The Coolest Smartwatch Made In India (Part 1)

“With Blink, we never wanted to build another feature packed gadget that stuffs everything on the wrist.” Their feature trailer is worth a look.

Here’s what Somnath, cofounder and CEO says.

Why did you decide to found Witworks (the parent company)?

We have essentially always been product guys. Ankit, Chandrasekhar, and I are batchmates from IIT Kharagpur, and we became friends because of our mutual love for making stuff. We quit our jobs and dropped out of B-School in 2014 to start Witworks, with the aim of building a modern-day consumer technology company in India.

We started working on Blink in November 2015 with an idea to make a personal device that could be the center for accessing contextual information and services on-the-go for a user and become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Something that's functional, seamless and beautiful. And at the same time, push the boundaries of technological innovation, not just in this country but beyond global benchmarks.

Besides, we realized that a watch isn't just another gadget you have. It means something more. You wear your watch because it represents who you are. It's an identity. And that design sensibility needed to be built into a gadget that goes on your wrist as well. After a lot of conceptualization, research, trials, making and breaking stuff, and understanding what users truly need; we have reimagined the entire interaction for a wrist wearable with Blink.

What’s special about Blink?

With Blink, we never wanted to build another feature packed gadget that stuffs everything on the wrist.

While smartwatches do exist out there today, they are pretty much a replication of the phone on your wrist with the kind of interactions designed for a bigger 5-inch display. Besides, they lack contextually relevant services and sensibility of watch-design.

We believe in an app-less world, where you won’t have to use multiple applications to access multiple services. With a singular UX and a unified design language, the same interface can be retained to access everything you seek proactively (cabs, restaurants nearby, directions to navigate) and things you need to respond to (messages, notifications, mails) in a very, very intuitive manner. Blink is the watch to deliver that experience in a connected world.

Blink runs our own OS called Marvin. With Marvin, the entire input and navigation has been re-imagined using a touch bezel with no screen swipes, designed specifically to be simple for a smaller 1.4-inch screen. Marvin has the capability to integrate various native and third party applications. This allows Blink to run several stand-alone functions ranging from playing the music, tracking your activity, and user authentication without any dependency on the phone.

Besides, Blink embodies the perfect blend of state-of-the-art technology (It has a 1.2 GHz processor which is almost twice that of most watches, 1GB RAM, 8GB internal memory, a 400x400 completely circular AMOLED display with over 16 million colors) and watch craftsmanship. The outer body design has been done in association with traditional watchmakers with decades of experience of having worked with HMT and Titan at a place called Kunigal in Karnataka. The moment you see Blink, you can feel the sensibility of traditional watch craftsmanship that has gone into its making.

How did you manage to fund this idea?

We raised a seed investment round from Fireside Ventures, Investopad, P39 Capital and a syndicated group of angels towards the end of 2015. The funds were raised to be utilized for the development and launch of Blink.

What are/what will be your monetization paths?

We make money with every unit of Blink that moves out. The gross margins built in are the highest among similar products in the category, given the value created with the functionality and a progressive brand.

At the same time, Blink running our platform - Marvin OS allows us to build and control a certain set of native services like - fitness tracking, music streaming, messaging (and possibly payments in the near future). Each of these services can be monetized/subscribed once we have a critical mass of users (imagine an i-Tunes service with the i-Pod hardware).

There's a more to the Blink story, To know how they battled demonetization and policies click here.