I'm quite angry. This sucks so bad. I "ordered" a Time 2 via Kickstarter.
I'm glad they are refunding me, but that makes me think... WTF, did they not produce any Time 2's? Or are they all going to the landfill? How long have they been knowing that they are going to be insolvent? This doesn't happen overnight! Was the last Kickstarter a gamble?
Why does everybody have to aim for total market dominance to be successful? They overreached and now the customers suffer. There should be a place for "small" manufacturer selling a niche product ("small" with a certain understatement like German "Mittelstand" enterprizes - I mean Pebble sold millions of units). If they had to increase the price by 10% to be sustainable, they still would have smashed the Kickstarter.
Sometimes I think there is a secret cabal conspiring so we can't have nice things ;-). The same one that decided that cell phone batteries have to be non-removable, touchscreens glossy, and wearables either mini-smartphones or bluetooth-step-counters.
_All_ Kickstarters are gambles. Their messaging[1] is pretty clear in the fact that you aren't buying a product, you're contributing money with the hope that the maker will deliver on their promises.
Right, but I meant a gamble on their side, not the buyers'. Like when MtGox lost their bitcoins and ran as a fractional reserve trying to cover what happened. Or an actual addicted gambler trying to cut their losses by playing more. I wonder when they learned they were going out of business, and if the last Kickstarter was just a Hail Mary...
I think this is an example of an issue that some companies that do kickstarter/preorder campaigns have.
They try to do a Hardware project that pushes boundaries and try to collect money to early during the development process at a time when it is really impossible to set a ship date. (Also a factor is company inexperience with manufacturing) This is why so many projects have to delay shipments and sometimes eventually run out of money without getting to a shippable product.
Companies that are successful typically do their preorders at a point where they have already completed multiple production runs at a cm in china and are ready to ramp for mass production. the order count helps justify the costs of ordering mass production parts. The issue of course is that it means investors had to be willing to fund seed/series A without seeing any traction.
A while back GPG announced their Kickstarter campaign for a game to be named Human Resources. It was later announced that they actually didn't have enough funds to survive if the Kickstarter didn't go through[1]. The campaign stalled and the entire company went under.
People were understandably angry. And it wasn't so much the risk (because none of the backers lost their money), it's that the company wasn't upfront about risks. GPG's leadership knew going in that the company would go under if the campaign didn't become a miraculous success, but backers didn't find that out until after the campaign had stalled.
Presumably, backers wouldn't have been informed at all if the campaign had succeeded.
This situation with Pebble is even more strange because apparently their campaign succeeded (in raising money beyond their target goal)....
Even though Kickstarter explicitly says it's not a store, it doesn't mean people don't think it is. Perception = reality. This news will most likely have the largest effect on Kickstarter, specifically in the tech category, more than anything else. There have been many failures of promises on Kickstarter, but when your top 4 most funded projects are all now dead, people are going to start thinking twice about backing companies.
I don't want to hit a person while they're down (in the dumps about their "purchase"), but going to Kickstarter for version 3 was my sign to give it a rest on buying Pebbles. Maybe it was just marketing, but it caused me to wonder "have you not made enough profit to support rolling out your third version without outside backing?" If it finally hit retail, great, I might get one then. But in the meantime I bought a Garmin Fenix instead of financing someone else's manufacturing interest-free.
Pebble wasn't aiming for market dominance, they were aiming for market traction. How many Pebbles do you see in the wild? Now, how many Apple Watches do you see? How many Garmins? FitBits? "Notifications" is the baseline these days. It's just a given if I buy a fancy electronic watch. So where does that put Pebble? Having the same notification functionality as other devices, only not as slick and more cheap looking. Oh, Pebble has fitness stuff now? Have fun going up against Garmin and FitBit. As more and more devices gain the functionality that defined Pebble, Pebble went from the leader in this segment to playing catch-up.
Sometimes I think there is a secret cabal conspiring so we can't have nice things ;-).
Of course you know better. :-) Pebble sold you a device, everyone else sells you an ecosystem. All the fitness add-ons in the world won't make a difference if there isn't some form of analysis and data storage behind it. I can go back to stuff my Garmins have recorded over a decade ago. FitBit's got something similar, Nike (back when they made hardware), and others I've missed. Apple and Android watches tie into their respective systems for more functionality than just notifications on your wrist. Nope, no cabal, the market just moved on and Pebble got left behind. We do have nice things, they just don't have "Pebble" silkscreened on them now.
>How many Pebbles do you see in the wild? Now, how many Apple Watches do you see?
Almost the same number for me. That said I barely see any Apple watches and most people I know who bought them have left them in the bedside drawer long ago
Totally this. Kickstarter is for, well, kick-starting things. It's not meant to be a business model. If you're already a million-dollar company, and you can't bring a new revision of your product to market without crowdsourced funding, maybe you're not doing it right.
> Pebble sold you a device, everyone else sells you an ecosystem.
Pebble actually had the full ecosystem going, app store, online integration, accessories, the whole hog. So much so that (for me at least) it was actually a /bad/ thing. I don't want my smartwatch to be a portal into web services and a means of datamining my life. I don't want a subscription to a watch service. I just want it to be a watch that I can program and that can talk to my phone.
> have you not made enough profit to support rolling out your third version without outside backing
I interpreted it more as a way to build hype around pre-orders for something that wouldn't come out for a while. In light of them going under, your explanation seems to gain some support, but I still wonder if they were also using Kickstarter as a hype builder and pre-order managment system.
They genuinely believed they were going to change the world, drank too much of their own kool-aid and eventually ran out of money.
Pretty sure they feel terrible right now and I don't think they slept well for the past 6 months.
Could someone reasonable see this coming before KS? Most likely yes. Would they get this far without taking big risks? Most likely no.
