Fossil buys Misfit for a bigger stake in wearables
After launching an Android smartwatch and a bunch of fitness wearables, Fossil Group announced today that it's also snapping up Misfit, which is best known for its svelte Shine fitness tracker. The deal, which is worth around $260 million, gives Fossil access to an existing market of wearable buyers, a team that's been trying to figure out how to design attractive wearables for years and a cloud platform for health tracking. Basically, you can expect some pretty attractive devices resulting from this union. And it comes just in time for Misfit, which didn't have many upgrades in store for its Shine 2 health tracker. Now that plenty of phones and cheap gadgets can offer the basics of activity tracking, tech companies have to work harder to prove why we need standalone health trackers at all.
