Late yesterday it was reported by The Information that Fitbit is close to buying wearable startup Pebble, news that has since been independently confirmed by The Verge. Fitbit and Pebble have been in the final stages of the deal since before the Thanksgiving holiday; the buying price has not yet been confirmed. While it ultimately might not be as good of a deal as Pebble would have hoped for, there are a lot of reasons why a Pebble-Fitbit deal makes sense.
Pebble is popular among OSNews readers, so those of you with a Pebble might want to keep an eye out for the future of this possible deal.
This has a “Blackberry buys qnx” feel to it. Not too optimistic, but the watch I have works fine. It just needs to last until there are better options.
blackberry make a fortune out of QNX for embedded systems. They took to long turning it into a mobile platform, so missed the market. But the OS was and is Alive and well.
Yeah but now its tied to a company that is a fraction of its old self. It arguably would have been better if it had not been saddled with the quixotic task of trying to save blackberry.
If it’s a smartwatch, I would say automatic is a better option.
Out of curiosity what is a better, lower latency solution for receiving notifications? Time is money. Time that it takes me to pull my phone out is time wasted, money lost. If your time has no value, then sure smartwatches are dumb pointless devices.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I know that’s what owners may tell themselves, but most people concerned about their time and money would probably achieve better productivity by ditching both or at least turning them off during work, haha.
You don’t fix productivity by making notifications easier, you fix productivity by increasing the burden so that you are only interrupted by important communications. I’m half joking, but it’s a serious point too. It used to be we’d go to work and have almost no external interruptions. Someone would have to call the work number and ask for you, which in and of itself was enough of a barrier that people would just wait until they saw you after work to discuss anything unless it was important.
So the main productivity loss isn’t caused by pulling a cell phone out of a pocket (after all, this can be solved by keeping it on the desk), rather it is that our attention is constantly interrupted at work in the first place.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2656681/Workers-glued-cell-…
http://www.businessinsider.com/productivity-killers-at-work-2014-6
Edited 2016-12-04 21:44 UTC
I have a new Pebble Time 2 on order, very very poor comms from the company in general and now compounded by this…
Will I even get my device? If they are bought, do Fitbit have ANY commitment to those who paid for a device on kickstarter?
List of questions goes on and on, yet nothing approaching an update from the company itself..
I think fitbit has to communicate to their customers very quickly what their intentions are with the product range at pebble. If they don’t, they’ll lose a lot of them fast.
If you look at the Kickstarter comments sections its open panic like rats on a sinking ship
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-2-time-2-and-c…
Literally hundreds of requests for refunds pouring in. Something needs to be done Before Fitbit takes over (if they end up doing so).
Citizen offered Pebble $740 million for the company back in 2015
Intel also wanted to buy Pebble for $70 million earlier this year
Now estimates of Fitbit being $40 million
is this not an indicator of a bubble waiting to burst in the industry?
Not really. A bursting bubble is inflating. The prices coming down seems to reflect a more pessimistic market.
Adurbe,
I would think the indicator of “a bubble waiting to burst” would be the original sky-rocking company valuation without matching customer demand. Dropping valuation means the burst is already under way. The question is where it stops. I didn’t know Pebble was offered $740M, wow.
maybe its just me, but $740m feels like a number you should never turn down when you are a company with one product :-p
Depends. Facebook was offered huge numbers before it ever made a buck on advertising, but its investors were better off not accepting those offers.
If you won a company for reasons other than making money (like wanting to do something specific, or simply having ownership), selling is not always ideal. In capitalism, the owner gets to make all the decisions. If you sell, you are no longer the owner, and can no longer make decisions on your own fate. The same goes for taking investment money (because the investors become the owners). If the founders of Pebble wanted to be employees, they probably wouldn’t have bothered with Kick Starter.
Pebble is the BeOS of smartwatches.
It’s an indicator that fitness tracking is the killer app for wearables for the bulk of the market, and everything else is an answer looking for a problem. It’s not so much a bubble as much as the hype is dying down and the wearable market cooling off.
Selling a company is also about finding the correct fit. In this case, Pebble fills in the higher end market that FitBit is moving into with the Blaze.
I personally like the Fitbit products but then I had the interesting realisation that they’ve actively been ignoring real paying customers for almost 3 years with regards to integrating their devices and user data (which is not theirs, but their customers and to which they have all the rights in the world) with the Apple HealthKit SDK. If a customer has made the decision to buy into a particular brand and lifestyle, you should really try to work with that, not play silly corporate animosities (probably all stemmed from the entrance of the Apple Watch in the same arena.)
https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/Integrate-with-i…
Not listening to customers, moderating the forum to keep any dissent to minimum seems like the complete opposite from what Pebbel is about.
Until they change this practice I will vote with my wallet in other directions.
Probably, but FitBit is a wildly successful company and basically own the fitness tracker market.
Integrating with Apple HealthKit would be nice, but of the people I know who own FitBits and iPhones, they don’t care.
I have no interest in the health functions of Fitbit and the like. I want a simple smartwatch that looks like a proper watch, provides me notifications, simple apps, and an informative always-on display.
I bought the Pebble Round shortly before this announcement. It is the only watch I have ever owned as an adult. It is almost perfect as far as I am concerned.
It would be more than a shame if the culture and design of Pebble were lost with this change.