It is increasingly important for hardware entrepreneurs to either transform what people are already carrying into wireless devices or create something completely innovative that can convince people to carry another gadget.

Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble Watch, is taking on the challenge by reinventing the modern watch. 

But Pebble is more than just a watch. It’s a completely new platform that connects with the Internet, smartphones and laptops. It can receive e-mails, text messages, or alerts, monitor heart rate and allows wearers to even listen to music.

Pebble also allows developers and users to devise their own watch apps and share them with others, as they do with traditional smartphone applications.

Pebble recently received a $10.3 million start-up boost from Kickstarter, making it the highest funded Kickstarter project so far. But getting off the ground wasn’t easy.

“We raised money from friends and family. Then we raised money from a couple of angel investors from Silicon Valley, but unfortunately we could not raise [enough] to turn the watch into a commercial success. That was the point when we decided to collect the money on Kickstarter,” said Migicovsky after his keynote speech at the 2012 Webrazzi Summit in Istanbul on October 4.

There are currently around 85,000 Kickstarter funders waiting for the watch, and there will undoubtedly be many more once it’s released into the market with a $150 price tag.