Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

I hope there's potential?

I thought the Fitbit looked good on certain women.

Aesthetics aside, I don't know if I want anything on my wrist other than a nice mechanical watch.

I repair watches. I've been following these watches since day one, and just been dissapointed.

I just got a Waltham 17 jeweled moment running. The last service was inscribed on the case back. It was last worked on on '62. I washed, and oiled the movement. It's a few seconds fast. It just tells the time, and I like the way it looks. Done.

Then again, I'm starting to like the Iwatch. When it first came out, I was very disappointed. But lately? It just doesn't look as bad? It's just looking better? It must be psychological? I still see it's the number one for sale watch on CL though. (My record for sentence fragments.)

If anyone cracks the code, they will gave a real successful product.

There's a lot of psychology behind a watch. I've noticed men are more interested in timepieces than women. I used to think it was just that women have more fashion choices. Now I don't know the reason.

The big ones all caught a wave and rode it, while these startups tried to create the wave. (Actually, that's not quite true - all these hardware startups were riding the wave of cheap Chinese components and free trade. It's just that it turned out the bottleneck for a hardware startup isn't manufacturing, it's customer acceptance. Apple rode the same wave with the iPhone/iPad, but they also had a well-established core competency of knowing exactly what the customer wants.)

There are still waves going on now, and there are probably some startups being founded right now that will get rich off of them. It's just that the waves probably aren't what VCs think they are.

The problem with fitness trackers and smartwatches is that each and every brand keeps adding unnecessary features to the stack. They won't listen to users and keep building devices that have no market. Most of those companies created a product that was good and needed a good amount of work to make it better. But it seems that developers and management felt that simple = bad, and worked their asses off to add useless features.

Probably the closest to what people wanted was Mi Band - a bit too simplistic, but close enough. And this opinion is shared by many of people I know.

In order to create a successful fitness tracker, create a device with:

-distance tracker

-steps tracker

-waterproof (good enough to swim in swimming pool)

-mobile phone notifications, alarms

-no screen needed or extremely simplistic screen is OK

-battery live of at least 7days

-heart rate monitor (do not need to be constant)

-good software, small size

-make it look simple - let users decide on adding bits to it

-sleep tracker that works and learns

-use phone and app for making most of the calculation to save battery

-the price of $49

This tool would kill the market. As of now, Mi Band is closest, but their software/app is bad and there are some issues with hardware and customisation.

honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success?

as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money.

it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can be copied, but I don't see that happening always.

I would argue that Ring is the primary consumer success that the VCs are looking at right now. Everything else is not looking good.

Simplisafe raised the $57m in 2014 and seems to have been able to make a sustainable business without VC money. Form Labs is seemingly (with the rest of 3D printing) moving away from consumer to B2B focus.

I find Sphero/Anki raises surprising and wouldn't be surprised if they had Chinese Funds leading the rounds.