You feel angry you didn't get your pebbles, I feel angry I didn't get my two pebbles and a core.
Imagine how they feel - reportedly turned down $750 mil and less than a year later had to apply for a job at another struggling wearables manufacturer.
You can take the "going to change the world" too far. They are bankrupt and still believe they're "Making Awesome Happen". Investors lost their money. Suppliers will not get paid. Employees are losing their jobs just before Christmas. Customers will not get their orders. Current customers are left without support and - in the near future - a limited functioning device. How is that "Making Awesome Happen"? A more humble attitude would be more appropriate.
VC/exponential growth increase risk of exploding the whole company.
In alternative reality:
1. They could hire way less aggressive and stay lean. Product development will be much slower, but they can operate cash flow positive.
2. With Kickstarter/pre-orders they could avoid taking any serious VC funding.
3. They probably need to move less expensive region than SF Bay Area. SF is great for go big or go home, but not an ideal place for long-term sustainable business.
4. Probably the price of watches would be higher and they will be niche, but still there are tons of watch manufactures that survived decades.
I agree, and it's such a shame to see this company/product's demise due to overreach.
Per their site, Pebble's current product line has three different case designs, each available in at least three different finishes, and one with an additional heart rate monitor. That seems like an awful lot of SKUs for a small hardware startup to develop, manufacture, stock, fulfill and support. Their latest kickstarter added even more models.
From my armchair, it looks like they tried to expand and segment their market too quickly, for the sake of both growth and the optics of their product line in comparison to Apple.
I'm in the early stages of creating the world's tiniest "hardware startup" (the product consists of a single piece of metal), and it's a constant discipline to not get caught up in offering variations on the base design. Every product design choice ripples through the supply chain, increasing complexity and overhead at your peril.
Good luck to all the folks at Pebble in their new endeavors.
Totally this. I'd gladly pay double for Time 2 if it meant the platform will grow sustainably.
> Sometimes I think there is a secret cabal conspiring so we can't have nice things ;-). The same one that decided that cell phone batteries have to be non-removable, touchscreens glossy, and wearables either mini-smartphones or bluetooth-step-counters.
I feel that all the time. Of course it's not a secret cabal, just the free market promoting get-rich-quick schemes and making it harder for sustainable businesses and actually useful products to survive.
Unfortunately companies can't make a sustainable business around people like you. If they were to double the price, then they are going toe to toe with the features and infrastructure behind the Apple Watch, and that's an area they just can't compete in at their size.
Yep, everything in the past year has indicated that they were underpricing their offerings. I'm not even talking about turning a large margin, but that they were offering more services than they could sustain, regardless of market penetration.
This last kickstarter raised $12million while only requiring $1million to fund. I'm really unsure how they managed to get 12x the "required" funding but still fail to deliver.
It's pretty common for Kickstarter projects to ask for a lot less than they actually need. Hence the reason for all the stretch goals and such. Companies like the story to be that they blew their goal out of the water, not just barely creeped over the funded line.
> I'm glad they are refunding me, but that makes me think... WTF, did they not produce any Time 2's? Or are they all going to the landfill?
The probably made some, but it takes money to turn any component inventory they may have into shippable products. They probably burned all of the money on mechanical tooling and part procurement already, and maybe hit a major issue in doing so (critical component is suddenly a very different price, etc). All of that inventory either is returned (if possible) or ends up liquidated on the secondary electronics component market for pennies on the dollar, to pay back the creditors. Custom parts, tools, etc have less of a resale market, but I'm sure a company in China will be happy to pick them up cheap to make smartwatches for the local market.
> and maybe hit a major issue in doing so (critical component is suddenly a very different price, etc)
There were some stories circulating that their provider of screens for Time 2 is in financial troubles, so presumably may have not been able to fulfill the order.
Having done a hardware Kickstarter, I can tell you it's not as easy as just "increase the price". Hardware is hard. We did two crowdfunding campaigns: almost broke even on the first one, and are still in massive debt from the second one. Although I'm glad we came through for our backers, I wish we had just refunded everyone. The aftermath has been incredibly stressful both mentally and fiscally.
Hardware isn't really profitable or even sustainable until you are shipping millions of units. That's why you don't see many hardware startups succeeding without either massive amounts of VC funding, or a really cheap-to-make product that you can sell for much more than it's worth (e.g. Fitbit). That's why any investor will tell you that the subscription model is basically the only way to go if you're making hardware.
According to one of the developers, they produced a very tiny number of Time 2's for testing. She has said those ones all worked perfectly but even she didn't even get one.
It's clear to me that Fitbit bought Pebble to kill it. It was the only smart watch that had good functionality, good battery life, good pricing, and easy user programmability. So of course it had to die. The founders no doubt got a nice payout and the customers, as usual, got forcibly sodomized.
Kickstarter is like the blind men talking about the elephant, its just too big. Cutting edge hardware? Gonna be risky, it almost always fails. On the other hand the board game and RPG scene on KS is reliable as the worlds slowest amazon-like fulfillment store, it always arrives in ten short months (after having been promised six). I swear board game developers are as bad as software devs at estimating delivery dates.
Of course that's kind of a mis-use of the kickstarter site... you've been in the euro/war/rpg board gaming business for over 25 years and you've had 8 completely successful kickstarters and now you're starting your 9th... I'm not naming names, but come on, you're not "kickstarting" anything, this is just your online store.
Kickstarter, the company and the 'creators', depend on this expectation mismatch. If everyone who kickstarter 'wasn't for' didn't use it, there'd be no kickstarter.
You'll get a refund. What's the problem? I've lost money backing stuff where the money just disappeared. Not even that has angered me. Kickstarter is not a store.
Did they aim for total market dominance? I haven't followed it to closely, but to me it didn't seem like they did any totally crazy expansions. Seems like they should have developed further models in smaller steps, but would people have bought enough of those then?
