Gadgetory

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 midget 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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