WakeMate Blog

The YC 09 startup WakeMate (http://wakemate.com/) took this much further: (Edit - Took down my run-on sentence describing them, here's their pitch) The WakeMate is a comfortable wristband that you wear when you sleep. It measures subtle body movements—a scientifically proven method (Actigraphy) to map dips and peaks in your sleep cycle. The wristband communicates directly with your mobile phone to calculate the ideal wake time closest to your alarm setting. When you wake up, your night's sleep data is automatically uploaded to Wakelytics™, our online analytics platform. Their blog (http://blog.wakemate.com/) and live support seem to be down at the moment. Anyone know how they're doing?

According to a poll by the National Sleep Foundation, 53% of teens take naps to cope with insufficient sleep. This is symptomatic of the problem and it does not just stop at teens. 44% of adult take naps to cope with insufficient sleep. For more info about sleep checkout http://blog.wakemate.com/

They aren't even produced yet: http://blog.wakemate.com/ And I'll only believe that they are shipped and work roughly as advertised when I read reports from people who got one, if ever. The WakeMate team has done a terrible job at estimation and at communication.

They haven't started shipping as far as I know, but they seem to be very close to it. Last update on their blog is from Nov 5th, and it sounds like they expect to start shipping by end of this month. http://blog.wakemate.com/

Though biased (I wrote all of WakeMate's web-based software), I think the product is solid and works as described; Beta users have agreed. Release estimation and product management in general are clearly a different matter, but we have sent out multiple emails since April and the blog (http://blog.wakemate.com) is routinely updated.

That is their old blog: P.S. You’re not crazy — our blog has moved! The old blog is still available at http://wakemate.posterous.com — though it will redirect here for a couple days. Here's the current one: http://blog.wakemate.com/

Now that we've got the monitoring down we're working on ways to help people improve their sleep. This blog post talks a bit about one of the features we're testing: http://blog.wakemate.com/2011/04/05/743/.

http://blog.wakemate.com/2011/04/04/wakemate-is-shipping-international… :-D

Nevermind, found the answer: http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/08/17/timing-update/

From what I've heard: * If you paid by google checkout, you were never actually charged * If you paid by paypal, you should have been refunded by August 17th, 2010 (http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/08/17/timing-update/) So if you paid by paypal, just check your transaction history around that date to ensure you actually got the refund.

same issue here, I emailed them earlier today and asked if it would be to me within a year of me pre-ordering :( WakeMate so far for me is a sad story of a good product with a poor planning/release cycle.. Also their front page still shows the wrist band that will look nothing like the one you will get final wrist bands here http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/08/10/final-wristbands-3/ compare that to front page http://wakemate.com/ Perhaps they are shipping to their new customers; cause they think there is no way to please the old ones?

P.S. If you paid via PayPal you will be receiving a refund in the next few days (the request for mass refund was placed today). Do not worry; we still have your order and your place in the queue. Once these payments are refunded no one who pre-ordered (Google or PayPal) will have been charged any money and as a result will be charged $50 upon shipment. http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/07/30/shipping-and-mass-manufacturing-ti…

It sounded like they were planning to do something closer to that, but the higher-than-expected demand made that not a viable option: from http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/26/questions-answered/ >As previously stated, we misjudged demand for this product. Having too many people wanting to buy your product is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. Our original method for assembling and shipping devices simply wasn’t scalable in terms of cost and time. It was no longer good enough to get easily accessible parts, buy a few hundred or a thousand of them, and pay somebody to assemble them; time and expense would be too much.

My biggest problem with them is their empty promises; more than once, they've said, "really soon", and apparently that means nothing to them. It's important they say what they have to say ("won't be ready for six more months"), rather than what they think the customers want to hear ("coming really soon"). Be precise, not vague/subject to interpretation. "Six months" may be "soon" in a certain context, but as a customer, to me "soon" means "the next 10 minutes". They should instead be more precise. It feels like they take me for a fool; I do understand and accept that projects slip schedules etc., but I don't enjoy being exposed as a naive fool every few months when the Wakemates wake up and make a "coming soon" blog post. In their last blog post, they said, "coming soon, but this time we learnt from our mistakes, so our projected ship dates are even bogus, we are actually going to beat the dates we posted!" -- http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/01/first-units-shipping-new-store/ -- so now my expectation is that they in fact beat the date they posted, and if they simply met their second commitment, I'd still feel like they screwed up! This is them setting themselves up for failure. Further, they invalidated the brownie points I would have handed out ("wow, they promised date X, but they actually beat it; maybe they're not so lame after all!") ... if Wakemate shipped right now, they still don't get the brownie ... ("they promised they would beat the Sep 2010 date, and hey, they…

I was actually looking for new updates from wakemate just yesterday. From their response to a comment on the latest blog entry ( http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/26/questions-answered/#comments ), they don't have their app in the iphone app store yet, and are currently distributing their app ad-hoc (which apparently has a 200 phone limit). I understand being back logged, but this means they haven't even shipped more than say 500 units yet. I know they said their original manufacture process was not scalable... but you can't make a couple hundred devices in 6 months? Also, they claim they have shipped some devices, but I haven't seen a review or positive word about one yet. I believe they probably have a few (at least prototypes), but I am less and less sure that any real customers have one. In the meantime they have announced new premium features (free for pre-orderers), and redesigned their online store. I know it's not the same guys who do manufacturing versus coding, but it does not look good when you have a major problem, and are spending your time improving your store (which sells non-existent products).