If they have 20 millions in debt, just increasing the price on their kickstarters slightly wouldn't have done it, so they obviously overdid something.
No. Chinese manufacturers are building whatever you pay them for. It's literally a human-powered API converting designs to hardware. It's the western companies that don't want to build nice things.
I'm sad/angry/depressed as any Pebbler right now, so I won't repeat those comments. Instead, since this is HN after all, let me ask - what shall we do?
In a year or two, when my current Pebble Time fails, I'd love an equivalent smartwatch to be available. Since the market doesn't seem to want it, how can we make it happen anyway?
Features I'm looking for are, in order of priority:
- always-on screen, preferably color (like Pebble Time), but monochromatic will do
- open SDK for writing software for the watch
- battery life at least the one like Pebble's - 5-7 days
- *zero* dependency on cloud for it to work
- basic, standard suite of sensors onboard - compass/magnetometer/accelerometer, maybe a mike
- elegant form factor
Now I can go the DIY route (I have a friend with experience in making smartwatches from ground-up, though I'd look at some SOCs instead of going the uC + separate sensors route - to save on watch size). Many of us here could do it. But honestly, I have shit ton of other stuff to do, and I'd rather pay for such a watch and enjoy the ecosystem, just like I did with Pebbles. And if everyone goes the DIY route, and there won't be some standardization along the way, there will be no community. Any idea how to coordinate and make this happen? Maybe a community, open-hardware design + crowdfunding for production?
I feel like I'm starting to sound like a fanboy - but it's because I've had other smart watches and it's just so much better. Why not consider garmin? Not sure if their SDK is going to hit the mark as I'm guessing you want complete control and it's definitely not that, but they have everything else you've asked for.
Thar Garmin watches are so much more expensive and do an excessive amount of stuff. In Canada, for $150 I could have a pebble time with a color screen, great battery life, sleep tracking, step tracking and that can do notifications. That's all I use it for, I might like a heart rate monitor on occasion, but paying way more for extra stuff I'll never or rarely use doesn't appeal to me at all. The only Garmin smartwatch I can find in stores is over $800. This isn't a real alternative.
You've tried several different brands of smart watches and you like Garmin the most? Can I ask what you actually use your smart watch for?
I've always had nice wristwatches (and prefer to look at my wrist for the time instead of my phone) but I've been thinking about buying one recently. Most of them seem centered around health / fitness tracking, though, and that's not something I need or want. Mostly, I just want a "regular watch" (date/time) and perhaps notifications of incoming calls/messages (not necessarily even the content of messages -- just, for example, "SMS from Alice" or "Call from Bob", enough to let me decide whether to go pick up my phone). Garmin's API/SDK looks pretty cool, though.
I looked at some devices a week or two when purchasing a new FitBit for the girlfriend but, like I said, they had loads of features I didn't want. I'm tempted to just continue to wait on purchasing a "smart watch" and get a new wristwatch instead. I'm not really thrilled at the idea of having to charge my watch all the time anyways.
There are Chinese companies working on similar products, for example WeLoop[0], Goclever[1].
People are already working on open-source firmware for some of these watches[2], so I think there's a reasonably good chance that either some of these companies will create a decent alternative to pebble, or at least good enough hardware which can be used with community-developed firmware (and even more importantly: apps on the phone side).
One problem for open source HW watch is that a lot of other folks will just use their factories in ShenZhen to clone the HW sell it for cheap without any R&D and marketing.
Similar to how OrangePI leverage Raspberry Pi situations.
It becomes race to the bottom ($5-10 pi zero) and no one can make $ in the market in both short and long term.
There seem to be a lot of sub $20 watch base on following links - not sure how good/bad are they.
My primary worry is that at some point, the hardware will die.
And by crowdfunding I meant crowdfunding of manufacturing; the hardware would be open source, ensuring you could (with enough skills or good enough friends) make your own instead of buying one, and the software ecosystem would be compatible with it.
I've been working on a DIY watch off and on a bit.
One of the bigger obstacles for me personally has been bluetooth notifications. I have found surprisingly few examples online of people getting it to actually work, and if you read through their work more closely, it only very barely works. I've tried to reproduce what other people have done and had it actually work even less than that.
I was thinking of selling a pre-programmed bluetooth module with apple and android notifications etc. if I ever got it working, figuring there must be other people in the same situation with this pain point. So far the idea that I could do a better job than others that have tried has turned out to be hubristic, though.
I'm really looking forward to something like a Trivoli [1] or Chronos [2]. It gives me most of the things I use the watch for (alarm and silent notifications) and allows me to use a nicer watch (or different watches, even). I don't get screen that allows me to deal with notifications, but over time I've found that to be 1) kind of rude if I'm talking to someone. 2) For the most part if there's something I need to deal with, it's easier to take the phone out. Mostly I just want to be notified if certain, important notifications come in (SMS, Google Hangouts, possibly one of my email addresses). Your use case may vary, of course.
Obviously we all need something different, but that's what I'm waiting for.
I was planning on getting the Time Round for myself this Christmas, and I'm pretty bummed that this is happening.
I'd be pretty interested in making something like this happen and figuring it out and leading the charge so-to-speak. It'd be an awesome experience, at the very least. However, I have no experience on the hardware side of things. I'm down to learn, but the software side is what I do have some experience with.
I am so sad about this. I had told myself that at least I'd get a Time 2 and a Core, and stave myself off before the sadness hits again that Pebble is gone.
Pebble's products were an excellent example of lateral technology. No need for high DPI on your watch, because they made something that looks good with few pixels. Making battery life a priority in a world of WiFi-enabled pressure cookers.
Even when the battery ran out you still got 24 hours of a watch that would at least tell the time!
