So I keep checking the Pebble Kickstarter page like its a stock ticker and I need to stop.
If you havent been paying attention: some guys from Palo Alto (the same team that made the inPulse watch a couple years back, if you remember that one, which honestly not many people do) put up a Kickstarter on April 11th for a watch called Pebble. E-paper screen, syncs to your phone over Bluetooth, buzzes you for texts and calls, runs apps. Goal was $100,000. They hit it in two hours. Two hours! By the next day they were past a million bucks. Last I checked, a few days ago, they were sitting around $5.5 million with almost a month still left to go. Its insane. Im writing this at like 11pm and I just tabbed over to check again out of pure reflex, which tells you something about where my brain is at right now.
I backed it. $115 tier, the one that gets you the watch plus shipping, whenever that ends up actually happening (they were saying September as a target, which, we'll see). I dont even wear a watch normally. Havent since high school. But something about the idea of a screen on my wrist that just quietly shows me who's calling without me having to dig my phone out of my jacket pocket at a bar and squint at it under bad lighting got me. Also I will fully admit the video got me. Its a good video. Guy just casually biking around, checking his wrist, not breaking stride. Marketing works on me every time and I know it and I still fall for it.
Whats funny is this isnt even really a new idea. Pebble started life as something called the inPulse, which I actually looked at buying back in 2010 and talked myself out of because the screen was tiny and the app support was basically nonexistent. Same team, mostly same concept, except this time theyve got iPhone support, a real developer SDK, and apparently way better timing. Two years ago nobody wanted a smartwatch. Now half of Kickstarter wants one. I dont think the watch changed that much. I think its that everyone's already got a smartphone glued to their hand and is starting to feel a little weird about how often they check it, so a thing that lets you glance at your wrist instead feels like a small act of rebellion or something. Or maybe Im overthinking a plastic rectangle with a battery in it, which, fair, I do that a lot.
Anyway the part of this that actually bugs me a little is the comment sections under every article about it. Theres always some guy going on about how Kickstarter isnt supposed to be for pre-orders, its supposed to be for funding projects that couldnt exist otherwise, and Pebble already has a factory lined up and clearly doesnt need the money in the traditional sense, so this is "gaming the system." Maybe? But nobody's forcing anyone to pledge, and if 40,000 people (which is roughly where the backer count is) want to hand this team money in exchange for a watch two months before Best Buy would sell them one, I dont really see the crime. Crowdfunding purism is a weird hill to die on when the alternative is the thing just doesnt get made as fast, or gets made by a bigger company that doesnt care as much.
Two other things happened this month that are sort of in the same neighborhood, worth mentioning since I havent written about them yet. Facebook bought Instagram, which by now is old news since that happened over two weeks ago, but Im still not totally over it. A billion dollars, mostly stock, for an app that's what, eighteen months old and still doesnt run ads? I use Instagram most days (mediocre camera phone, filters that make it look less mediocre, you know the drill) and I have no idea what changes for the actual product, if anything. And Google put out that Project Glass concept video a few weeks back, the one where the guy walks through New York with directions and messages floating in his field of vision. Half the internet thought it was the coolest thing theyd seen all year, the other half thought it looked like a fake demo for a product thats a decade away from being real. I lean toward the second camp but Ill admit the video is well made.
Its a weird month for wearable stuff and I dont think thats a coincidence exactly, but I also dont think I need a unifying theory for it. Sometimes a few different companies just happen to ship things in the same general direction around the same time and it looks like a trend from the outside. I just want my watch to show up in September and actually work.