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Fitbit Is Buying Smartwatch Maker Pebble For Around $40 Million, Says Report (techcrunch.com)
According to a report from The Information, Fitbit is buying smartwatch maker Pebble for a "small amount" of money. One source says Fitbit is paying between $34 and $40 million for the company and is "barely covering their debts." TechCrunch reports: A source close to the company told TechCrunch that watch maker Citizen was interested in purchasing Pebble for $740 million in 2015. This deal failed and before the launch of the Pebble 2 Intel made an offer for $70 million. The CEO, Eric Migicovsky refused both offers. Pebble released the newest version of its smartwatch in October, but the past year or so has been a challenging period. It laid off 25 percent of its staff in March, while we reported last year that it was in some trouble and had turned to debt funding and loans, as well as traditional investor cash, "in order to stay afloat." Earlier this year, Pebble CEO Migicovsky confirmed that his company had raised $28 million in debt and venture financing. He blamed a more cautious outlook from VCs focused on tech as the primary reason for letting 40 of Pebble's staff go.
Or the technology isn't there yet.
Remember the 'fad' of the Palm Pilot and Apple Newton? The technology wasn't there yet and now smartphones.
I disagree with this sentiment strongly. Palm Pilots were fantastic. The lack of popularity wasn't anything to do with tech. The tech was there, it just wasn't sexy. You need to make it stupid and give it a selfie app before it's popular, but that has nothing to do with the tech being there. It's not even a matter of viability. Niche markets exist, and Palms were largely marketed to business users anyway, who loved them.
The only reason smartphones are popular is because they have been made sexy to a mass market who uses them largely to waste time. There's nothing wrong with that choice, but we should acknowledge that demographic as the primary. Palm users were running businesses and managing teams off of them. Your average smartphone user is using instagram or the ilk.
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That's a shame...I enjoy my Pebble. Battery life goes for days, and I can check who is calling/emailing/texting without pulling the phone out. It also works as a great phone finder, and has a decent alarm. I hope Fitbit doesn't kill the brand.
Umm, facebook?
the whole thing is a roll of the dice for them. Much like the music scene, you throw money at 50 people, 45 will fail miserably, 4 will come close to even, and 1 will be a rock star and finance all of the 50. It's been that way since the web came out.
The Internet doesn't even things out. By making location irrelevant for delivery reasons, it makes concentration of people/money for other reasons more relevant. So, we can Facebook corner the market for socail. we can have amazon corner the market for selling. Then any VC that bets on one of these has their rockstar and gets very rich. their roll of the roulette wheel paid off not 30-1 but 3000-1