Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Interview with Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky at CES 2016”.
Hey I’m Dan Seaford, I’m here at Las Vegas, CES 2016. I’M here in our booth on the show floor and across from me I’ve got Eric Kowski. You may now know him as pebble he’s still CEO, one of the co-founders been making pebble for how many years now, eight years, eight years, eight years of pebble and wearables, and even before pebble Eric was building wearables. So we’re gon na talk about wearables and let’s do it. That’S some fun so we’re here at CES, you’re kind of just your pal and around having some fun.
That’S exactly see anything says you see anything fun here, drones a lot of drones. I really like this drone that had like styrofoam on the outside, so it doesn’t cut people. Oh that’s, nice. Let’S consider it yeah. I appreciate that yeah yeah they’re, like drones, there’s cars everywhere and stuff like that, but there’s also a ton of wearables and like everybody’s, putting wearables on like their product lineups and everybody’s getting into it. But you know you guys have been doing it for a long time and I want to talk about last year, specifically 2015, which was crazy busy for you guys you correct me.
If I’m wrong, you launched four products: three new watches, three new watches and then a bunch of software new software platform, yeah new software interface. You just in December, launched an initiative with health and tracking and you really kind of change the way the pebble talk. Does Fitness start? You can talk to me about that, so our our our approach is, you know. From the hardware perspective we launched three new watches.
We’Ve got a broad offering now all the way from $ 99 up to 250 bucks a bunch of different options, but for us like again and I’ve reiterate this pretty much every time I talk to you, it’s like it’s about software, because these things are tiny computers That are on our bodies. We we put them on for a cup of for a variety of different reasons. You know fitness tracking sleep, tracking notifications, music control, those are they’re like the simple they, the bass use cases, but over time it’s growing. It’S doing more. You know, we’ve seen a lot of people. Groups start using pebble as as a means of collecting data for medic, for medical studies and for research research projects, as well as seeing like the benefits of what happens when you have an open platform. So we’re combining that together, I think, with peplums okay, so speaking of you’re wearing the pebble time round. Yes, now this one is kind of like a departure from your earlier designs in number of ways. It’S really different than like the original pebble, which I think you’ve seen a lot. It’S like.
That’S the sporty. That’S the that’s the runners watch and this is yeah, pretty pretty different yeah. So you know it’s round. It is ready. Obviously, it’s got a little bit lower battery life, but it’s a lot slimmer and thinner kind of just a different appeal and aesthetic we’ve seen a completely. You know a completely different take on on people looking at pebble like when they looked at us with the original pebble.
It was mainly the crowd of runners and people who are a little bit more into fitness, and it’s colorful there’s a lot of color options, so it brings in a kind of younger crowd couple times. Steel, you know, offers that a little bit more style but pebble time round has just for people that never considered a SmartWatch before it catches their eye as not a SmartWatch, but it’s something that they might want to. Actually, you know where ya know, one of the things that you’re talking about being a small company. Is you have this this idea, when the time launched of these smart bands, that kind of like snap in and other companies and make them we haven’t, seen a whole lot of? Oh there’s a bunch action kicks at CES actually and there’s Aria health, which is a a sensor, a gesture sensor: smart, strap, okay, they launched on Kickstarter about six months ago, they’re, actually gon na be shipping. In two or three months, you can control pebble using gestures on your finger, so it’s even more hands-free than it was before. There’S fit pay, which announced launched about a month and a half ago.
It’S a payment. Smart strap for pebble they’ve integrated with MasterCard and Visa Networks, they’ve added an NFC NFC chip onto your onto the strap, which means you can pay with your pebble. That’S coming out in a couple months. They also did something cool.
I think a lot of people are gon na buy the fit pay not just for the payments, but also because they did something completely logical, that we haven’t done, which is add a USB port onto the back, so that you don’t have to carry around a cable. It was cool I mean, but that’s kind of the power of what we’ve, what we’ve done. We’Ve created this open platform that other people can build. On top of. From a software perspective, we launched that yeah. We launched that like three three years ago.
Yes, you can now, you know with the hardware it takes. It takes a little bit longer because of the lead tons of building hardware. But it’s it’s it’s starting. It’S pretty cool! What what’s next for 2016 for wearables and then what? What do you think is next for pebble, so we see a massive opportunity right now: kind of in the convergence of the activity, tracker space, the the fitness health tracker space and more of a multi-purpose smart, smart device.
This is our bread and butter. We’Ve been working on this, for, as I said eight years, we see the biggest opportunity for pebble kind of that. You know Apple watches here, there’s no doubt about it. That Apple has created.
You know a great product, a strong product. It’S you know: they’ve sold millions and expanded the entire market for smart watches, which has helped us out. We don’t see ourselves as necessarily, then you know side by side hundred percent competitors. You know in that higher-end, 300. 400 dollar space – we’re very focused right now. In the 99 to 200 dollar space, that’s our bread and butter.
We think that, because of the choices that we’ve made on the technical architecture of the product, we can provide a much better product, a much more fully featured product that has just different capabilities like the battery life, the water resistance, the always-on screen. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us Expo is a blast for more on pebble and everything here at CES be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel again, I’m Dan Siefert, it’s a pebble, CEO, Eric, Mazur, Koski and I’ll talk to you guys later. .