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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.
Pebble has always been the best looking of among all the others in the niche, while offering the least functionality. Fitbit could have saved even more money by just hiring away Pebble's design team at triple their salaries. Pebble is set to tank in moments as is, and Fitbit would have grabbed all their users on the upgrade cycle (which for gadgets like this is every 18-24 months).
Should have sold themselves in 2015 when the hype for smart watches was at its greatest and the buyers remorse was at its lowest.
He blamed a more cautious outlook from VCs focused on tech as the primary reason for letting 40 of Pebble's staff go.
In what universe is this quote acceptable?
This man appears to believe that businesses get money from VCs and pays money to employees+suppliers. Last I checked, businesses got money from customers. They'd get /loans/ from banks (but that has to be paid back).
The problem with a lot of SV/Tech startups is that the people involved appear to believe that their income comes from VCs. Their business plan is effectively "Get VC Money, Then Sell Company!"
A depressed market would soon separate the wheat from the chaff.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I really like both of my Pebbles. Don't really want a fitness band, do want a watch.
CEOs justify their huge salaries saying that their decisions have multi-million dollar affects on a company. Well in this case the CEO gave up a 740 million deal and has to settle for a 40 million dollar deal so he lost 700 million for the company. The employees should sue him in a personal capacity for everything's hes got.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Fitness bands and smartwatch sales are tanking. It looks like it's just a fad.
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.
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.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
The butthurt is strong in this one.
Probably true for smartwatches - battery life being the main technology issue that needs to be resolved. Once batteries are better (or power consumption is lower), you'll be able to pack more processing power and radios into a watch form factor and eliminate the need to carry a phone. Or, for those of us who don't like wearing jewelry, we can carry Zoolander size phones. Win win either way.
Fitness bands, on the other hand, are most likely a fad. People are always looking for silver bullets for weight loss and exercise. There's always a small market for products for athletes who find the gear improves their training, but the vast majority of these devices sell to consumers who really aren't using them as anything other than a feel good product. Plus, the science behind fitness bands is mostly bogus. Beyond GPS tracking for pacing, there's not much they can do accurately enough at their form factor. Biology, not technology, gets in the way of that. (e.g., for heart rate monitoring, we already know that straps are the most accurate way, but most people won't wear those, regardless of what they're tethered to)
-Chris
That is a very big possibility. Personally, I think the problem with smart watches and fitness devices is that while they are useful, most people don't actually need the features they offer. For a smartwatch to be useful, you already have to have a phone along side it. But everything you can do on your smart watch can already be done by your phones. That is, apart from the heart rate and movement tracking, which I'm sure only a small number of people are actually interested in.
Everybody used to carry around paper agendas and briefcases with their important files. Now you can completely replace that entire thing with your smartphone. Rarely do I see people carrying around briefcases anymore. Even laptops seem to be losing their purpose as many people just plug them into full sized peripherals and use them as a stationary computer at home or work. In 5 years, you'll probably see that becoming common with a phone using something like Continuum. A tablet could simply be a dumb screen that you dock your phone to.
Looking at things like the Surface book, it's definitely possible to even give your phone extra processing and memory capability when you plug it into the dock. All your important stuff can still come with you, but if you want to do some photoshop work or other intensive work, you're going to need more resources than you can get out of a phone, at least in the near future.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Palm Pilots *may* have been fantastic but they were not a product for the masses. At the time, these devices were known as PDA's because they were niche, focused products that addressed a specific need. They were not general purpose computers that smartphones are now. GP is right, the hardware just wasn't there yet.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I purchased two Pebble watches as part of the original Kickstarter. One failed within a year (we were too distracted at the time to pursue a warranty claim), the other one is still "ticking".
Custom programming my own non-24-hour sleep-wake calendar was a big step for me in finding a cure. It finally put my metabolic reality on equal footing with the world around me, so that I could properly track each on its own terms.
