Eric Migicovsky is a smart watch pioneer. His new Pebble Time kickstarter has raised over $16 million and Pebble has sold more than a million watches. He has a rare voice of experience and insight into what Android Wear has done and what Apple brings to the market.

Barron’s interview with Migicovsky is an interesting read. A few excerpts:

Notifications are fun and useful and wonderful, but it’s not the only part of the future. The real thing is, the number one reason, is to tell the time. When you look down at your wrist, you have to be able to see what time it is. But more important, what’s the context around time? Am I late? Am I early? What’s the traffic like?

On Pebble’s pins in a timeline interface:

What is important is not the app but the content of the app. If you overlay it on top of time, everything clicks. You see these pins on your timeline, and you could have 20 different ones, but it won’t be complicated.

ESPN is taking the idea of the current engine, where you follow teams that you like. They are putting that into the past, present and future organization. So, you have a single pin from a provider like ESPN that in future, exists as a heads-up of when a game starts. In the present, that pin traverses time and becomes a real-time score keeper. In the past, that exists as a record keeper. It’s time-based context.

On Android Wear and the slow moving smart watch market:

We have a million users, the biggest smartwatch population. Android Wear, I don’t think anyone ever respected them. They didn’t have any new ideas. I like their voice responses, though. We looked at that. The benefit we have are passionate users that care. Looking at the competition, it’s crazy that we launched three years ago and it’s taken people this long to launch their first.

On sales:

The only one that has a chance of selling a lot is Apple Watch. If you look at the numbers from [research firm] NPD for the holiday quarter, Pebble outsold everyone else including Samsung. We were twice the volume of Motorola [360] in terms of units. All the other ones are smaller footnotes at the bottom. It’s cheap to make a watch but they don’t actually get sold.

And on taking on Apple:

I think Apple is a massive competitor. They are Apple, and there’s no reason to underestimate the power they have. We are specifically doing things Apple can’t do, like having a battery life of 10 days, like having this new interface, being waterproof, working with both [Google’s] Android and with iOS.

Good stuff. I think Migicovsky has Pebble right where it needs to be, a real sweet spot in the market.