I have no idea if it is possible to produce something like Pebbles at low quantities, but I would love to see an open design with similar specs. I think these watches are better than anything else out there, and it's sad the design is going to disappear.
>Making battery life a priority in a world of WiFi-enabled pressure cookers.
I literally wear my Time Steel for 23 hours and 45 minutes per day. The only time it's charging and not on my wrist is when I'm in the shower, and over the course of a regular day it never drops below 80%. If I'm going away for a weekend I don't even have to bother with the charger.
I charge my first gen Pebble literally once a week. Monday morning, I get to work, and put my pebble on charge. By the time stand-up happens a couple of hours later (my first meeting of the day) it's back on my wrist and good to go for the next week.
I was aiming to get a new Pebble after Christmas, as mine suffers from that screen corruption glitch that plagued the first gens.
I expect this is actually part of the problem, and likely affects many smartwatch producing companies: If it wasn't for the screen glitch, I wouldn't be replacing my watch. It works, does everything I need, and speed isn't an issue. A colour display would be nice, but it's far from important to me. I'm sure the same is true for many Joe Average consumers. There isn't the same impetus to frequently upgrade a watch.
I can't help but think that maybe this is the manufacturing niche the US could fill... High quality, low run manufacturing that people are willing to pay a premium for.
Sorry you did not get your Time 2. I got my Pebble 2 and I really like it. I am sad the core I ordered will not ship as my pebble is not connected to my Windows Phone and GPS would be nice when I run.
The pebble 2 does compete with the fit-bit. This story reminds me of a time when I worked at a small semiconductor equipment manufacture. We were a scrappy team and build a great small footprint tool. We won an order from a larger customer. Everyone was celebrating until our competitor quickly bought us out for cheap and shut us down. A few engineer went over to the new company but not enough to keep the product going.
> I think these watches are better than anything else out there
I'm not sure about that. I read some comments on a few other articles about the Pebble shutdown, and people are recommending the Vector Watch [1]. It's a smart watch with a monochromatic e-ink display, and it has a 30 day battery life.
I agree entirely. It's very rare that something fits a niche so nicely, while the competition misses it by miles.
I have the same feeling about my simple sigma bike computer (though at least there's more options in that niche).
I will use my pebble as long as it continues to work, then it'll get retired to my shelf of tech fails. Most of which failed FAR more spectacularly.
Hmm - I doubt they compare, but then again, one is open-source and nearly infinitely customizable (depending on your budget, skills, and needs) - and one, well - doesn't exist any longer.
Considering that Pebble is stopping product development, cancelling orders, ending warranties, ending support, and essentially completely shutting down I find the positive tone of this post and the Kickstarter update post to be nearly unbelievable.
I know we see plenty of "our incredible journey" posts filled with optimism, but euphemistic language and dozens of photos of watches and happy people and more watches is jarring.
It's not a shame to try hard at something and fail. But it is a shame to fail and pretend you succeeded. We can see through you.
Indeed, the tone, headline, and imagery are bizarrely incongruous to the gravity of the message. I have to assume that internally they're just trying to make sense of a difficult situation and PR is not one of their strengths. One recalls that the first stage of grief is denial...
They might have gotten a relatively lucrative deal with FitBit by way of an asset sale with hiring bonuses for transitioning staff, enough for them to abandon their current efforts without any sort of Hail Mary fundraising or outreach to their customer base. This doesn't seem like an act of desperation to me, and if that's the case then they would have to down-play internal celebration since such a deal negatively impacts their user base. As for Fitbit, they don't have to honor warranties or fulfill orders for Pebble if they scrap the company while still getting what they want. They are competitors, so even if Pebble had strong cash flows worth maintaining, it's still a competing product line they might have eventually consolidated. Cut out the middle man. Buy the assets you want to keep. Avoid the liabilities. Tell customers whatever you think they need to hear.
You know, Pebble has garnered one of the best group of loyal customers I know of: well-off techies.
Had they came to the community and said, "hey we are losing sales and we need everyone to pitch in $10 / year for software support (maybe a web interface for fitness or something) I guarantee a few hundred thousand people would have done it.
Had they shared a coupon with the community (i.e. email add campaign, or add on watch - "buy one, get one half off" for christmas they would have probably had a large bump in orders. Although I recognize this would be a mild annoyance, I can also guarantee they would have sold plenty of units.
This simply seems like poor management and it's frustrating because it's the best smart watch I can find at the moment. It does exactly what I want, is cheaper than the competition, and is dead simple to use.
WTF pebble, you had the product people loved - you just didn't market it well.
>"Had they came to the community and said, "hey we are losing sales and we need everyone to pitch in $10 / year for software support (maybe a web interface for fitness or something) I guarantee a few hundred thousand people would have done it."
What is this based on? I'd be shocked if that worked. I think it'd be a sign of blood in the water, and signal the end (if vendors see this, they're going to want to be paid up front, employees are going to start looking for the exits).
> Had they shared a coupon with the community (i.e. email add campaign, or add on watch - "buy one, get one half off" for christmas they would have probably had a large bump in orders. Although I recognize this would be a mild annoyance, I can also guarantee they would have sold plenty of units.
Pure volume wasn't what sank the ship, I'm sure. It probably would have put them out of business faster.
> "This simply seems like poor management"
That's an easy thing to say, but it's probably more complex than that. They were in a tough spot, with competition from much, much deeper pockets.
I would gladly pay around $10 a year, maybe even $15. My Pebble has been worth it. However, I am now going to return it because if the next Android update breaks the app, it will become a paper weight.
It seems very much like poor management. The "go big, or go home" culture of the valley. Where businesses think if they can't be a billion dollar unicorn, then they might as well die. It makes companies push too hard for explosive growth instead of building a sustainable business.
This is exactly right. 100s of thousands of well off techies strap your product to our body and the best deal you could arrange is to put a bullet in the companies head?
