Cronologics was founded in 2014 by Lan Rcohe, Leor Stern, and John Lagerling. All three of these people had previously worked at Google in business development, but then decided to leave the company. They formed this new company and for the past two years have been working on a way to build “compelling wearable hardware”. Then, in April of this year their team launched an Indiegogo campaign for their first product.
The wearable was dubbed the CoWatch, and its main selling point was its integration with Amazon Alexa. It was marketed as the “world’s first Amazon Alexa-enabled smart watch”, with the campaign being funded on June 3rd. The team was able to crowdfund over $293,000; overshooting their goal by 281%. The team did see an official product launch too, when they started selling it on Amazon in September for $280.
This week, it’s been confirmed that the Cronologics team has been acquired by Google. While the details of the acquisition have yet to be revealed, we’re told that the folks at Cronologics will now be working at Google’s Android Wear division. Google has had to delay the launch of Android Wear 2.0 so this injection of new talent might be enough to get the project back on track. We’ll just have to wait and see if there ends up being any CoWatch DNA found in Android Wear 2.0 and beyond.
The team at Cronologics had said they wanted to bring its CoWatch technology to other devices (like iOS). But it seems clear that the CoWatch era is over and plans to do anything with it are likely scrapped. The team had the backing of some major investors though, including CoinDesk, Student.com, Shakil Khan and the head of Spotify’s special projects. So bringing this team back under the Google umbrella can do wonders for Android Wear’s future given their potential.
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