Fitbit’s future plans clearly extend well beyond simple fitness tracking, as evidenced by products like the Blaze, which leans much more heavily into smartwatch territory than before. And then there’s this. The company announced this morning that it’s picked up assets from mobile payment solution Coin.
Fitbit was quick to point out that the acquisition was just a piece of the larger Coin puzzle and doesn’t include, say, Coin 2.0. Instead it’s focused, fittingly, on the mobile company’s wearable payment platform. A Fitbit spokesperson told TechCrunch that the deal includes, “personnel and intellectual property specific to wearable payments.” Still, it’s hard not to wonder aloud what this means for Coin’s future, moving forward.
The company shed a little light on the subject in a blog post that went up this morning, noting that it’s done with the smart payment product business, now that Coin 2.0 has sold out. And those devices have their own baked-in self-destruct buttons in the form of the built-in battery’s two-year life. Also on the outs are the Coin Rewards and the Coin Developer Program.
For Fitbit, the purchase means extending toward “an active NFC payment solution that could be embedded into future Fitbit devices.” The fitness hardware developer was still careful not to spill the beans entirely adding that “there are no plans to integrate Coin’s wearable payments technology into the 2016 Fitbit product roadmap.”
But yeah, you’ll still probably definitely most likely be able to buy stuff with your Fitbit at some undetermined point in the nearish, not too distantish future. Meantime, you can always just AmEx your Jawbone.