It seems very strange they are basically just shutting down. That has to be an ego driven decision on the FitBit side - they wanted to kill Pebble. Are they even going to use the brand name? The combination of: working production facility, users in the wild, and (the biggest asset) a developer community had to have some value. Now that the deal is done there is no chance to pry that out of publicly traded FitBit, but it seems like this could have had a better outcome.
>This is exactly right. 100s of thousands of well off techies strap your product to our body and the best deal you could arrange is to put a bullet in the companies head?
Actually, I think what happened is that Eric, the CEO, is now a multi-millionaire.
So, this is more of a success story than most of us might consider savory to think about.
I don't think they even have a few hundred thousand customers. Their first one kicked in the neighborhood of 50k supporters. Did they even ship the second?
A hardware company on the hook for fulfilling 50k orders of the sequel has some pretty serious expenses. A sale might have been the best landing and what got everyone a refund for the 2nd.
Their pebble app has 500,000+ downloads on the Google store, and they have 2 million in pebble sales (I believe that's delivered). They've shipped their second Kickstarter last year (Pebble Time Steal).
Pebble Time 2 would have been their third major product. They had the original Pebble, and then the Pebble Time. IIRC the Pebble Steel and Pebble Time Round were sort of secondary projects, but if you include them then they had 4 generations of delivered products.
Yeah, pardon my french but I'm fucking angry this morning.
There's some initial reports that they need service back-end to be live in order to do the initial pairing. My Time Round is a dead watch walking if that's the case.
There's not a comparable smartwatch right now that is like the Time Round, I'd happily have paid for ongoing support.
Assuming all of the ~200,000 kickstarter backers would have been okay with the $10/year software, and no duplication of backers between their three campaigns, and that yearly payment kicking in as soon as each of the three campaigns ended (so before the customers even got their devices), that would have brought in a bit shy of $5m, compared to the ~$43m they brought in from their three campaigns. It's a good thought, but I doubt their revenue stream was only 10% away from being sustainable.
I don't know whether to applaud or criticize those who create open source software on unstable proprietary platforms, but if nothing else it shows what potential good greater openness would serve users.
Um...have you paid attention to the open source space for the past decade?
Audium/Pidgin/libpurple all were originally created to have open source interfaces to close systems (MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc). Most of the OSS work is about reverse engineering and creating open yet compatible tools to use with or in place of closed systems.
If anything, projects like this can help keep Pebble watches alive after the demise of the company.
I can't believe this, just got a Pebble 2 a week ago and now they are literally saying it may not work in the future.
If we rely on their cloud services for activity tracking and app downloads then it will be useless if FitBit doesn't maintain the platform.
I have to say I'm really disappointed and this is a huge blow to people that invest in startups offering hardware. If the company fails forget about the smart stuff you bought, it just won't work anymore.
We should look for ways to minimize the impact on backers. Sadly we'll see more of this in a future in which the products depend a lot on the company cloud services to operate.
Or at least treat any kind of cloud integration as a big negative. Without cloud dependence, the devices can always be hacked and made to work again until hardware dies.
I like how they announce it after Black Friday and Thanksgiving sales. I'm sure they knew of it during the acquisition as it would be all laid out, but they wanted to squeeze in more sales. Hopefully the average consumer gets wind of this and return their product.
Could such a pledge provide enough assurance? If the company folds its IP is up for grubs, this might include their products source code. Right?
If that's the case I would prefer to purchase devices that are actually already running free software or there is free software available to flash on them.
I also have a Pebble 2, what cloud services? The android app checks for a firmware update when you pair but is otherwise standalone.
I enabled sync to google fit because I hoped it would backup sleep data but that does nothing sensible, it's all stored locally (and in fact if you reinstall the Pebble app you lose all your data).
ps: if anyone knows of some software to export these data from an android phone, I'd love to know because I could not find anything
From what I remember, Fitbit has ~30M customers, and Pebble has ~1M. That's just 3% of Fitbit's userbase, so pretty much a rounding error. I don't believe they will care.
As someone who quite likes their time steel and who was patiently waiting for their time 2 this is incredibly frustrating. No other watches do what I want so I guess my foray into smart watches is over. It's a shame too because I appreciate the convenience it offers but I probably won't miss it much after a couple of weeks
I agree with this being frustrating. I had to explain to so many people that even though my watch doesn't have a SIM card, integrated 4G, GPS or a memory card slot for music it is still exactly what I wanted. Pebble watches do what smart watches should do, without trying to be a tiny phone on your wrist.
I guess I can only dream, but I hope they some day open up parts of it so that the phone app can continue working even with changes to Android/IOS down the line (if Fitbit doesn't want to keep the old Pebbles alive).
But with that said, a smart watch makes me feel hyper-connected. Putting it in quiet mode (and/or taking it off my wrist) every now and then is liberating and definitely makes me more productive.
Wow this is so true with me, I just want a watch that is a small extension of my phone. Not a watch trying to be a phone. Now I got to figure out wtf to get next if anything. A watch I have to charge every night isn't going to happen.
> But with that said, a smart watch makes me feel hyper-connected. Putting it in quiet mode (and/or taking it off my wrist) every now and then is liberating and definitely makes me more productive.
I feel that you probably did not configure notifications. Each time I received a notification that is not important I went to Pebble, and disabled it, after a while pebble was no longer as annoying.
Hear hear. I wish I could get the simplistic-but-effective features of a Pebble elsewhere. Track my steps, send me the notifications I want, and let me customize the watchface. The heart rate monitoring was what I was looking forward to the most, it would have made it /perfect/ for my use case.
I have an OG pebble steel and it does everything I currently want in a smartwatch. I don't expect it will stop working for some time, and I plan on using it as long as possible.
