John Walls: I'm sure you've heard about Pebble by now and if you haven't then Myriam
Joire is here to tell you all about it as the product evangelist
of Pebble and thanks for being with us Myriam. Now tell me about this
thing on your wrist now. What, I mean, you talk about a great
overnight success story and a tremendous success
Pebble certainly personifies that Myriam Joire: Yes, so
just think of Pebble as a watch that just happens to be able to connect
to your phone, so that opens up a whole bunch of options right?
Instantly, now you can have your text messages displayed on your phone or email
displayed on your phone. Walls: or your watch Joire: Exactly
so you don't have to pull out your phone anymore now you have a kind of
connection to your
phone on the watch and that opens up a whole bunch of things
and that's kind of the appeal. There's a bunch of things you can do out of the box.
You can remote control the music on your phone
from the watch. You have these different watch faces
That basically let you choose, you know different
asthetic, but that's kind of like the very tip of the iceberg, because this
has sensors
and you can gather information and relay it to the phone
now you can do things like a pedometer for example and all this hinges on
apps on the watch, so those watch faces you saw me select between
actually are just apps and they can have more functions than just display the time
they can display something
just like there, I just got a notification sent by my boss in fact
Walls: I'm sure they're saying you're doing a great job keep it up
Joire: Exactly, instantly real time. The point is
you can now have an entire two-way communication
between the watch and the phone and enhance what a watch
normally does. A watch normally tells the time this will tell the time if you don't connect it
like any watch
it gives you your choice of a look for the watch face
but beyond that you can now have data sent back to the
the phone or data from the phone sent. Walls: So, you're saying email
text, even a pedometer function and what's the range of activity we can measure
Joire: It's pretty broad, here I have one that
shows the weather, the current weather and temperature
and the location I'm in and it knows this from connecting to the phone
It also tells me the battery life on my phone
So, I think the key here is that
there's been a bunch of products like this done before, we want to make it
really simple and easy to use, so it's always on. You see I don't have to do
anything to be able to read the time, so if I'm driving, I just go like this and I see
the time.
That's the idea a watch has always been like that. We didn't want to remove from the
watch experience
we wanted to add to the watch experience
Walls: So, what's the next iteration or the wish list as you're looking to say
boy, next time around this is where we want to go
Joire: Exactly, so currently we were selling on the idea like that it's a
companion or add on to your watch like a bluetooth headset
right, but to get that ecosystem
of apps started, we really heavily market this to developers and hackers
and, you know, we've been present at hackathons. You know we're a start up, so we're
in the valley, so it's all about
interacting with other communities and trying to get this off the ground
and you know we were very successful, the Kickstarter campaign
was a success, we raised $10 million. It's the most successful Kickstarter of
all time, from then on got VC capital, but now the watch is not just sold on our website
it's also sold at Best Buy, by AT&T stores, so it's now a consumer product. As a
consumer product it brings all these new
challenges to the table, right? So for example all these watch faces you saw
there's a few that come with the app that we sell for the phone
we don't sell it, it's free, but it comes with the watch for the phone.
You can get more by visiting certain websites right now that are basically
curating watch faces and apps for Pebble, so the next step for us to have our own app
store, obviously
and we can then, like, work with developers for them to monetize ytheir ideas
and we also have partnerships with very well known
companies, for example Run Keeper, the application syncs with pebbles, so
you know
you can do your exercise and the Pebble talks to Run Keeper
to keep track of things that way. That's just some of the stuff that can be done
Walls: Well it's a tremendous device, a great success like I said shot for a 100 thousand
got ten million. Missed the mark in a very positive way and we're looking forward
Joire: I think we screwed this one up royally. Walls: *laughs*
Walls: Clearly, Thanks for the time. Joire: Thank you so much John, nice talking with you.