Interest in smart watches is so intense these days that smart watch pioneer Pebble set new Kickstarter fundraising campaign records in just a few hours Tuesday with its latest product, the Pebble Time.
By afternoon, the Palo Alto company’s Kickstarter campaign had attracted more than $10 million in pledges.
Kickstarter said the Pebble Time hit $1 million in pledges in just 49 minutes. That easily beat the previous record holder, a gaming project called Reaper Miniature Bones, which raised $1 million in 2 hours, 42 minutes.
And Pebble didn’t stop there. The campaign hit $5 million in less than five hours, beating the 174 hours it took for a combo ice chest-blender-music player called Coolest Cooler to reach that level.
And with 31 days to go in the campaign, the Pebble Time has become the sixth-most-funded Kickstarter campaign ever.
Pebble released its first smart watch on Kickstarter in May 2012 and raised a then-record $10 million, far surpassing its $100,000 goal. But supply and production problems delayed delivery until the following January.
Now, with consumer interest in smart watches stoked by the planned April release of the Apple Watch, and with sales of fitness-tracking wearables also growing steadily, Pebble decided to go back to Kickstarter to introduce its latest product, the Pebble Time.
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SOURCE: SF Chronicle, Benny Evangelista
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