Crowdfunding: The Pebble E-Watch

Cowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.

Crowdfunding has the potential to increase entrepreneurship by expanding the pool of investors from whom funds can be raised beyond the traditional circle of owners, relatives and venture capitalists.

A popular crowdfunding platform is “kickstarter”, which is based in the United States.

“kickstarter” allows members to pledge amounts of money towards an idea in return for a reward from the creator.

An example for a successfully funded project is an e-paper watch for iPhone and Android. The project was launched by a company called “Pebble Technology” on April 11, 2012. Their goal was $100.000 but the total pledge exceeded this by far. They received $10,266,845 in total.
The Pebble E-Watch is a watch built for the 21^st century. It is easy to customize with apps such as heart rate monitoring and exercise tracking. The e-paper watch connects with smartphones using Bluetooth, and alerts you to incoming calls, emails and text messages.

The inventors of this watch claim that this is probably where Apple got the idea for the iWatch from.

The smartwatch was released in 2013. It is the most successful product funded through “kickstarter”.
“Best Buy”, an American consumer electronics corporation, began selling Pebble smartwatch in July 2013, and sold out within 5 days.

I would be very interested in this smartwatch because it really makes your life easier as you don’t have to carry around your mobilephone all the time, since the smartwatch alerts you to incoming calls and messages.

Furthermore it is compatible with both Android and iOS which is an advantage compared to the iWatch.