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I'm glad they are refunding me, but that makes me think... WTF, did they not produce any Time 2's? Or are they all going to the landfill? How long have they been knowing that they are going to be insolvent? This doesn't happen overnight! Was the last Kickstarter a gamble?
Why does everybody have to aim for total market dominance to be successful? They overreached and now the customers suffer. There should be a place for "small" manufacturer selling a niche product ("small" with a certain understatement like German "Mittelstand" enterprizes - I mean Pebble sold millions of units). If they had to increase the price by 10% to be sustainable, they still would have smashed the Kickstarter.
Sometimes I think there is a secret cabal conspiring so we can't have nice things ;-). The same one that decided that cell phone batteries have to be non-removable, touchscreens glossy, and wearables either mini-smartphones or bluetooth-step-counters.
_All_ Kickstarters are gambles. Their messaging[1] is pretty clear in the fact that you aren't buying a product, you're contributing money with the hope that the maker will deliver on their promises.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store
They try to do a Hardware project that pushes boundaries and try to collect money to early during the development process at a time when it is really impossible to set a ship date. (Also a factor is company inexperience with manufacturing) This is why so many projects have to delay shipments and sometimes eventually run out of money without getting to a shippable product.
Companies that are successful typically do their preorders at a point where they have already completed multiple production runs at a cm in china and are ready to ramp for mass production. the order count helps justify the costs of ordering mass production parts. The issue of course is that it means investors had to be willing to fund seed/series A without seeing any traction.
People were understandably angry. And it wasn't so much the risk (because none of the backers lost their money), it's that the company wasn't upfront about risks. GPG's leadership knew going in that the company would go under if the campaign didn't become a miraculous success, but backers didn't find that out until after the campaign had stalled.
Presumably, backers wouldn't have been informed at all if the campaign had succeeded.
This situation with Pebble is even more strange because apparently their campaign succeeded (in raising money beyond their target goal)....
[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-resourc...
It arrived as a useless brick that I, and most other recipients, never even got to show the time.
Pebble wasn't aiming for market dominance, they were aiming for market traction. How many Pebbles do you see in the wild? Now, how many Apple Watches do you see? How many Garmins? FitBits? "Notifications" is the baseline these days. It's just a given if I buy a fancy electronic watch. So where does that put Pebble? Having the same notification functionality as other devices, only not as slick and more cheap looking. Oh, Pebble has fitness stuff now? Have fun going up against Garmin and FitBit. As more and more devices gain the functionality that defined Pebble, Pebble went from the leader in this segment to playing catch-up.
Sometimes I think there is a secret cabal conspiring so we can't have nice things ;-).
Of course you know better. :-) Pebble sold you a device, everyone else sells you an ecosystem. All the fitness add-ons in the world won't make a difference if there isn't some form of analysis and data storage behind it. I can go back to stuff my Garmins have recorded over a decade ago. FitBit's got something similar, Nike (back when they made hardware), and others I've missed. Apple and Android watches tie into their respective systems for more functionality than just notifications on your wrist. Nope, no cabal, the market just moved on and Pebble got left behind. We do have nice things, they just don't have "Pebble" silkscreened on them now.
Almost the same number for me. That said I barely see any Apple watches and most people I know who bought them have left them in the bedside drawer long ago
> Pebble sold you a device, everyone else sells you an ecosystem.
Pebble actually had the full ecosystem going, app store, online integration, accessories, the whole hog. So much so that (for me at least) it was actually a /bad/ thing. I don't want my smartwatch to be a portal into web services and a means of datamining my life. I don't want a subscription to a watch service. I just want it to be a watch that I can program and that can talk to my phone.
I interpreted it more as a way to build hype around pre-orders for something that wouldn't come out for a while. In light of them going under, your explanation seems to gain some support, but I still wonder if they were also using Kickstarter as a hype builder and pre-order managment system.
Pretty sure they feel terrible right now and I don't think they slept well for the past 6 months. Could someone reasonable see this coming before KS? Most likely yes. Would they get this far without taking big risks? Most likely no.
You feel angry you didn't get your pebbles, I feel angry I didn't get my two pebbles and a core.
Imagine how they feel - reportedly turned down $750 mil and less than a year later had to apply for a job at another struggling wearables manufacturer.
In alternative reality:
1. They could hire way less aggressive and stay lean. Product development will be much slower, but they can operate cash flow positive.
2. With Kickstarter/pre-orders they could avoid taking any serious VC funding.
3. They probably need to move less expensive region than SF Bay Area. SF is great for go big or go home, but not an ideal place for long-term sustainable business.
4. Probably the price of watches would be higher and they will be niche, but still there are tons of watch manufactures that survived decades.
Per their site, Pebble's current product line has three different case designs, each available in at least three different finishes, and one with an additional heart rate monitor. That seems like an awful lot of SKUs for a small hardware startup to develop, manufacture, stock, fulfill and support. Their latest kickstarter added even more models.
From my armchair, it looks like they tried to expand and segment their market too quickly, for the sake of both growth and the optics of their product line in comparison to Apple.
I'm in the early stages of creating the world's tiniest "hardware startup" (the product consists of a single piece of metal), and it's a constant discipline to not get caught up in offering variations on the base design. Every product design choice ripples through the supply chain, increasing complexity and overhead at your peril.
Good luck to all the folks at Pebble in their new endeavors.
> Sometimes I think there is a secret cabal conspiring so we can't have nice things ;-). The same one that decided that cell phone batteries have to be non-removable, touchscreens glossy, and wearables either mini-smartphones or bluetooth-step-counters.
I feel that all the time. Of course it's not a secret cabal, just the free market promoting get-rich-quick schemes and making it harder for sustainable businesses and actually useful products to survive.
