So I had this post half-written about something else entirely and then I made the mistake of checking Kickstarter one more time before publishing, and now I have to talk about the watch instead. Sorry, other post. You'll keep.
The watch is called Pebble. It's from a company called Allerta, the same folks who made that inPulse watch a couple years back that never really went anywhere outside of a small group of BlackBerry diehards. Pebble launched on Kickstarter on the 11th, asking for $100,000 to build an e-paper smartwatch that talks to your iPhone or Android phone over Bluetooth, shows your texts and caller ID, and runs little apps people can write for it. A hundred grand. That's the ask.
They hit it in something like two hours. By the next day they'd blown past a million dollars, and last I checked the total was sitting north of four million with something like three weeks still left to go. Three weeks! I don't think Kickstarter's servers were built for this. For $99 you get a black-and-white Pebble in whatever color, and if you're willing to sit and wait until September for it to ship, apparently forty thousand-plus people are fine with that math.
I'll be honest, I was skeptical the second I saw it, and I'm still a little skeptical, but not for the reasons I expected. My first thought was "who wants a second screen strapped to their wrist when the phone is already in their pocket," which, fine, is a boring take and I'm sure someone in the comments is going to explain patiently why it's actually great for running or biking or whatever. What actually got me was the display. E-paper, like a tiny Kindle screen, means the battery apparently lasts about a week instead of the few hours you'd get out of a backlit LCD doing the same job. That's the part that makes it feel like a real product and not a science fair project. Everything else, the SDK, the "developers will make thousands of watchfaces" pitch, the vibration alerts, all of that is table stakes at this point. The battery life is the thing that made me stop scrolling.
I'm not backing it. I say that fully aware I might regret it in six months when everyone I know has one and I'm still checking my phone like a caveman. But I've been burned before by gadgets that seemed clever on a Kickstarter page and then sat in a drawer three months after they shipped, and $99 plus shipping to Sri Lanka is not nothing. I'll wait and read what actual owners say in September, assuming September is even realistic once you're dealing with fifty-some-thousand backers instead of the five hundred you planned around.
Unrelated tangent, but it happened this same week so it's getting lumped in here: if you're on a Mac and you haven't run Software Update since around the 12th, go do that right now. Apple finally pushed out the Java fix for the Flashback trojan thing, the one that's apparently gotten into something like six hundred thousand Macs at this point just by sitting on a compromised webpage and exploiting a Java hole that had already been patched on Windows back in February. Six hundred thousand. On Macs. The whole "Macs don't get viruses" line has been dead for a while if you actually paid attention, but this is the first time it's felt like actual numbers instead of a hypothetical some antivirus company invented to sell you something. I ran the update on my own machine and it also just quietly turns off Java auto-run in the browser, which honestly should've been the default years ago. Took maybe ninety seconds. Do it before you forget, the way I almost did.
Anyway. Back to the watch thing for one more second, because the number will probably be a joke by the time anyone reads this: four million dollars, on a hundred-thousand-dollar ask, for a watch nobody outside a small circle of gadget blogs had heard of two weeks ago. Crowdfunding projects blow past their goals sometimes, sure, but not usually by four thousand percent with weeks still on the clock. Something's shifting in how people are willing to pay for hardware before it exists, and I don't think Kickstarter itself fully expected it either.