After raising more than $10 million on Kickstarter, smartwatch maker Pebble announced today that it has received $15 million in first round funding from Charles River Ventures.

That’s a pretty hefty sum for a company that was initially shot down by VCs, a blow that led to the Kickstarter campaign, one of the first big crowdfunding success stories. But after nabbing around 85,000 orders on Kickstarter and successfully kicking off Pebble shipments (despite significant delays), it’s not surprising to see investors taking a second look.

Pebble says the funding will let it expand its software engineering team, scale for demand, and grow its open development platform. (I backed Pebble via Kickstarter and am still waiting for my watch.)

Pebble could be credited with kicking off the latest smartwatch craze — now Apple, Google, and several other companies are rumored to be working on similar devices. The Pebble communicates with your smartphone to show incoming calls, email messages, and calendar entries, and it can also run apps on its own. After launching its initial SDK for developers in March, the company is today releasing an updated SDK that allows for two-way communication between your smartwatch and smartphone. That means Pebble apps can now be built to remotely control your smartphones or other web-connected devices.

The company is also launching a Sports API for fitness apps, which would give developers the ability to connect their apps with the smartwatch similar to RunKeeper’s integration a few weeks ago.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Source: USPTO

The transparent conical housing with a flexible display being inserted

Apple’s new patent is for a “consumer electronic product” with a flexible display that rolls up when needed, and unrolls if desired. In the patent claims, Apple says it could fit within a conical glass housing — a flattened oval — which would allow the display to be visible on any portion of the device.

In other words, your phone no longer has a front or back … just whatever side you happen to be looking at.

The device as patented includes facial recognition and user-sensing technology that determines which side is within your field of vision at any given time and selectively displays content and controls only where you can see them.

As such, it’s an interesting response to Google’s backside control patent, which describes controls built into the back of your phone to allow you to flip screens, turn pages, or control music without taking up front-screen real estate. Apple has a previous patent on similar backside controls, but this is more radical.

Source: USPTO

The flexible display inside the transparent glass housing

What’s interesting to me, however, is the flexible AMOLED display that rolls up and unrolls (see image gallery below, especially the fifth image). It’d be a perfect display for a sort of iCuff — a full phone built into a product that rides on your wrist.

The concept of iWatch as a peripheral to an iPhone has never made a ton of sense to me. If I already have a phone, it is already either on my person, or close enough for easy checking. A peripheral that simply enables notifications from my phone and perhaps has a few other self-quantification features doesn’t seem to be enough to make it worthwhile.

Rather, it makes more sense, potentially, to provide the entire phone (read: portable computer with communication capabilities) in a flexible cuff format that now comes with a handy new carrying case: you.

And, of course, if you want your full screen to be available, you simply unroll the cuff and snap the screen flat.

It would certainly solve the phone-in-the-pocket problem while still keeping your hands free for whatever you need to carry or do. And it’s built-in hands-free for while you’re driving.

More images from the patent application:

Image credits: iWatch mockup by VeneStudio; Hat tip: Cult of Mac

With Apple and Samsung reportedly working on next-generation smartwatches, it was only a matter of time until we heard that Google was joining the party.

Google’s Android unit is reportedly working on a smartwatch of its own, the Financial Times reports. Just as we’ve heard about Apple’s supposed iWatch, Google’s device will serve as an extension to your smartphone, a source tells the FT.

Project Glass, Google’s futuristic wearable display, is being spearheaded by Google’s X Lab, not the Android team, so the two projects could end up dueling for the mantle of Google’s top wearable computing project; although the smartwatch will likely end up retailing well below Project Glass’s $1,500 price (which itself will likely fall significantly over the next few years).

Google received a patent for a “smart watch including flip-up display” last October, which has been reported previously — so it’s not a huge surprise to hear that a smartwatch may be in the works.

The rumor gels well with Google’s reported X Phone, which we hear Google is developing together with its subsidiary, Motorola Mobility. With a potential smartwatch, X Phone, and Project Glass down the line, the Google of the future seems to be far more reliant on its own consumer devices, rather than on those produced by partners (which have led to some serious issues with its hold on the Android ecosystem).

Photo via: Rob Bulmahn/Flickr

A Samsung vice president has made it clear that the company is developing an upcoming watch product, which will likely compete with Apple’s heavily rumored “iWatch” smart watch.

