Thank you all for your input. Let me address a few items you have mentioned.
First, many are concerned about the invasive nature of a student basically wearing a tracking device. I knew this myself as I wrote it in. I had conceived the idea of a smartwatch for school and this was a feature I knew it could solve rather easily. If anyone has ever gotten a call from the office looking for a child who was there, but you hadn’t put them in the system because they slipped in after you submitted attendance, knows what I am getting at here. Perhaps we could market it as a safety feature. I am sure parents would like to know where their students are throughout the day. Believe me, I share the concerns about privacy and such. Perhaps it can be as simple as turning off location services or just leave the E-Bit in their locker when they leave school, you know, to charge up.
Rodney (rstpierre) makes a good point that pitching hardware is quantitatively different than an app or service. As I read other pitches I was struck by how easily they could be implemented compared to the idea I conceived, one that would be competing with the likes of Apple and Samsung. I am really out of my element here. I chose $150 dollars because it seems reasonable. But the device, as others have mentioned, is perhaps not even technologically feasible at this time and its competitors are selling in the $600 range. Perhaps a lower price point can be achieved by convincing departments of education to subsidize the product, but that is a whole other can of worms.
In the end, Noan hit on the real benefit of my idea. I wanted to think of a way that we could change schools from a class-based environment to a learning community where students roam at their own pace and attend learning experiences at their lesiure. Can a device like the E-Bit initiate a change like that or will it need to begin systemically?
Thanks for all your input and for the great examples you have all set with your own pitches.