How does the Pebble Watch fit into your understanding of the difference?
They have a small team, single designer. Although they built a consumer electronics product before they seem to run on fairly limited funding.
Although I don't know of any Kickstarted consumer electronics designs that have already shipped successfully, so maybe the specific viability is not yet proven.
The Pebble watch is cute, and small enough scale that they might actually ship product. The question is, at what price?
Remember, we're talking CE, so every penny counts. Unless they've assembled a very good team, that thing will retail for over $100.
If the product seems like it might be successful, somebody like Samsung will jump in right away with a competing product for $50 USD. And 6 months after that the Chinese clones will be coming in at $30. Good luck trying to turn enough profit to fund development of the cost-down version.
The big boys like Samsung and Foxconn are so vertically integrated. It is tough to compete with them when they can buy the chips at a much lower price than you can.
Well, but they will get some amount of money from the initial batches and then they might grow, get bought by someone, or who-knows-what.
But the point (for me) is that they're developing a piece of consumer electronics that is actually useful. Right now there's (AFAIK) nothing there comparable to Pebble (wearable, nice-looking, programmable e-paper interface to smartphones). It's a hacker gadget, something that is heavily useful and can be made even more by anyone with a bit of free time on their hands. It's a very rare situation in consumer electronics market (Android is kind of new here, and vendors are going out of their way to break it anyway).
So yes, let's have Samsung jump in with a competing product for $50. And then maybe Nokia, or someone else. I would be happy to see that, because an useful tool would appear on market, and it doesn't really matter who provides it, as long as it's not crap.
Unless they've assembled a very good team, that thing will retail for over $100.
From the $99 pledge description: "This watch will retail for more than $150"
They've already sold devices for blackberry so they have a good grasp of what the costs are: http://getinpulse.com/
They now have what are essentially pre-orders for over 25K devices at around $115 a piece so they're on course to make a good profit on the first generation, and they'll have the brand, ecosystem, and everything they learned making the first generation to make the second generation devices a better offering than anything the competition can put together. They're targeting smart phone users who don't mind paying a premium so price won't necessarily be the deciding factor.
They have a small team, single designer. Although they built a consumer electronics product before they seem to run on fairly limited funding.
Although I don't know of any Kickstarted consumer electronics designs that have already shipped successfully, so maybe the specific viability is not yet proven.