How A $3 Million Kickstarter Project Could Save The Wristwatch (Yes, The Wristwatch)
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Watch the video to see how this device works on your bike!]
How A $3 Million Kickstarter Project Could Save The Wristwatch (Yes, The Wristwatch)
BY KIT EATON |
The wristwatch is dying, right? Nobody even wants a "smart watch." The startup Allerta raised $3 million in less than a week, and may yet prove all that wrong.
In about two hours last Wednesday, a small but energetic group of young entrepreneurs saw their Kickstarter project's funding zoom from tens of thousands of dollars to over $100,000--their threshold for getting the project into production. Not bad for a funding window that still had 37 days to run!
And still the money kept coming. Just two hours later, they blew past $200,000. A million dollars came the next day, another million the next and now the figure is over $3 million. It's an astonishing growth curve, something that's pretty rare on Kickstarter, and by any measure 21,000 customers in five days is a success. What are all these folks around the globe buying, though? A smart watch that connects to iPhones and Android phones.
The device is called a Pebble, and it's almost completely perfectly explained by the Allerta team's Kickstarter promo video:
Essentially we're all tired of fishing our phone out of our pockets or purses to glance at it to check our Twitter feed, see the time, work out who's calling (resulting in an embarassingly loud burst of Lady Gaga ringtone as you grapple at the slab of glass and plastic in an effort to silence it quick-smart) or simply change the track on its music app. It's a tiresome maneuver, it can result in clumsy fingers smattering your precious iPhone's innards all over the floor, and it reveals eactly what digital hotness you're carrying and where you're carrying it--info that passing pickpockets love.
This scenario is precisely what smartwatches are designed to skirt. By adding a small screen to your wrist (yes, another screen in your life--what is this, the eigth now?), which syncs wirelessly to your phone, all of that important interaction can happen with a dab at the smartwatch...
Finish reading at FastCompany
Comments
Post a Comment