I never really cared for Bam-Bam, so I’m not surprised that everybody is going ga-ga for Pebbles – the newest Kickstarter sensation that has raised over $3 million in just a few days. A pebble, in this case, is neither a tiny rock or the daughter of Fred and Wilma. This Pebble is an app-filled watch that wirelessly connects to your iPhone or Android smartphone.
And I thought, in this era of smartphones, that people had abandoned watches. Turns out they just want their watches to do what their phones can do. Besides telling time on an e-ink display, it can do things like display email, tell you how fast you’re running or biking, or remotely controlling your iTunes.
Pebble’s intended goal was $100,000. It reached that in two hours. There’s still a month to go, so who knows how high this one will go. And it seems like the higher the budget goes, the more features the watchmaker adds. After $1 million, it let people know that they had enough cash to make the watches waterproof, and after $2 million, it opened up a software development kit that will let anybody tinker and build apps for the watch. Hopefully some kind soul will develop an app that lets me locate my phone, because I’m always losing it in my house.
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