I will always remember my Pebble watch as a life-changing event.
That said, I had doubts about Eric Migicovsky as a venture capitalist right from the beginning. When the original watch was delayed (I've done electronics fabrication before, it's far from easy with so much at stake on a new product) Eric obviously got some advice to keep reality close to the vest, and thus his public comments fell far short of the mark, given the situation. It's actually a flaw in the Kickstarter program that your promised delivery date is locked in stone prior to discovering you've got a landslide on your hands. (How to manage around that, I've never quite figured out. Kickstarter mainly appeals to flighty dreamers—too much honesty could seriously damp the lemming effect.) For my money, Eric failed the test of knowing when and where to draw the line on taking good advice. Any damn fool can advise you to keep your PR powder dry. Actual VC talent is required to know when to blow these damn fools off and venture out into the dangerous territory of actual honesty, while your users still care.
As for the watch itself, I'm still actually using my Pebble watch, for a single reason. Cure now in hand, in bottle form, I continue to wear my watch because its vibrate alarm is harder for me to ignore or forget than any other watch/phone I've had before, so I really do take my sustained-release melatonin at exactly the right time of day, each and every day, without fail.
I turned off BT completely after Fitness App Runkeeper Secretly Tracks Users At All Times, Sends Data to Advertisers because at this level of vigilance investment, extra battery life on both sides was more important than e-mail notification (and I hate pulling out my phone just to check a quick message).
Sad.
Fad?
Palm sold tens of millions of units over more than a decade. They were eventually killed by the smartphone.
The Apple ][ sold 6 million. The Newton somewhat fewer.
Actually I think it makes a lot of sense to have a bunch of bio-sensors on something you can place on your arm. It doesn't have to be on the wrist, it could be a bracer or something. I bought one of the heart monitoring devices, but like you said it, doesn't work that well doesn't mean this will always be the case though.
If someone could make a non-invasive heart meter, glucose meter, or lipid profile meter it would sell quite a lot.
Everybody used to carry around paper agendas and briefcases with their important files. Now you can completely replace that entire thing with your smartphone.
Curiously the Android phone I bought has no buit-in text editor facilities at all, there is Google Drive, but you need to be connected to the network. Lame.
Numerous articles are now reporting that the Pebble brand will be phased out. Given Fitbit's history of buyouts (e.g. their acquisition of Coin earlier this year was a technology buyout, and they left everyone who bought the Coin 2.0 payment hardware SOL) I believe that Fitbit is going to drop support/development of the Pebble hardware. And my Pebble Time 2 (bought earlier this year via Kickstarter) is late, and probably deprecated before I receive it.
My Pebble Time Steel - other than the giant bezel - is my ideal smartwatch. Great battery life, intuitive controls, looks nice, price was right, battery life means I don't have to charge it daily (sometimes as little as once a week, with a lot of notifications). I thought that Pebble Time 2 would solve my main gripe. But with the buyout, I'm probably going to cancel my order. Why buy into something that's going to be dead from a development perspective before I get it?
That's where biology becomes problematic. From a convenience perspective, it'd be great to have a small pack of sensors somewhere that let you monitor vitals, especially for people who are sick. The problem is, there's no one place we can put a range of sensors and have them all be accurate enough to be useful. The body is a distributed system and different parts let you measure some things and not others.
Theranos ran into this problem recently by attempting to perform a wide array of tests on a single drop of blood while ignoring the basic biology behind blood-based measurements. Many of the measurements they claimed to be able to make are for things that occur in low copy-numbers in blood, which is why large draws are required to accurately measure them. If something only occurs once for every 10M blood cells and you need at least 10 copies to accurately detect it, you'll need at least 100M cells to have a chance at detection. The same is true for most other biological measurements. Sample size and location both matter.
