Pebble Sold 400,000 Smartwatches in 2013

Pebble have snagged somewhere in around $60 million in revenue from selling their Smartwatches. They sold 400,000 devices last year. In 2014 Pebble is on track to double that revenue figure. Thats $120 Million!

Pebble are still very confident in their place in the Smartwatch market. Their is a growing amount of competition and earlier this week Google unveiled the Android Wear SDK and Apples iWatch is expected to released later this year.

“When we started working on wearables six years ago, there were few players in the space and a lot of skeptics,” says Pebbles CEO, Eric Migicovsky. “It’s exciting to see this market grow so quickly — enabling more interesting use cases and keeping all of us laser-focused on creating the very best user experiences we can.”

So far 2014 has been a big year for Pebble, after introducing the Pebble Steel watch back in CES. They have also released a major update to their iOS app back in February. It brought Pebbles own “AppStore” with more that 1,000 different apps and watchfaces.

Facebook buys Oculus Rift for $2bn – Minecraft not happy

  

 Image by: Nan Palmero

FACEBOOK has announced that it is buying Oculus VR, the outfit that that is developing the “Oculus Rift“

Facebook are paying $2bn in a mix of $400m in cash and another 23.1 million Facebook shares. If certain milestones are reached Facebook will give them a further $300m.

“Mobile is the platform today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,”Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg
“Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate.”

The transaction is expected to close  in the second quarter.

“We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal,”

Said Markus Perssion, known as Notch the guy behind MINECRAFT after hearing of the buyout from Facebook.

“Facebook creeps me out”

New Google Passwords – SlickLogin

Pic: TechCrunch

There may be an update of passwords on google after the companies latest purchase deals with creating audio passwords. SlickLogin is one year old and is based in Israel. SlickLogin are responsible for developing a security system that uses audio to verify a user’s identity. SlickLogin has still yet to release this technology commercially.

It does this by playing a uniquely generated sound from your computer’s speakers, which is picked up by the mic on your smart phone. The app analyses the sound and sends a signal back to confirm the user’s identity.

According to Techcrunch, the service was built to be used either as a password replacement or as a secondary layer on top of a traditional password. Google already has two-step verification process, which requires you to enter in a code sent to the user’s phone via SMS.

SlickLogin said in a statement :

Today we`re announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a company that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way.

Google was the first company to offer 2-step verification to everyone, for free – and they’re working on some great ideas that will make the internet safer for everyone. We couldn’t be more excited to join their efforts.