Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Fitbit’s CEO says comparisons to Apple Watch are ‘superficial observations'”.
Hey guys, it’s Lauren good with the verge reporting from CES in Las Vegas, and I’m here with James Park, he’s the co-founder and CEO of Fitbit, hey James thanks so much for being here with me early on a Friday morning, kind of a lot. I think we’re the last day here towards the tail-end for sure yeah. Some people are pretty tired. I really appreciate you being here this morning. Let’S get right into it. The most serious question I have to ask you about this week is how many steps have you taken it’s interesting, because I was actually doing a step challenge with Gary Shapiro, who runs the CTA, and I think this week I’ve been averaging between 20 and 25 thousand Steps a day, so yesterday, 125 thousand.
How many miles is that you know 2500 steps, so yeah 10 10 miles a day, that’s really impressive, but in in all seriousness you did have a pretty big week here at C at CES you introduced a new smart. Fitness watch called the blaze you’re wearing it. Yeah wearing it yeah, we, we announced this Tuesday Tuesday morning, so this is the Fitbit blaze.
So I’ll take it off at this point. So it’s it’s! What we call a smart fitness watch, it’s really focused on Fitness. First, it has the right set of smart features. Such as caller ID text, notifications, calendar reminders, music control, etc, the right set that don’t really overwhelm users, because I think the common knock against general-purpose smart watches today is that they’re very overwhelming they do too much etc cuts in their battery life.
The device is actually modular, so you can actually transform the entire look of the device, so we have different frames, different frame, styles, colors, etc. That will be launching. Personally I mean it. You know, we’ve talked about this eyewear and try a lot of wearables and I thought – and I thought it doesn’t – support third-party applications. It has much longer battery life, you know so I didn’t see it in the same category as Apple watch. But what? What is your response to that when people say that’s, that’s where you’re going with this? I think that’s a very logical superficial observation, but I think there’s been a lot of trade-offs for the product and you know balances that we’ve made to really cater towards our core audience, which again, is that active user? Who wants a little bit more smart capability? And it’s not a general-purpose device, I mean obviously, as you said, there’s no third party apps, but the trade-off there is.
We get. You know five days battery life, which is what our active users really like because look. They want to wear a device 24/7, including when they’re sleeping and this device really allows them to do that.
Did you consider making something that would support third party applications? You know the hardware on the blaze actually is pretty capable, so I think for us is, we do expect blaze to get smarter features over time, but we still want to be a little bit selective because not just from a power perspective, but I think people appreciate The simplicity and ease of use of the blaze and our other products, and we don’t want the device to be too overwhelming that makes sense, but it’s possible in the future you’re saying the hardware, the hardware spec technically it can do it. Yes, interesting! Ok! So let’s talk about heartrate because also on the heels of you introducing this watch. If it was hit with a class-action lawsuit from some consumers that were complaining, that the heart great accuracy of some of your other devices, wasn’t as accurate, as maybe they’d hoped, or they feel the company had said.
What’S your response to that, you know my response: is we have a pretty extensive Rd effort around our pure pulse heart rate technology? We’Ve done a lot of internal studies, around testing and validation. So we really stand by our pure pulse technology and you know for the lawsuit. You know we don’t really feel that it has any merit. You know for us, look it’s a huge advancement in convenience for people. I mean before really if you wanted to get continuous heartrate. The only way you could do it is, you know, wearing an uncle chest, strap exactly so look.
This is the logical progression of technology. You have to start at some point and then the technology always improves over time, but in general right now look we stand by our technology. We’Re gon na vigorously defend the lawsuit.
We don’t feel that it has any merit and there’s gon na be continued Rd. So but you do feel, there’s room for improvement or advancement in a software. Um, look it’s with any technology.
I think. If you look the original iPhone and the camera on it, I mean it was okay, but it wasn’t fantastic and look at the progress that all the smartphone makers have made in the camera module to the point. Where a lot of people – you, don’t you know, don’t even think you need the SLRs anymore. So for us, pure pulse, was a technology that we launched last year and look there’s a lot of things that pipeline R .