-Chris
PDAs like the Newton and Palm were great. They had two very obvious barriers that held them back. The first one was they weren't merged with a smart phone. I was a Newton developer and had conversations with people inside and outside of Apple about the need to merge the Newton with a smartphone. The second was lack of internet connectivity. I worked on some projects that involved using a cellular modem with the Newton. At the time it was very slow and very expensive. Just running our (brief) demo cost about $5 worth of data. In the case of the Newton specifically, I think there were looming security problems that would have been a nightmare if it had moved forward and had internet connectivity widely merged with it. The programming model made it easy to access any data on the device and even the internals of other applications. My main point, though, is that it was pretty obvious the kinds of super cool things you could do with PDAs if they had ubiquitous network access and integration with a phone. It isn't clear what technical limitations are in Smart Watches that prevent them from being significantly more useful. Perhaps the Apple Watch will be more useful if Siri becomes more useful and AirPods ever ship? I don't know. Its not that the watch isn't good, it is just that we haven't figured out what compelling use cases exist yet.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
...the Android phone I bought has no buit-in text editor facilities at all ... Lame...
Fortunately, there are app stores. On my Android phone I have a text editor app called Ted, which meets my needs nicely. There's no reason why a text editor should be be pre-installed on each phone.
Paid Q&A/Research
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.
Our company was a bunch of geeks. we had an original pilot (before Palm bought them). It was a tool for geeks. the whole Graffiti thing made it hard for people to just pick one up and use them. the sync software was a bear to use and felt like an infestation on your system. Whether you like social media or not, people use it to communicate how they wish to. You couldn't do that on a Pilot. Most didn't have any way at all to network. Even the Handspring with the cell module (I had a handspring, not the cell module though) didn't allow you to network much because there was no real OS support for it. Email sucked until the Treos came out.
And hell, i liked these things. So even someone who liked them, hated how clunky they were. There's no comparison to a smart phone. a lot of computing power goes into putting things into the cloud. a lot of computing power makes things easier
Newton - ARM based computer in your pocket with a touch sensitized screen
iOS - ARM based computer in your pocket with a touch sensitized screen, that actually does somehting
I developed for the Newton. Then I developed for the Palm Pilot. Then I developed for PocketPC. Then I got out of the business when the iPhone came along:)
I did come back to help out a team of scientists who'd just returned from a three year expedition in the tropical rainforest. I'd equipped them with PocketPCs before they left, which was just before the iPhone came out. When they returned they felt like Rip Van Winkle.
You have to build products around the limitations of the technology, and that means the appeal of every product you build is constrained in some way. The Newton was a product of genius, but the combination of size, weight, and limited capabilities meant the market for the device was limited. The Palm Pilot desigers, with similar technology available to them, made the definition to trade everything off for form factor -- and that was a great choice. They sold a lot of them to people who wanted to replace their daytimers and Franklin Covey planners.
The limitations of pre-iPhone converged devices (I tested a number of them) wasn't technological; it was marketing. The carriers dictated limitations to devices used on their networks to protect various added-charge services they made a lot of money from. They used to make you pay to get your pictures off your phone! That's why Apple introduced the iPhone as an AT&T exclusive. AT&T was an unpopular carrier that badly needed a hit product. It was in no position to say "no".
The essential property of a true smartphone is net neutrality. It's not tied to a particular carrier's services.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It might not have been as mass market as smart phones but it still sold well enough to sustain a line of devices until 2011. It might even have made the leap to mainstream with smart phone devices powered by Palm's replacement OS, webOS, but HP (who acquired Palm) made a hash of the platform and it flopped. Yet I should add that an open sourced webOS still lives on in a number of smart TVs and other devices.
This man appears to believe that businesses get money from VCs and pays money to employees+suppliers. Last I checked, businesses got money from customers.
In Silicon Valley, VC's are your customers. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They are 100% vegan compliant. Right down to the use of whale oil for lubrication of the buttons. Zero use of vegetable matter in the entire product!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I owned a palm and continued to use a paper day planner, the office I worked in at the time never bought into palm, so the benefits didn't outweigh the hassle.
