

WakeMate to begin shipping in march - tdm911
http://blog.tdm911.com/wakemate-to-begin-shipping-in-march

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paul9290
I recently bought the sleep cycle alarm app for my iPhone for $2 bucks. Works
like a charm for what it advertises.

THus I wonder what differentiates WakeMate from Sleep Cycle?

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drewcrawford
I've also been using Sleep Cycle since the first WakeMate delay and I've been
thinking about this in some detail. Here are the conclusions I've come to:

* WakeMate seems to be primarily competing on price (!) against FitBit and Zeo. The problem is, Sleep Cycle _way_ undercuts them.

* I would be willing to pay for dedicated hardware that would free up my iPhone for music listening before bed(like Zeo or FitBit). Unfortunately, WakeMate doesn't help in this regard.

* There are times that I think Sleep Cycle is inaccurate, but I think it's "good enough" in a lot of sleep circumstances. Dedicated hardware should improve over a bed accelerometer a bit, but I don't think the additional accuracy alone is worth $48

* I'm hoping WakeMate's statistics and analysis meet or exceed the Zeo, but to be honest Sleep Cycle's stats are "good enough" for a variety of circumstances.

I really do think they're in trouble, quite independent of the shipping
delays. Unless they can come up with some novel feature that nobody else can
emulate, I can't really see how they can improve enough on Sleep Cycle to
capture enough of the market. I think their best bet is almost to avoid the
iPhone now.

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johnswamps
I'm not sure how much the wakemate improves on the iphone's accelerometer, but
even if it's only a little bit, surely it's worth $48? I make $48 in 3 hours.
I have to wake up every day for the rest of my life.

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drewcrawford
I don't know. Sleep Cycle works well about 94% of the time for me. With an
improved wake algorithm, I think you could pull it up to at least 98% of the
time in pure software, or at least that's what I got for my sleeping patterns
playing around with the data in Mathematica.

Is improving 2% of your wakeups worth $48? Your wakeups would have a
"valuation" of $2400 by that logic. Which, I dunno, maybe it should, but it
seems a little high.

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mlinsey
If drowsiness affects your productivity, then all of your wakeups over the
lifetime of the device are probably worth $2400. Of course, it's best to leave
judgement until we know whether WakeMate is better, and if so then by how
much.

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prodigal_erik
I'm disappointed they haven't corrected "works on all phones" on the front
page. Still not true.

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roel_v
Maybe off topic, but I just did the pre-order and Google Checkout is one of
the worst checkout experiences I had in the last few years. The translations
look like they came from babelfish, no integration with WakeMate itself, ugly
- you would think that a company with as many smart people as Google would
figure out that this is not a good way to end your sales funnel.

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zoomzoom83
Damn. I literally had an idea to build such a device last night, looks like
somebody beat me to the punch :p

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natrius
Multiple people.

<http://www.fitbit.com/>

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latortuga
Don't forget <http://www.myzeo.com>

