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Comment by svens_ | Hacker News Reader

Never noticed that Kickstarter has live updates for money and backers.. It's crazy how fast they sell (probably in part due to the earlybird specials), almost 1k USD / second.

That being said, it almost feels like an abuse of the platform. It's their third generation of smartwatches after all. I really like the new models with heart monitor though and now they've also added a pure fitness tracker-like device.

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I feel the same way. Pebble isn't kick starting anything at this point. They're just crowdfunding interest free R&D loans with pre-sales, which is fine, but the use of the Kickstarter platform for the THIRD time seems disingenuous.

I don't know. I like them using it much better than the usual use - VCs checking product-to-market fit prior to deciding whether to invest in a startup. Kickstarter is long past being used to actually kickstart anything, at least in tech projects.

The question of whether Pebble is abusing kickstarter came up last time around as well. I think it's ultimately up to kickstarter and I would guess they are okay with it given their 5% take ($35k in the last 45 minutes, ~$1M last time)

I would think pebble would be able to negotiate a better rate than 5%.

How is it an abuse of the platform? From the beginning, Kickstarter had often been used to fund individual product launches that were not company or product-line launches.

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