Who's to say how it would have worked out if they had gotten a ubiquitous cell/data module instead of their old crawling wireless network and made use of touch better.
The technology was there, palm just didn't put it together. At the time even with full palm buyin, you were carrying a phone and a palm.
The cell addon was buggy, late, huge and worked on one network at edge speeds IIRC.
Making it work would have been ninja, but it was just possible IMHO. Palm blew it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Aaawe, c'mon! I maintained my website* with my Palm devices, was able to store contacts that I still have records of just shy of 20 years later, and so much more...
*OK... so that was the most convoluted process I can imagine and did require manual PHP scripting with a folding keyboard and a whole lot of external workflow, but I was able to do it with a device that I could haul around in my backpack for two years and use in a sala looking out on the beach and ocean...
Maybe the Blackberry was an improvement after all...
Back OT though, when I read the summary it sounds more like FitBit bought Pebble out of bankruptcy. Shame; I think Pebble had more value than that, ESPECIALLY to FitBit. This is an opportunity for them to make their products support the next round of innovation with dedicated user base... and something that isn't as fugly as their current smart watch kind of thing...
Cross compile nano/vim/emacs.
Open a terminal.
Can you give a brief description of what you did to solve your sleep-wake cycle?
I'm very interested in this sort of thing, as it borders on some of my areas of research.
The thing I liked a lot about my Palm was it's highly focused limitations. It has a memopad, a calendar, a contact list, a todo list. They all synched flawlessly to an 'data island' on my PC. Nothing went anywhere else, it was all compartmented, and when I got a new computer I could zip up the whole palm desktop folder with my data and relocate it, OR just install the Palm desktop on the new PC and sync my Palm to move all my data to the new PC.
There were not 100 todo apps to choose from, not 1000 memo apps that put your text in weird directories on either a real SD card or what calls 'the SD card' due to legacy issues.
I didn't have to synch my life to big brother Google to assure my data landed somewhere accessable.
All rhis stuff can be done with a modern smartphone, but the focus is dissipated.
If there was a strong Palm emulator that could sync to a strong Palm desktop emulator on my PC a part of me would want to rip everything else off my smartphone and just use that.
I don't see an actual press release from either company. Is this just more fake news, like "renaming" Alpha Centauri?
focused products that addressed a specific need.
They were *marketed* for specific needs...
They were not general purpose computers that smartphones are now.
They were the exact precursor of smartphones now :
they were general purpose computers, on which you could install tons of additional apps to extend functionality.
(with SDK and documentation provided by Palm).
After PSION with their EPOC OS (ancestror of Nokia's SymbianOS),
Palm's PalmOS was the next big eco-system that saw big development of 3rd party apps.
It is dwarfed by the current Android and iOS apps ecosystems, but back then it was quite an achievement.
You could find and install game, web browser, email client, GPS/Nav software, console emulators, some very domain-specific apps (Epocrate, a medical drug database started its life on PalmOS), etc.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Wrong. Fitness tracker sales are still increasing, as they have done since they were first introduced.
I could send faxes from my Newton.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
No one has confirmed this, I wouldn't be surprised if it is FUD from Fitbit to hurt Pebble sales. There is no real reason for pebble to sell at this point in time.
I could send faxes from my Newton.
But receiving them must have been tricky.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think it could actually do that too.
and email.
it could barely internet though, even though there was a modem (I never had it on a proper network, so I don't know how it did with that, and I don't think there was any wifi back then.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
FYI, Pebble 2 that was Kickstarted was $99.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
I unfortunately lost my warranty on mine because Fitbit didn't take over the warranties of Pebble.
As far as the HR monitor, it is useful when running to make sure you are above the fat burning level of heart rate, but don't go into VO2 max territory. It is useful for those of us that don't run on a regular basis, and don't know well enough what pace to run at as it gives a goal and range to shoot for.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?