While the tech Goliath’s announce their upcoming wearable tech, tiny Pebble just keeps reliably and confidently turning out their plastic and metal smartwatches to the tune of 400,000 units since January 2013.
“When we started working on wearables six years ago, there were few players in the space and a lot of skeptics,” says Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky of Google’s news. “It’s exciting to see this market grow so quickly — enabling more interesting use cases and keeping all of us laser-focused on creating the very best user experiences we can.”
This week Google announced Android Wear, a version of its popular Android mobile operating system for use with such wearable tech as smartwatches.
Fortune reports that Migicovsky doesn’t seem unnerved by all this, and why should he? Pebble has sold over 400,000 smartwatches since January of last year, and that amounts to about $60 million in revenues for that time period.
Charles River Ventures partner and Pebble investor George Zachary estimates the company will make twice last year’s revenue for 2014. With over 1,000 Pebble apps now available, and 12,000 registered developers working on more, Pebble has reason to be a confident company.
To be sure, Migicovsky will be keeping his eye one the big boys like Google, and yes, Apple. However, his main concern is to make his products better than ever. He is exploring technologies to increase battery life. (Something I can get behind, as my Pebble currently runs approximately two days before needing a charge following the Pebble 2.0 update, WAY down from the previous 1 week running time between charges.)
Migicovsky says he looks forward to the day when Pebble becomes more than just an early-adopter digital accessory, and the watch can act as a central controller to some of the user’s other devices. His desire is to innovate Pebble to the point where “if other people compete with us, they would have to do it on our terms.”