But the VP, Lee Young Hee of Samsung Mobile, also hinted that the watch wasn’t just a knee-jerk response to Apple’s rumored product, Bloomberg reports.

“We’ve been preparing the watch product for so long,” Lee said. “We are working very hard to get ready for it. We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them.”

It’s not surprising to see Samsung tackle a smartwatch (again), especially after all of the hype surrounding the iWatch. With every new report, it seems clearer that our wrists will be a significant part of the future of mobile computing. But Samsung will likely want to make it clear that it isn’t just copying Apple’s game plan, given the contentious trial where Apple accused Samsung of copying its smartphone and tablet designs.

The watch category isn’t anything new for Samsung. The company released the S9110 watch phone (above) back in 2009 at a slightly cheaper price than a competing LG watch phone. Apple’s iWatch is expected to serve more as an accessory for your smartphone rather than a completely separate phone, so I’d expect Samsung’s upcoming smart watch to follow suit.

Unfortunately, Lee didn’t have anything else to divulge about Samsung’s upcoming watch. The company is also getting into the fitness gadget arena this year with a new S-band activity monitor, activity scale, and heart monitor, all of which will synchronize with the company’s new Galaxy S IV smartphone.

Long before the iPhone changed how we think of cellphones, Nokia was dabbling in even more radical cellphone concepts.

The Nokia 888, a concept from designer Tamer Nakisci, was a flexible design that could fit around your wrist, lay flat for reading, and take on a few other shapes. I haven’t thought much about the 888 since it won Nokia’s Benelux design contest in 2005, but after AppleInsider dug up Apple’s slapband-esque iWatch patent yesterday (below), Nakisci’s concept feels strangely relevant.

As he envisioned it, the 888 featured a liquid battery, a flexible touchscreen, and relied on speech recognition rather than a keyboard. If that sounds to you like shades of what we’re hearing about the iWatch coupled with Apple’s Siri virtual assistant, you’re not alone.

To be clear, I’m not implying Apple in any way stole this design concept. It’s just interesting to see how close we are today toward building devices that once seemed impossible.

Here’s how Nakisci described the functionality of the 888′s form to Yanko Design:

You don’t have to carry it in your pocket or on your wrist. You can carry it anywhere, in any form. You can roll it, bend it, put on your clothes like a clip. It also makes some form changes that makes it more ergonomical: i.e., when you want to talk on the phone, the body form turns into the form of the good old telephone. You can personalize these forms and record them. So it fits you the best in the way that you have chosen. The functions that it has also create a feeling of electronical pet, as it senses your moves, understands what you want, responds to you in the best way. It learns you, to fit you better. Also e-motions lets you send forms to the other 888 users. It could be the shape of a heart or a small dance. This way you can talk without words.

Like any great concept design, Nakisci’s vision was far beyond the technology available at the time. It may even be too advanced to build today; Apple’s iWatch concept still relies on a wireless connection with your iPhone to fetch data, which removes the need for bulky cellular electronics and a bigger battery.

Here’s how Apple describes its “slapband” iWatch patent (which, of course, isn’t called iWatch anywhere in the patent):

A wearable video device arranged to be worn by an end-user, comprising: a flexible substrate having a flat state and a curled state; a flexible display disposed upon a first surface of the flexible substrate, wherein in the curled state the flexible substrate conforms to an appendage of the end-user, the flexible substrate further comprising: an electronic module in communication with the flexible display, the electronic module providing information to the display, at least a part of which is presented in real time for presentation by the flexible display; and a mechanism for detecting an end portion of the flexible display, the detection for adjusting the arrangement of information shown on the flexible display to match the size of the appendage the wearable video device is mounted on.

Rumors of Apple developing a smartwatch, cheekily dubbed the “iWatch” by gadget geeks, aren’t dying off anytime soon.

Now even the New York Times is reporting that Apple is developing “wristwatch-like devices” — though the interesting spin this time is that the devices are reportedly made of curved glass.

According to two sources familiar with Apple’s plans, the iWatch will run iOS and lean heavily on its curved glass design to differentiate itself from competitors. It sounds like Apple is working on yet another massive leap in how we view commonplace devices, similar to how the iPhone seemed generations beyond other cellphones when it was first released.

