Fitbit buys smart watch pioneer Pebble amid wearables shakeup

Pebble Technology, a Redwood City startup that pioneered smart watches but struggled to expand its market after major competitors like Apple and Samsung followed, said Wednesday it is shutting down and selling key assets to health tracker maker Fitbit.

San Francisco’s Fitbit announced it was acquiring “key personnel and intellectual property” from Pebble, but not the company’s lineup of smart watches.

Pebble gained a small following of technology enthusiasts with a record-setting Kickstarter fundraising campaign in 2012, three years before Apple attempted to make smart watches fashionable to a wider audience with its Watch.

[...] Pebble was never able to expand beyond its niche, especially as Apple and Samsung put marketing muscle behind its products and specialty fitness trackers like Fitbit grew.

The research firm IDC this week said Fitbit topped the overall smart wearables market, with a 23 percent share that increased about 22 percent since the third quarter of 2015, even as the overall smart watch market “took a tumble.”

In March, Pebble laid off about 25 percent of its employees.

“Part of the value of being in this crowded space is actually using other people’s research and development efforts and experimenting with them,” CEO Eric Migicovsky said at the time.

[...] we’ve had the chance to try all of them and see what works.

“The acquisition gives Fitbit an opportunity to expand outside the simple fitness band market,” Jitesh Ubrani, IDC’s senior research analyst for mobile device trackers, said in an email.