Low goal is just good for PR and means you actually get some money rather than none if you fall short of your secret real goal
The probably made some, but it takes money to turn any component inventory they may have into shippable products. They probably burned all of the money on mechanical tooling and part procurement already, and maybe hit a major issue in doing so (critical component is suddenly a very different price, etc). All of that inventory either is returned (if possible) or ends up liquidated on the secondary electronics component market for pennies on the dollar, to pay back the creditors. Custom parts, tools, etc have less of a resale market, but I'm sure a company in China will be happy to pick them up cheap to make smartwatches for the local market.
There were some stories circulating that their provider of screens for Time 2 is in financial troubles, so presumably may have not been able to fulfill the order.
Hardware isn't really profitable or even sustainable until you are shipping millions of units. That's why you don't see many hardware startups succeeding without either massive amounts of VC funding, or a really cheap-to-make product that you can sell for much more than it's worth (e.g. Fitbit). That's why any investor will tell you that the subscription model is basically the only way to go if you're making hardware.
So did we.
Edit: removed judgemental statement.
Of course that's kind of a mis-use of the kickstarter site... you've been in the euro/war/rpg board gaming business for over 25 years and you've had 8 completely successful kickstarters and now you're starting your 9th... I'm not naming names, but come on, you're not "kickstarting" anything, this is just your online store.
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If they have 20 millions in debt, just increasing the price on their kickstarters slightly wouldn't have done it, so they obviously overdid something.
Because they want money, and it's very hard to be sustainably profitable when it comes to hardware without major scale.
If you can do different/better, then go do it. Be the change you want to see.
There is, it's called "Chinese OEM manufacturers".
(Yes, I know that an 'OEM manufacturer' is like an 'ATM machine'.)
OEM means "Original Equipment Manufacturer".
In a year or two, when my current Pebble Time fails, I'd love an equivalent smartwatch to be available. Since the market doesn't seem to want it, how can we make it happen anyway?
Features I'm looking for are, in order of priority:
Now I can go the DIY route (I have a friend with experience in making smartwatches from ground-up, though I'd look at some SOCs instead of going the uC + separate sensors route - to save on watch size). Many of us here could do it. But honestly, I have shit ton of other stuff to do, and I'd rather pay for such a watch and enjoy the ecosystem, just like I did with Pebbles. And if everyone goes the DIY route, and there won't be some standardization along the way, there will be no community. Any idea how to coordinate and make this happen? Maybe a community, open-hardware design + crowdfunding for production?https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/sdk/
A Pebble is a nice gadget. The Garmin (looking at garmin.com, clicking the first thing that looks like a watch) is close to a month of rent.
I believe you when you state that you're satisfied. On the other hand, I really don't feel that this is in the Pebble replacement league.
I've always had nice wristwatches (and prefer to look at my wrist for the time instead of my phone) but I've been thinking about buying one recently. Most of them seem centered around health / fitness tracking, though, and that's not something I need or want. Mostly, I just want a "regular watch" (date/time) and perhaps notifications of incoming calls/messages (not necessarily even the content of messages -- just, for example, "SMS from Alice" or "Call from Bob", enough to let me decide whether to go pick up my phone). Garmin's API/SDK looks pretty cool, though.
I looked at some devices a week or two when purchasing a new FitBit for the girlfriend but, like I said, they had loads of features I didn't want. I'm tempted to just continue to wait on purchasing a "smart watch" and get a new wristwatch instead. I'm not really thrilled at the idea of having to charge my watch all the time anyways.
People are already working on open-source firmware for some of these watches[2], so I think there's a reasonably good chance that either some of these companies will create a decent alternative to pebble, or at least good enough hardware which can be used with community-developed firmware (and even more importantly: apps on the phone side).
[0]: http://www.weloop.cn/
[1]: http://www.goclever.com/uk/products,c1/smart-wear,c114/
[2]: https://ossw.github.io/
Similar to how OrangePI leverage Raspberry Pi situations.
It becomes race to the bottom ($5-10 pi zero) and no one can make $ in the market in both short and long term.
There seem to be a lot of sub $20 watch base on following links - not sure how good/bad are they.
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...
[1] http://vectorwatch.com/
And by crowdfunding I meant crowdfunding of manufacturing; the hardware would be open source, ensuring you could (with enough skills or good enough friends) make your own instead of buying one, and the software ecosystem would be compatible with it.
One of the bigger obstacles for me personally has been bluetooth notifications. I have found surprisingly few examples online of people getting it to actually work, and if you read through their work more closely, it only very barely works. I've tried to reproduce what other people have done and had it actually work even less than that.
I was thinking of selling a pre-programmed bluetooth module with apple and android notifications etc. if I ever got it working, figuring there must be other people in the same situation with this pain point. So far the idea that I could do a better job than others that have tried has turned out to be hubristic, though.
Obviously we all need something different, but that's what I'm waiting for.
[1]: http://www.trivoly.com/en [2]: https://wearchronos.com/
I'd be pretty interested in making something like this happen and figuring it out and leading the charge so-to-speak. It'd be an awesome experience, at the very least. However, I have no experience on the hardware side of things. I'm down to learn, but the software side is what I do have some experience with.
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Pebble's products were an excellent example of lateral technology. No need for high DPI on your watch, because they made something that looks good with few pixels. Making battery life a priority in a world of WiFi-enabled pressure cookers.
Even when the battery ran out you still got 24 hours of a watch that would at least tell the time!
I have no idea if it is possible to produce something like Pebbles at low quantities, but I would love to see an open design with similar specs. I think these watches are better than anything else out there, and it's sad the design is going to disappear.
I literally wear my Time Steel for 23 hours and 45 minutes per day. The only time it's charging and not on my wrist is when I'm in the shower, and over the course of a regular day it never drops below 80%. If I'm going away for a weekend I don't even have to bother with the charger.
I was aiming to get a new Pebble after Christmas, as mine suffers from that screen corruption glitch that plagued the first gens.
