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"Everyone's favorite smart watch \u2014 the Pebble \u2014 just raised $15 million in Series A funding. The company also released the next evolution of its official SDK, now known as the PebbleKit.\nLed by Charles River Ventures, the $15 million Series A isn't the biggest amount of funding we've seen in the hardware space, but it's impressive when you consider the context of the round \u2014 and Pebble's crowdfunding roots.\nPebble remains one of Kickstarter's most endearing stories. More than 68,000 backers pledged over $10 million to make Pebble the most successful Kickstarter project in history.\nA year later, watches are slowly but surely making their way to backers, and the developer community around the watch is heating up.\nI backed the Pebble smart watch project almost as soon as it hit Kickstarter. Although my choice of a colored Pebble device meant that my unit was delayed (in the end, I decided to just change my order to a black model), I'm genuinely happy with the product I received and with the state of development around the device.\nA More Enhanced SDK For Better Apps\nLast week, RunKeeper \u2014 the first third-party app announced for the smart watch \u2014 officially received Pebble support. Building on the momentum around sports, Pebble is launching a Pebble Sports API to let developers integrate their apps with Pebble and push stats like time, distance and pace to an app on the watch \u2014 and even control basic functions of the mobile app using buttons on the watch.\nThis comes alongside the more general improvements to the SDK, or PebbleKit. The SDK now enables two-way communication between third-party apps and the watch. That means that watchapps (the Pebble term for apps that are accessible from the smart watch) can send and receive info from the smartphone. Pebble says that apps to receive weather and traffic data \u2014 or to act as phone remote controls \u2014 now exist.\nThe developer momentum around Pebble is hot. Pebble claims the Pebble SDK has been downloaded more than 8,000 times since its release last month.\nAnd while Pebble is only officially supported on iOS and Android, developers are already getting the device working on other platforms. At BlackBerry Live 2013, we met a developer who has Pebble working on BlackBerry 10 devices. The integration is still in the development stages, but it works and will be available in BlackBerry World and on GitHub soon.\nWearable computing is a hot space \u2014 whether it's smart watches or things like Google Glass. We look forward to seeing how the devices and their apps evolve over time.\nWhat do you think of Pebble and smart watches in general? Let us know in the comments.\nImage courtesy of Pebble"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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