Ongoing Pebble Issues


Update: Check out my more recent update on my Pebble experiences too.

Anybody following along here will know that I have been having intermittent connection issues, as well as bluetooth audio interference issues, with my Pebble smartwatch. But more than that, I have been having issues with their customer support. Not to mention having their Chief Evangelist accuse me of whining, and then block me on Twitter. Great way to treat your customers. Guess she doesn’t want to actually hear from real users. 

On October 17, I was given this answer by one of their support folks:

We well received your logs, and will review them thoroughly and have a reply by Tuesday. Thanks for your patience.

That was a Friday. By the next Friday, October 24, I had still heard nothing other than another canned response on a different case number because I submitted more logs through their app and it generates a new case each time suggesting I upgrade to iOS 8.1 (which I had already done, and which has made no difference).

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Crowdfunding

Yesterday’s discussion around the ParaShoot camera project and whether it was doing any more than rebadging a Chinese ODM’s product, available in bulk on Alibaba already, for sale here in the US or actually developing something novel lead to some thoughts on crowd funding and what they can, or should, be applied to. 

Manu Vollens (@manuvollens) proposed that crowd funding should only be used for disruptive projects:

Whether or not that applies to the ParaShoot project, I do think it is a little too restrictive on the funding model. One of the advantages of crowd funding is that in parallel with raising the money to fund your project you are also gauging the market’s demand for your project. But why should that be limited to disruptive projects?

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