NEWSLETTER
Eric Migicovsky still uses his wink. Thirteen years after founding the wearable company and finding Great success in KickstarterAnd more than eight years after the company sold to Fitbit, which was later acquired by Google, the Migicovsky watch still works. (In case you are asking you: When I saw it in CES a few weeks ago, it seemed to be using a white pebble time round model. But it has a box full of them at home). He has not received software, however, it has been updated since December 2016, and has been worried about a time that will eventually stop receiving notifications, or connect with your phone, or meet some other flash problem.
Instead of buying another smart watch, Migicovsky decided to try to make Pebble work again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging application called Beeperer, Automattic last year and left the company in autumn. Since then, I had thought about starting a product similar to Pebble from scratch, thinking that it would be easier to do the same for the second time. “But then I thought, What happens if I only asked Google that of open origin the operating system?? “He says. He felt like a long shot, but he knew that the code was sitting inactive inside Mountain View somewhere. Then he asked. A few times.
To Migicovsky's surprise, Google agreed to launch Pebble to the public. As of Monday, All Pebble firmware is available in GithubAnd Migicovsky is starting a company to resume where he left it.
The company, which cannot be appointed Pebble because Google still has that, it still does not have a name. For now, Migicovsky is organizing a waiting list and a news record on a website called Repetition. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that pebble software, the plan is to start sending new wearables that are seen, sit and work like the pebbles of yesteryear.
The reason, Mygicovsky tells me, is simple. “I have literally tried everything else,” he says, “and nothing is close to.” Of course, you can have a very specific set of requirements: many people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google and others are doing. But it is true that there has been nothing like Pebble from Pebble. “For the things I want, as a good electronic paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there is nothing.”
Pebble's core, he says, are some things. A wink must be peculiar and fun and must feel like a contraption In an important way. Shows notifications, allows you to control your music with buttons, lasts a lot of time and does not try to do too much. It seems that Migicovsky could have ambitions from pebbles beyond smart watches, but seems to be starting with smart watches.
If that sounds like the old pea and not much more, that is precisely the point. Migicovsky tells me again and again that the plan is not to reinvent Pebble, or it is the Bejesus out of the concept, or do anything else to start a hardware company in 2025. The fact that the pebble on his wrist still works , And it still works for him, it is evidence that perhaps Pebble had already finished his work. “We are building a spiritual, not successor, but clone of pebbles,” he says, “because there is not so much that I really want to change.”
However, many other things have changed in eight years. Google, Apple and Samsung now have good smart watches that are well linked to their other devices: Pebble always had trouble getting access to iOS features, in particular, and that is not becoming easier. Smart watches are currently health and physical conditioning devices above all, and they are becoming much more complex and powerful in search of those characteristics. Google obviously does not see any form of pebble as a threat; His best opportunity is to draw another way completely.
The biggest difference will be how the company itself operates. Migicovsky wrote A long blog post in 2022 Explaining what went wrong in Pebble the first time and attributed its failure in part to take a lot of investment money and let the company change. Since then, Migicovsky has earned a lot of money with Beeper and for a period as an investor in and Combinator; Your new company is your alone. At this time, it is only migicovsky and some part -time employees: it will grow, it says, but not too much. “The main thing here is: sustainable.”
“They could even use it in another random hardware. Who knows what people can do with that now?
Migicovsky also hopes to be part of a broader open source community around Pebble OS. There are still the acadeners of pebbles: a group of developers in Lower have worked to keep many of the platform applications alive, for example, together with The Cobble application to connect to phones and Guijarros subdit It is surprisingly active for a product that has not been updated since the Obama administration. Migicovsky says that he plans open source that his new company builds and expects many other people to also build things. “There will be the ability for anyone who wants, take the source code of Pebble, compile it, execute it in their pebbles, build new pebbles, build new watches,” he says. “They could even use it in another random hardware. Who knows what people can do with that now?
This whole project will take time, says Migicovsky. He only learned with certainty that open source Google the software a few days ago, and has not yet been able to use it at all. But he is already working for hardware prototypes, and he is clear about what he wants to be the new pebbles. He knows he can do it because he already did it once. The evidence is there in his wrist. All he is trying to do is make sure he can stay there.
