Raising $1 million in 28 hours made Pebble the poster child for the Kickstarter generation, offering proof that anyone with an idea good enough, could stand up to established industry players. "I think those fundamentals are still here with us today and most smartwatch makers still build devices to those fundamentals,” Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy told Wareable. The Pebble watch really hit home on the need to have a long battery life, to be able to always tell time, and to give you your notifications in a non-intrusive manner. “I think Pebble's initial design really captured something that people wanted from a smartwatch and I believe is still core to the smartwatch's utility. Millions more sales followed and, for a while, things were looking really, really good. Nine months later those first Pebble watches began shipping to backers and the tech world sat up and took notice. That unprecedented success meant the watch got better before it even arrived, with Pebble upgrading from Bluetooth 2.1 to 4.0 and adding improved swim-proof water resistance (5ATM). Unlike many Kickstarter campaigns of the era, it actually delivered without screwing over backers The 68,989 initial Kickstarter backers were suitably convinced by the proposition and placed $10,266,845 in Pebble’s coffers, amassing the funding goal 100 times over in just five weeks. ![]() Sure, that plastic build had a cheap feel to it, and the display was a bit of a fingerprint magnet, but a logical button-based UI design meant you barely had to touch it anyway. The black and white e-paper display enabled a five-day battery life, while an open SDK enabled developers to build apps, which saw heavyweights like Uber, Runkeeper, Misfit and TripAdvisor embrace the platform. ![]() It also pioneered the way the companion smartphone apps could be used to deliver updates, new apps and fresh watch faces. ![]() It enabled Bluetooth control of the most popular music apps from the wrist (especially handy because we all had speaker docks back then) and delivered smartphone notifications and caller ID.
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