SourceCode: Pebble reportedly close to selling to Fitbit

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Pebble is reportedly in talks to get acquired and deleted by wearable giant Fitbit. Fitbit will reportedly purchase the struggling smartwatch pioneer for US $40 million, keep its intellectual property while eradicating the Pebble name and its various product lines. This is worrisome not just for existing Pebble owners but also for the sizeable amount of fans who have money on the hook for upcoming products like the Pebble Core and the Pebble Time Steel 2 slated to ship in 2017.

This isn't the first time Pebble was in talks for acquisition. The company refused a buyout from watch maker Citizen, who was interested in purchasing Pebble for $740 million in 2015 according to TechCrunch.

Pebble visionary and CEO Eric Migicovsky can be credited with starting what was to become the smartwatch market with PebbleIntel apparently made an offer to buy Pebble last year for $70 million but was again rejected because it wanted to release the Pebble Time which Intel was not in agreement with.

Pebble is apparently in dire straits, the closely knit group had to let go of 25 per cent of their workforce in the last month and despite constantly breaking Kickstarter records for their devices (and being one of the few crowdsourced companies to thrive in real retail outlets), the company seems to have burned through cash.

Fitbit stands to gain a lot from acquiring Pebble. The company dominates the fitness wearables game and their latest salvo of products is outstanding in almost every respect. I'm currently testing the Fitbit Charge 2 and the Fitbit Flex 2 and they are two of the best designed and accurate fitness trackers I've used. 

Fitbit's premium Blaze wearable, which was more like a smartwatch or traditional watch, didn't fare too well because it lacked a lot of the customization and functionality that devices like the Apple Watch of the Pebble Time offer. Placing Pebble's bona-fide wearable OS on an already accomplished fitness tracker might prove to be a winner for Fitbit.

I have mixed feeling about this news. Pebble has Canadian roots coming from Waterloo, it is an innovative and user-focused company whose products and software delight users the way older Macintosh and Palm devices did, a rare thing in today's desktop and mobile OS landscape. Seeing their IP subsumed and the Pebble brand retired (much the same way Microsoft obliterated all the vesitges of Nokia once they absorbed it) will be hard to swallow for many fans of the Pebble brand.

I interviewed Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky a year ago. Back then, the company had yet to make the transition to being focused on fitness. Migicovsky said that Pebble was happy to be the 'Swatch' of smartwatches, offering value and fun as opposed to the tech-and-fashion first approach of many competing Android Wear devices and the Apple Watch. 

Pebble made the idea of a smart wearable more palpable and understood many of the features that made a smartwatch valuable. I hope that some of their prodigious ingenuity and innovation makes its way over to Fitbit, which already has the best software for managing and visualizing fitness goals. 

Sources: TechCrunch and Fortune