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Pebble Lays Off 25% of Its Staff, Smartwatch Bubble Set To Burst? (computerworld.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the time-to-ditch-the-e-paper-display dept.

tripleevenfall writes: Pebble is laying off 25% of its employees -- that's 40 pink slips -- taking it down to just 80 people. It seems indicative of the smartwatch market's terrible state. Previously the darling of the crowdfunding fraternity -- it raised over $30 million on Kickstarter -- Pebble is finding it hard to keep the plates spinning in 2016.
The layoffs were confirmed by Pebble's CEO Eric Migicovsky, who implied that venture capitalists are now less keen on funding the smartwatch category.

6 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Math? by Y2K+is+bogus · · Score: 5, Informative

    80+40=120
    40/120=33.33%

    So they are laying off 33.33% of their staff, not 25%.

    1. Re:Math? by marcansoft · · Score: 3, Informative

      TFA says:

      Pebble is letting 40 people go -- that's 25% of its workforce

      Which implies had 160 people to begin with, and they let 40 go, leaving them with 120. As usual, the bad math came from Slashdot.

  2. Re:Hmm, and I thought that they were above average by normanjd · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not true unless you wait until its completely dead (and even not as long as it takes to charge an Android watch)... I charge it while in the shower each day (10 minutes) and have never run out of battery... All they really need is either wireless charging and/or a watch band with a battery in it to make it even better.

  3. Re: Huh? Was there a smartwatch bubble to begin wi by rasmusbr · · Score: 3, Informative

    "The number of people who want to wear a watch is extremely high"

    LMAO. Really. Thanks for the laugh. I work for a university and get to interact with many people on a daily basis, and I use public transportation for most of my commute. I can count on one hand (and have fingers left over) the number of people wearing a watch.

    Sounds like a local cultural thing where you live.

    The wristwatch is currently a multi-billion dollar industry and (perhaps surprisingly) shows no sign of declining.

  4. Re:Submitter can't math by drakaan · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...to which the answer would be 33 1/3 %, not 25%.

    --
    "Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
  5. Re:They are still the #1 smartwatch by MachineShedFred · · Score: 3, Informative

    Really? [Citation needed]

    Here's my citation to the contrary: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/...

    If Apple sold >50% of the smart watches that shifted in 2015, how is Pebble outselling that combined with all the Android Wear 2:1? Are you counting total sales since the absolute first unit left the factory? Even that doesn't pass the sniff test.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.