I expect this is actually part of the problem, and likely affects many smartwatch producing companies: If it wasn't for the screen glitch, I wouldn't be replacing my watch. It works, does everything I need, and speed isn't an issue. A colour display would be nice, but it's far from important to me. I'm sure the same is true for many Joe Average consumers. There isn't the same impetus to frequently upgrade a watch.
The pebble 2 does compete with the fit-bit. This story reminds me of a time when I worked at a small semiconductor equipment manufacture. We were a scrappy team and build a great small footprint tool. We won an order from a larger customer. Everyone was celebrating until our competitor quickly bought us out for cheap and shut us down. A few engineer went over to the new company but not enough to keep the product going.
I'm not sure about that. I read some comments on a few other articles about the Pebble shutdown, and people are recommending the Vector Watch [1]. It's a smart watch with a monochromatic e-ink display, and it has a 30 day battery life.
[1] http://vectorwatch.com/
I will use my pebble as long as it continues to work, then it'll get retired to my shelf of tech fails. Most of which failed FAR more spectacularly.
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Well - there's always this:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-your-own-smart-watch/
> ...with similar specs
Hmm - I doubt they compare, but then again, one is open-source and nearly infinitely customizable (depending on your budget, skills, and needs) - and one, well - doesn't exist any longer.
I know we see plenty of "our incredible journey" posts filled with optimism, but euphemistic language and dozens of photos of watches and happy people and more watches is jarring.
It's not a shame to try hard at something and fail. But it is a shame to fail and pretend you succeeded. We can see through you.
Had they came to the community and said, "hey we are losing sales and we need everyone to pitch in $10 / year for software support (maybe a web interface for fitness or something) I guarantee a few hundred thousand people would have done it.
Had they shared a coupon with the community (i.e. email add campaign, or add on watch - "buy one, get one half off" for christmas they would have probably had a large bump in orders. Although I recognize this would be a mild annoyance, I can also guarantee they would have sold plenty of units.
This simply seems like poor management and it's frustrating because it's the best smart watch I can find at the moment. It does exactly what I want, is cheaper than the competition, and is dead simple to use.
WTF pebble, you had the product people loved - you just didn't market it well.
What is this based on? I'd be shocked if that worked. I think it'd be a sign of blood in the water, and signal the end (if vendors see this, they're going to want to be paid up front, employees are going to start looking for the exits).
> Had they shared a coupon with the community (i.e. email add campaign, or add on watch - "buy one, get one half off" for christmas they would have probably had a large bump in orders. Although I recognize this would be a mild annoyance, I can also guarantee they would have sold plenty of units.
Pure volume wasn't what sank the ship, I'm sure. It probably would have put them out of business faster.
> "This simply seems like poor management"
That's an easy thing to say, but it's probably more complex than that. They were in a tough spot, with competition from much, much deeper pockets.
It seems very strange they are basically just shutting down. That has to be an ego driven decision on the FitBit side - they wanted to kill Pebble. Are they even going to use the brand name? The combination of: working production facility, users in the wild, and (the biggest asset) a developer community had to have some value. Now that the deal is done there is no chance to pry that out of publicly traded FitBit, but it seems like this could have had a better outcome.
Actually, I think what happened is that Eric, the CEO, is now a multi-millionaire.
So, this is more of a success story than most of us might consider savory to think about.
A hardware company on the hook for fulfilling 50k orders of the sequel has some pretty serious expenses. A sale might have been the best landing and what got everyone a refund for the 2nd.
There's some initial reports that they need service back-end to be live in order to do the initial pairing. My Time Round is a dead watch walking if that's the case.
There's not a comparable smartwatch right now that is like the Time Round, I'd happily have paid for ongoing support.
So much of the time "the cloud" is an anti-feature.
Whereas on the $43m they still had to manufacture, ship, hire designers, engineers, etc.
That $4m profit would be a LOT more than 10%, that would cover 20 people's salary
https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge
I've not looked into it yet, but it is described as:
"A free and cloudless replacement for your gadget vendors' closed source Android applications. Pebble and Mi Band supported."
The feature list seems substantial. So hopefully we'll be able to continue to use our pebbles for some time.
Audium/Pidgin/libpurple all were originally created to have open source interfaces to close systems (MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc). Most of the OSS work is about reverse engineering and creating open yet compatible tools to use with or in place of closed systems.
If anything, projects like this can help keep Pebble watches alive after the demise of the company.
If we rely on their cloud services for activity tracking and app downloads then it will be useless if FitBit doesn't maintain the platform.
I have to say I'm really disappointed and this is a huge blow to people that invest in startups offering hardware. If the company fails forget about the smart stuff you bought, it just won't work anymore.
We should look for ways to minimize the impact on backers. Sadly we'll see more of this in a future in which the products depend a lot on the company cloud services to operate.
Buyers need to start demanding Open Source Software and Open Hardware...
With out that, you will always be screwed
Exactly
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If that's the case I would prefer to purchase devices that are actually already running free software or there is free software available to flash on them.
Person
I enabled sync to google fit because I hoped it would backup sleep data but that does nothing sensible, it's all stored locally (and in fact if you reinstall the Pebble app you lose all your data).
ps: if anyone knows of some software to export these data from an android phone, I'd love to know because I could not find anything
I guess I can only dream, but I hope they some day open up parts of it so that the phone app can continue working even with changes to Android/IOS down the line (if Fitbit doesn't want to keep the old Pebbles alive).
But with that said, a smart watch makes me feel hyper-connected. Putting it in quiet mode (and/or taking it off my wrist) every now and then is liberating and definitely makes me more productive.
I feel that you probably did not configure notifications. Each time I received a notification that is not important I went to Pebble, and disabled it, after a while pebble was no longer as annoying.