It just had to form the number of three twenty five. The first time you looked at it, and until it's three twenty six, it doesn't have to spend any energy

at all, at least not for the display. The displays are reflective and they rely upon outside lighting for view and they work great in bright lights like outdoors, which is sometimes a thing that makes it difficult to see traditional backlit displays. Right. So if you are looking at something like a typical L C D or L E D screen, usually you have light coming from behind the screen that highlights what you're looking at well in a brightly lit area, that can be canceled out and you

can't really see very well. I'm sure you've had this experience. But the e paper displays are more reflective, so you're actually dependent upon that external light to be able to

see the stuff. The pebble had physical buttons for navigation rather than a touch screen interface, and it ditched the USB port of the impulse for a magnetic charging strip on the side of the watch, so the watches charging cable had a magnetic section that was of course an opposite charge, so that they would or they would attract each other, so you have like a north pole in the south pole attracting each other. And that would allow the charging cable to snap into place properly against the

pebble and allow it to charge. The nice thing about this is because there was no port for you to plug a cord into, the team was able to make the case water resistant. It wasn't totally water proof, but it was water resistant to a depth of thirty seven meters or a hundred twenty feet, so pretty significant. Inside the watch was also a motor with an offset weight.

So when the motor would spin, uh, whenever you get incoming notification, it would create a vibration in the watching you would feel and let you know, hey, I just got a notification, just like the vibrating motor in a cell phone or a video game controller. Now, when you paired this watch, you did so using the Pebble app. There's an app that would run on top of Android or iOS that kind of thing, and that would allow users to customize their watch faces. They could choose from

several different watch faces right out of the gate. But it also allowed access to a growing developer community, and developers were creating their own watch faces. Sometimes they're developing other types of apps that could take advantage of the fact that your Watch would become essentially a little Bluetooth

remote control for all sorts of different stuff. So this was again Pebble deciding to create a platform that would support a community not just of customers, but of developers, and really anyone could become a developer if they really wanted to. So this was the beginning for Pebble, and the reaction to the crowdfunding campaign seemed to validate Michaikovsky's belief that wearable computing was ready for prime time. But

the following years would put that to the test. So in our next episode, I'll talk about how Pebble followed up their first watch, the obstacles the company faced, and it's ultimate and sad fate. Spoiler alert, but that wraps up this episode. If you have suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, send me a message. You can email me. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter.

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