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Pebble founder's comeback is a battery case for iPhone and AirPods
After ushering in the smartwatch movement in 2012, Eric Migicovsky's Pebble brand fell by the wayside. The company was saved from bankruptcy by Fitbit, which acquired its talent and software last year, but ditched its beloved devices. Now, the man behind the e-watch timepiece is returning to the site of his greatest success: Kickstarter. And, this time, he's packing an iPhone case.
Pebble CEO bets big on developers for the smartwatch's future
Pebble has come a long way since its debut way back in April 2012, having sold more than 190,000 smartwatches and growing the company from 11 employees to 40 in the span of a little over a year. Now that the hardware has proven immensely popular, the company is shifting its focus to software, and nowhere is that more evident than its big announcement this week. It not only seriously expanded iOS 7 support, but it also introduced the second version of its SDK, which should hopefully get its nascent developer community excited about making even more apps for the eponymous smartwatch. Eric Migicovsky, CEO of Pebble, sat down at Expand NY to give a little more insight into the origins of Pebble and the vision of the company going forward.
Live from Expand: Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky
The age of the smartwatch, it seems, is upon us, thanks in no small part to the success of Pebble. What began life as a record-breaking Kickstarter success has grown into a wearable phenomenon. We sit down with the company's CEO to discuss Pebble's successes and where it goes from here. November 9, 2013 3:55:00 PM EST Follow all of Engadget's Expand coverage live from New York City right here!
Pebble's Migicovsky: we're focused on software, not hardware right now (video)
"We future-proofed Pebble quite a bit," says Eric Migicovsky. "We put a lot of tech into Pebble because we knew that the watch we shipped to Kickstarter backers [was] what people were going to judge us on." The hardware startup's CEO is in New York for a few days, hitting the Big Apple after a recent appearance at an MIT hackathon, a chance to interact directly with the developer community his company holds so dear. After a tremendously successful crowdfunding campaign and subsequent product launch, Migicovsky's focus has shifted from hardware to user experience -- a job that means fixing bugs and helping to bring the next killer app to the wearable platform. "What we're focused on right now is software," explains the soft-spoken exec. "We know that there are hundreds of thousands of Pebbles out there. We had our Kickstarter backers, who were the first to support us. Our job now, almost exclusively as a company, is to move the software forward. Pebble has the really cool ability to update the firmware over the air. It gets better as we publish more software updates. There's been some gaps, we've moved quickly and broken some things, but we're working to make sure that the moment you open up a Pebble box, it's making your life better in tiny ways."
Eric Migicovsky on Pebble's origin, smartwatch philosophy and what's wrong with the competition
Pebble is an unequivocal success story thus far -- setting Kickstarter funding records and making its way to retail outlets. However, the road it's taken hasn't been been all smooth, and at TechCrunch Disrupt today, company CEO Eric Migicovsky spoke about Pebble's beginnings and some of the challenges it faced as a hardware startup. Migicovsky said that he first started working on Pebble's precursor five years ago, not because he thought it would become a business but because "it was something I wanted to have," he said. That first prototype was essentially a hacked Arduino strapped to his wrist, and while it "didn't work too well as a watch" due to poor battery life and performance, he got a lot of positive feedback from other folks who saw it. Those folks geeking out over that prototype is what convinced him to enter the smartwach business.
inPulse Bluetooth smartwatch gets Facebook Places check-in app for Android (video)
Ever since Allerta released an SDK for its well-hyped inPulse smartwatch, it was only a matter of time before we start seeing more practical applications that take this Bluetooth peripheral beyond the BlackBerry ecosystem. For instance, the latest example comes from the inPulse's very own Lead Designer Eric Migicovsky, who happens to be a fan of Facebook Places and possibly an Android convert. Rather than having to pull out his Nexus One for every check-in, Migicovsky can now use his simple app on his inPulse to grab a list of nearby locations off the phone, and then check in with just a click of a button. Pretty neat, eh? For those interested, you can grab the project code off inPulse's website and get programming.
