Hope you didn't empty the piggy bank for a nifty color Pebble Time last week, because Pebble's just gone the same "crowdfunding" route for its more sophisticated and more expensive Pebble Time Steel. (We put "crowdfunding" in quotes this time because the company's really using Kickstarter as a distribution channel, not the actual "put-it-out-there-and-see-what-happens" … [Read more...]
Pebble Teases a Pivot
Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky gave an exclusive interview to The Verge, in which he said that his company has sold 1,000,000 watches, and that 2015 will bring new products and a new software platform. Pebble's in a pretty difficult spot. It more or less pioneered the notification device use case for wearables, and but saw Google wield its sharp elbows in the market with Android … [Read more...]
Smartband Business Jumped 684 Pct This Year, Says Canalys
Fitbit, Jawbone, and Samsung are leading the smartband business, says the industry analysis shop Canalys, whose earlier work has impressed us. On a worldwide basis, the smartband market grew 684 percent from 1H13 to 1H14 -- although Canalys doesn't say if that's units shipped or revenue. Due to their relationships with distributors, Fitbit and Jawbone lead the basic … [Read more...]
WebOS Team Reportedly Joins Pebble
One of the sadder tech product stories of the last few years is the fate of WebOS, the excellent operating system from Palm that HP bought and eviscerated. Having been among the earliest adopters of the Palm Treo, we had a Palm Pre smartphone on our desk here at WTI for a long time, just to remind ourselves that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on elegant hardware and software … [Read more...]
Quote of the Day: Sonny Vu
“Why should we cling on to a dying business?” -- Sonny Vu, CEO of Misfit Wearables, maker of the Misfit Shine fitness tracker. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal about his company's deal to license its software to Pebble. … [Read more...]
Pebble Watches Will Now Run Misfit Software
Once Google announced Android Wear, we started to worry whether excellent products from Misfit and Pebble might be toast. Now comes word that they're building an ecosystem of their own, with Pebble devices tracking steps using Misfit software. The Misfit trackers are lovely, but have a scant user interface. Pebble watches aren't bad, but are primarily notification devices … [Read more...]
Salesforce Brings Wearables Into the Enterprise with Salesforce Wear
We've long believed that the most exciting thing about wearables isn't the Quantified Self movement as much as it is how wearables can change the relationship between people and entities. (It's much the same as early personal computers: standalone computer were much less interesting than computers connected to the Internet.) Salesforce -- the world's top CRM platform -- … [Read more...]
Who’s Making How Much Money in the Wearable Band Market
We've been thinking a lot about the recent Canalys report about market share in the wearables business, and we've been trying to tease some actual revenue numbers based in the results they published. This is valuable because these companies are either private and don't publish revenues, or are public and don't break this market down in their financials. Canalys said that … [Read more...]
Fitbit Leads the Wearables World: Canalys
Anyone can project billions of dollars in the future, but counting actual shipping products is hard. The consulting firm Canalys reports that Fitbit shipped nearly half of all wearable bands in the world in the first quarter of 2014. Overall, Canalys reported, 2.7 million wearable bands shipped worldwide last quarter, and Fitbit's strength was despite the skin rash-related … [Read more...]
Fixya Crowdsources Five Smartwatch Reviews
We here have been writing and editing tech product reviews for going on three decades, so we claim some significant expertise about them. But Fixya's showing an interesting approach to the process we haven't seen before: collecting thousands of troubleshooting reports and drawing conclusions about the products. Fixya aggregated about 6,000 user reports about five smart … [Read more...]