“Smart Money for a Smart Watch” by Pui-Wing Tam. The print article appears in the July 2, 2012, edition of the Wall Street Journal on pp. B1 and B2.
You may be able to find it online under the title “Pebble Technology Becomes Kickstarter Test Case.”
This image of the Pebble Technology watch created by Kmeron and licensed under CC by NC and ND license 2.0) See more of kmeron's images at http://www.flickr.com/people/frf_kmeron/
Pre-reading Vocabulary:
- test case
- the poster child of
- crowdfunding
- venture capitalist
- net worth
- equity in a company
- barometer of the market
- transplant
- delivering in volume
- in the wake of (What does this piece of figurative langague mean? Where does it come from?)
- fruition
- cagey
- buffering
- frenetic
- alma mater
Comprehension and inference questions:
What is the crowdfunding?
How does it work?
From the context, what is Kickstarter?
How does crowdfunding differ from the traditional way that most start-up companies are financed?
What is the general idea of the article?
What is the article’s structure?
What is the article’s tone?
Why is Pebble “the Facebook of the crowdfunding market”?
In what ways does Pebble Technology show how big crowdsourcing could be?
What do the venture capitalists see as the biggest challange facing the CEO of Pebble Technology?
What steps has the CEO taking to ensure that production goes smoothly?
What is the product?
How many orders did Pebble Technology get for the product and at what price?
After his crowdsource funding success, how many more orders did Eric get?
This reading comprehension exercise is licensed under CC Attribution Only by Eric Anderson. Permission to copy and distribute the WSJ article can only be given by the Wall Street Journal.