Corning’s new Willow Glass, a flexible new type of glass that’s both incredibly thin and bendable, could be the mysterious curved glass in question, according to the New York Time’s Nick Bilton. That wouldn’t be a huge stretch for Apple — Corning’s Gorilla Glass was brought back from obscurity thanks to Steve Jobs’ desire to have a strong glass for the iPhone. Gorilla Glass has since gone on to be an industry standard for smartphone and tablet screens.

The last iWatch rumor suggested that Apple was working on a Bluetooth-capable smartwatch with an Intel chip, but that report never really caught my interest since it seemed like a minor step for Apple. Introducing the first wearable device with curved glass to the public seems more like Apple’s style — just like how the iPhone made touchscreen smartphones seem commonplace, and the iPad made it clear that even large displays could benefit from touchscreen tech.

Given just how much hype the Pebble smartwatch project has seen, it’s clear that there’s a desire for some sort of high tech device on our wrists. An iWatch will likely do more than show you messages and texts — it will likely incorporate some sort of activity tracking technology, similar to Nike’s Fuelband and Jawbone’s Up.

While the tech world seems gung-ho for a big screen iPhone and the increasingly crazy idea of an Apple-made television, a small screen iWatch could ultimately be far revolutionary.

Update: The Wall Street Journal is also reporting on a potential iWatch today, adding that Apple has been in discussions with Foxconn about it.

Photo: An iPod nano watch, by Ruben Schade/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The much-hyped Pebble smartwatch started shipping yesterday, but the smartphone apps that help the watch really tick hadn’t been approved yet.

Thankfully, the apps for iPhone and Android are now available — just in time to help those who get the watch first. While the first of 89,000 Pebble orders are out the gate, it will likely take several more weeks to fulfill all of the orders.

Pebble got a lot of notice as one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever, with more than $10 million raised. Pebble integrates with your smartphone, and uses an E-Ink display to show information like call data, calendar entries, and social media updates. The apps for Android and iPhone help you install custom watch faces and more.

The Pebble app for the iPhone and Android provides a dashboard for your Pebble smartwatch and does the following things:

• Notifies you when software updates for Pebble ready to install
  
• Installs and remove custom watchfaces onto your Pebble
• Sends ping test messages to your Pebble
• Helps you troubleshoot issues

Check out a demo we did with Pebble in the video below.

Photos via Apple App Store

As promised during CES, Pebble has begun shipping its long-awaited smartwatch to Kickstarter backers today.

But don’t go throwing away your current watch just yet. Judging from the company’s production and shipment capacity, and with more than 89,000 Pebble orders to fulfill, you’ll likely be waiting for your Pebble watch for a few more weeks.

The company notes that its factory is currently building around 800 to 1,000 watches every day, but it’s still working on achieving full capacity of 2,400 daily units. Pebble is also building batches one color at a time, starting with black. So if you’re eager for that red or orange Pebble, expect to wait even longer.

“Since black was by far the most popular color, we started with a run of black Pebbles,” the company wrote in a blog post today. “I realize that this is different than what I said before … [The company previously said it would fulfill orders based on when someone backed the project.] While we would have liked to be able to ship out all the colors at the exact same time, it’s proven to be impossible. We’re doing our best to bring production of other colors on-line as soon as possible.”

Completed Pebbles are being shipped to the company’s Hong Kong and U.S. distribution centers one to two times a week. The company notes that there’s a five- to seven-day lag between a unit’s completed production and its arrival at a distribution center. Due to issues with airport documentation, only 500 Pebbble units are getting shipped today.

Pebble’s Kickstarter campaign was a smashing success — it raised more than $10 million. But after delaying its original launch date from last September, it also quickly became a warning sign for potential problems with the crowdfunding model. Now that it’s actually shipping, new problems lie ahead for Pebble. The company needs to make sure it can ramp up production, ship devices efficiently, and also deal with any issues that come up.

Design issues managed to defeat the far more experienced and well-funded Jawbone with its first Up health wristband, so Pebble can’t rest easy just yet.

Pebble says its iPhone app has been in review by Apple for the past two weeks, but it’s unclear when it will actually be available. For now, iPhone-touting Pebble owners will be able to see notifications and control music but won’t be able to install new watch faces or upgrade the Pebble’s software. The Pebble Android app will be available tomorrow.

