Pebble Watch: Behind The Smartwatch Sensation

It's 8 a.m. and Eric Migicovsky opens the door to his condo-turned-home-office in downtown Palo Alto, Calif. He looks a lot like many of entrepreneurs in their twenties or thirties walking around Palo Alto or sitting around its coffee shops -- shorts, sandals, and a MacBook Pro are all part of the uniform.

But Migicovsky has become something of a Silicon Valley sensation over the last few months. He is the mastermind behind the Pebble Watch, the smart watch that got more than $10.2 million in backing on Kickstarter.com after private investors and venture capital firms decided not to back it. The digital watch pairs with Android phones and the iPhone and runs apps.

Eric had hoped just to raise $100,000 to make 1,000 watches on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site that allows anyone to buy a product before it is made. And, well, that turned out to be chump change. Within 37 days, Pebble raised $10 million and over 85,000 watch orders.

WATCH: Pebble Smartwatch: Behind The Scenes

On an early June morning I'm getting a behind-the-scenes look at just what is so special about this record-breaking smart watch. But before I do that Migicovsky and his roommates -- one works for Pebble and another works at another start-up -- have to get ready for work.


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They take turns getting in the shower while chatting about what they did last night. They make eggs and coffee in their small kitchen. A Silicon Valley frat house might be the best way to describe it.

But there is much more than chatter about beer and babes going on in this condo. By 9 a.m. four Pebble employees are in the downstairs office. One of them, Matt Zulak, replaces the empty beer bottle on his desk with coffee, and puts his head down to write software for the watch. Andrew Witte sits at his desk and begins tinkering with some hardware and the MakerBot 3D printer, which we have had to move out of the center of the office to make room for our camera. Pebble now has nine employees; six of them were hired since the Kickstarter campaign.

And those nine employees are all helping build what Migicovsky calls "one of the best watches in the world." He says he is confident of that, not only because of the reaction from early backers but because he has had experience building a watch before.

"We actually launched our first smart watch a year and a half ago, which worked primarily with BlackBerry smartphones," he tells me as he starts to show me the prototype watch next to the previous InPulse version. "We had built a watch that was primarily an email device, but we started learning what people wanted out of a smarter watch."

They wanted better battery life and one that worked better outside, which is how the Pebble's defining feature -- its e-paper screen -- came to be incorporated. The black and white screen is crisp, readable outdoors, and doesn't use as much power as the LCD screen on the original watch. Even with the sun shining right on the screen I was able to see the time on the prototype.
The watch has some other key features: it has four buttons, rather than a touchscreen, it's smaller than the InPulse and competing products from Sony and WIMM, and it is the first smart watch to work with the iPhone. The watch will also work with Android phones, but there are other Android smartphone watches. The watch pairs with the phones using Bluetooth.

Review Pebble Watch and the Future Smart Phone

Upon first glace at the Pebble Watch I thought, "Why?" It seems so redundant. It is an e-paper watch that can receive updates from your mobile phone, alerting you to incoming calls or texts, control your music, get weather alerts, or even lean on your phone's GPS for when you're riding your bike. However, it's nothing that your phone can't already do -- it's just in a different package. Yet, the watch project managed to raise a cool $10 million on Kickstarter, making it the most financed project the fundraising site has seen to date (the project was only shooting for $100,000).

Review Pebble Watch At here

So, it's clear that a whole lot of people want a watch that does nothing new. But... maybe it does do something different. Not spectacularly different (and still nothing a phone can't do) but something different enough that it's worth really paying attention to Pebble Watch.

On top of being a wrist watch that can, you know, tell you the time, it is also now compatible with Twine, a prototype interface that uses a sensor and notification system. With Twine, you can receive alerts when your washing machine is done with a load of laundry, for instance, or if someone opens a door, and so on.

DesignBoom explains the system simply:


while 'the internet of things' and a connected home are not new concepts, the mission behind 'twine' is to make the technology easily accessible to average users with no knowledge of programming. the system is powered by a wireless module (2.5-inches square and powered by AAA battery), connected on users' existing wifi network and interfaced with a cloud-based service called 'spool'. web-based, 'spool' permits users to modify and monitor their 'twine' alerts from any browser. the application itself reads in conversational english, for example: 'when moisture sensor gets wet then send an SMS reading 'the basement is flooding!'' users can add to a list of preprogrammed rule sets, and share new rules with other 'twine' users.

Okay, so with Twine, you can determine exactly what notifications you want to get from everyday objects and machines. And with Pebble watch, you can get those updates on your wrist.

While the system would be very simple in the near future, it is the building blocks for a more sophisticated system later on that can include energy-saving alerts like lights being left on or dishwashers running at the right time of day. I know, I know -- we already have sophisticated systems that do this for smart homes. But, do you see many people using them? Do you see people laying down dough on Kickstarter at record rates to be part of them? Nope. You see people wanting wrist watches that tell you when an email comes in. It's just a building block, even a couple steps back from what's already out there, but it's a building block people want. Not only does it have potential uses for saving resources and money, but it is currently "all the rage." And that makes it worth keeping an eye on.

Wired writes:

"We believe in connecting many simple objects to do powerful things, and when a common backer of Eric's and ours suggested that Twine and Pebble together would be like peanut butter and chocolate, we loved the idea." John Kestner, Supermechanical co-founder, told Wired in an e-mail. "[Pebble] is tinkerer-friendly and a kindred post-PC spirit (it even uses the same low-power ARM processor [as Twine]) and by giving users the ability to incorporate Pebble into Twine rules, the possible applications grow exponentially."

The Twine partnership only hints at the many ways a Pebble smartwatch might be useful in people's day-to-day lives. The Pebble team will make an open software development kit available in August, allowing developers to create more applications for the Pebble platform.

When it comes to making smart homes and the energy savings possible with them popular, Pebble watch in conjunction with projects like Twine might be an important path.

Review Pebble Watch and the Future Smart Phone