So I've been refreshing a Kickstarter page more times today than I'd like to admit, and I figure that's worth writing about instead of just quietly being a weirdo about it.
The project is called Pebble. It's a watch, kind of, except it talks to your phone over Bluetooth and shows you texts, caller ID, your music controls, whatever you want really, on a little 1.26-inch black and white e-paper screen (168 x 144 if you care about specs, which apparently I do now). The company behind it, Allerta, used to make something called the inPulse for BlackBerry users, which tells you something about how long they've been quietly grinding on this idea while nobody was paying attention.
They put it up on Kickstarter on April 11th asking for $100,000. They hit that in under two hours. Two hours! By the next day they'd cleared a million dollars, which at the time was basically unheard of for Kickstarter, a site I mostly associated with indie board games and short films nobody was going to finish. Now it's sitting well past that, climbing by the hour, and there's still almost a month left on the clock before it closes in mid May. I genuinely don't know where the ceiling is on this thing anymore.
$99 gets you a black one if you back at that tier, more if you want color options, and they're promising it ships this September, which, sure, we'll see. Kickstarter timelines are a bit like contractor timelines in my experience. Nobody's lying to you exactly, they just have a different relationship with calendars than the rest of us.
Here's the thing that actually gets me though. I did not back this. I've got the tab open, I've reloaded it probably a dozen times today watching the number go up, and I still haven't clicked the button. Partly because I already own two watches I never wear because my phone is right there in my pocket telling me the time anyway, and partly because I've been burned before by shiny gadget promises that show up eight months late in a slightly worse form than the render suggested. Not naming names. You know the ones.
But there's something genuinely different about watching this happen in real time versus the usual product launch, where some company just tells you a thing exists and you either want it or you dont. This is thousands of people, actual strangers, deciding collectively in the span of an afternoon that yes, we do in fact want tiny computers strapped to our wrists that arent made by a giant company with a marketing budget. Nobody greenlit this in a boardroom. It just happened because enough people typed their credit card numbers into a form.
Part of what's fueling it, I think, is that people are already primed for the idea of a smartwatch being a real category and not just a novelty. Theres been chatter for months about Apple maybe doing something in this space eventually, and separately Google put out that video last week of people wearing some kind of glasses that overlay information on the world, which is a whole different animal but scratches a similar itch, this idea that computing is about to crawl off our desks and phones and onto our actual bodies. Whether thats exciting or slightly dystopian probably depends on your mood that day. Mine changes hourly.
Anyway. I'll probably back it before the campaign ends, let's be honest with each other here, I'm just pretending I have willpower for a few more days. If you want to look at it yourself the project's easy enough to find, just search Pebble Kickstarter and it'll be the first thing that comes up, hard to miss at this point given the numbers involved.
One more small thing while I'm here: does anyone else find it a little funny that a company that spent years making a smartwatch nobody bought is now sitting on more money than most funded startups raise in a seed round, and they got there in about 24 hours flat? Timing is a strange and mostly unfair thing.