Check out our CES demo with Pebble creator Eric Migicovsky below:

The Pebble smartwatch is almost here. In a jam-packed press conference this morning, Pebble creator Eric Migicovsky announced that it will begin shipping the watch Jan. 23.

I chatted with Migicovsky after the press conference, and he showed off some of his favorite features from the watch.

Migicovsky demonstrated Pebble’s “Fuzzy Time” functionality, which gives you plain language time readings (like “Quarter past five”), and a binary clock watch face. And he showed how easy it is to control your phone’s music with the watch.

It may just be running a black-and-white display, but the Pebble feels every bit as exciting as an ultrapowerful tablet. It foretells a new age of devices that are less focused on killer specs and more about evolving how the devices we already rely on function. While its initial delays led to some criticism of the crowdfunding model, the final product looks good enough to show that crowdfunding could be a viable path for consumer products.

It’s been a long road for the Pebble team, despite some initial success. After raising more than $10 million on Kickstarter for its smartwatch, and then facing several months worth of delays, the Pebble finally debuted at a CES press conference this morning (the company’s very first).

Pebble’s lead engineer Eric Migicovsky (below) announced today that the watch is in mass production, and it will begin shipping to Kickstarter backers on January 23 in the order they backed the project.  The watch connects to your smartphone to show incoming data like caller info, e-mail messages calendar entries, and it can also run a variety of apps.

At peak production, Pebble will be able to make 15,000 watches a week. Pebble has to meet the demand of more than 85,000 Kickstarter orders (from almost 69,000 backers), as well as tens of thousands who’ve placed pre-orders for the $150 watch.

“To some people a smartwatch is one of those Dick Tracy devices … to us, it’s a device connected to your smartphone,” Migicovsky said.

Pebble’s final design sports a black and white E-Paper display, which is an LCD variant screen. The screen refreshes faster than typical E-Ink e-reader displays and is 144 by 168 pixels. Pebble claims the watch should last up to seven days on a single charge. It’s made of a polycarbonate base and lens, with an additional antiscratch lens on the screen.

In my brief time with the Pebble, I was surprised by how light and comfortable it felt. I typically don’t like wearing watches because I find most watchbands annoying, but the Pebble’s polyurethane band felt soft and comfortable. The band is also interchangeable, if you prefer something more fashionable.

The Pebble will support Android smartphones running Android 2.3.3 and above, and Apple devices running iOS 5. Migicovsky noted that it works even better with iOS 6, thanks to a new Bluetooth profile that Apple introduced.

When I asked Migicovsky to elaborate on the Pebble’s delay from its initial September release, he said that it was mostly due to taking a completely different strategy towards production. Initially, the company planned to build 1,000 to 2,000 watches in the Bay Area, but after the Kickstarter campaign exploded in popularity, it shifted towards an overseas mass production model.

“The delay mainly stems from us shifting our focus from a sort of hacked together, simple and more rudimentary device, to what we feel and are proud of as a full-blown consumer electronics product,” he said. “That definitely took longer than we had planned for in the beginning, but we feel like the extra three-and-a-half months will definitely be worth it in the long run, based on all the future-proofing that we’ve been able to do for Pebble.”

Even though Pebble is built with geeks in mind, the company has also made it a useful sport and fitness companion. It weighs 38.2 grams, or around 1.3 ounces, so it should be light enough to wear all day. Pebble is also water resistant up to 5 atmospheres, which means you can wear it in the rain or while swimming. Since it’s waterproof, Pebble developed a magnetic charging system for the watch, which relies on a custom USB cable.

Pebble uses Bluetooth 2 at the moment to connect with smartphones, but it contains a chip that can support Bluetooth 4.0 down the line. That leaves the door open for it to connect to future smartphones and take advantage of Bluetooth 4.0′s low battery usage. Pebble also features an ambient light sensor, which will be unlocked in a future update, as well as a magnetometer and an accelerometer.

Instead of using an existing operating system like Android, Pebble runs on a custom operating system, built from the ground up. The watch relies on a free RTOS (real-time operating system) core for its notifications, and Pebble has also built a custom selection of drivers and features.

Now that the initial work on the operating system is done, Pebble is going to begin working on ways for developers to interact with the watch. Migicovsky showed off how he could program the web service IFTTT (If this then that) to send an alert to his Pebble watch when it was snowing outside. The company is also working on an SDK for developers to create their own apps and watch faces for the watch. Migicovsky invited iOS developers to contact Pebble to figure out how to connect their apps to the smartwatch.

When asked about future retail plans, Migicovsky said that the company hasn’t yet signed any deals. For now, it’s focusing on getting watches shipped to its Kickstarter backers, and selling more through its online store.

The much-delayed Pebble E-Ink smartwatch is almost here. The Pebble team just sent out invites to a press conference taking place at CES at 9 a.m. Pacific on Wednesday. It will also be streamed online at the company’s site.

Pebble raised more than $10 million on Kickstarter, leading some to herald it as a champion of the crowdsourcing model (especially since traditional investors passed on it). The watch connects to your smartphone to show incoming data like caller info and calendar entries, and it can also run a variety of apps. We’ve seen many attempts at smartwatches, but for some reason the Pebble struck a chord with its more than 68,000 backers.

But after missing its initial ship date of last November, and with few updates from the Pebble team, it also quickly became an example of the dangers of crowdsourcing. A ton of funding, after all, isn’t going to teach an inexperienced company how to manufacture at a large scale.

The last we heard, Pebble’s lead designer Steven Johns was “stuck in Asia” trying to get the watch out the door.

VentureBeat will be on the ground at Pebble’s launch announcement next week, as well as for the rest of CES 2013.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VCs always have a war story about the one that got away. Time to add the Pebble smartwatch to the list. The creators of the Pebble had some initial success raising $375,000 in angel funding. But when it come to raise a series A, Pebble was roundly rejected by venture capital firms that didn’t want to risk betting on a hardware firm. So the Pebble team put their project on Kickstarter, where they have now raised $4.2 million and counting without giving away any equity in their company.

In a way, this is the dream of crowdfunding in action. The recent JOBS Act put new structures in place that would allow companies to raise small amounts from a big pool of investors. In that case they would be exchanging stock for funding, whereas Kickstarter allows a project to exchange rewards for donations. With hardware like the Pebble, much of the donations amount to a pre-sale, with backers receiving the watch before it goes on sale to the general public.

While physical projects like Apple accessories and the Pebble smartwatch have been the most successful at this, software too can employ this tactic. Retro PC games have raised over $6.7 million on Kickstarter in 2012 alone. And Light Table, an open source development environment, has banked $38,000 since debuting its project yesterday.

“With VCs, they worry about models and size of market and stuff like that,” Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky told Bloomberg . “With consumers, one of the things I love about the videos, we just showed how you’re going to use it.”

As for hiring in the hyper competitive Silicon Valley scene, Migicovsky has a powerful tactic. He shows potential recruits the Kickstarter page when they arrive. “After we stopped talking,” he told Bloomberg, “I told them to refresh.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

First seen at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 2012, Sony has launched its SmartWatch, an Android-powered watch with its very own apps.

The watch connects with your Android phone and will vibrate when you get a text message, phone call, or email. And don’t bother digging through your purse or pockets for your phone, the watch will even display messages on its tiny 1.42-by-1.42-inch screen.

Sony has priced the device at $150, which is cheaper than the competitors. The watch connects via Bluetooth to your Android phone to get all those must-have updates. You can also download Google Play apps to the watch, though it’d be hard to read Twitter on such a tiny screen. It comes with a default black wrist band, though pink, white, mint, grey and blue bands are available for $20 each.

If this watch-from-the-future looks familiar, it’s because you’ve probably seen something a lot like it before. There is the Pebble for iOS and Android, which just netted $1.17 million in 30 hours on Kickstarter, and the I’m Watch, which also made it big on Kickstarter in late 2011. Watch maker Fossil used the technology from Metawatch to create its own smart watch. Even Apple is in on the game with the sixth generation iPod Nano. The little square MP3 player Apple debuted in 2010, can be placed in a watch band, and of course supports Apple based apps.

As ugly as Sony’s Smartwatch and others like it are, I’d probably wear one. My phone blows up all day long with notifications and while I could just shut them all off, most of them are important. Instead of looking at my phone every time it vibrates, I could glance at my wrist and determine if what happened is worth my attention. Random emails from someone I don’t know would be read later, and calls from my mom would be answered immediately, provided I had a Bluetooth headset handy.