That $5 pre-order is far too easy to do. I bought one without stopping to research other products like the http://www.fitbit.com/. Brilliantly designed pricing.
It's a lot like Glastonbury ticketing. Deposits in autumn, full payment in January. This is extra profitable because in January many people are short on cash post-christmas and either can not or choose not to pay the full amount. You get to keep the non-refundable deposit and then sell the ticket/product again to another person.
As an aside, any idea on how hackable the Wakemate is? Presumably other devices could talk to it over bluetooth, eg a homemade arduino based alarm clock. Will the bluetooth protocol and data format used be published?
It took me about 15 seconds from the initial onload to typing my PayPal password, and I'm normally just seething with deliberative-yuppie-purchasing-angst. My normal minimum conversion time is at least an hour of research and a week of wall-clock time.
If you can hack my purchasing process so effectively, I'm pretty confident that you'll do well by my sleep cycle. Bravo!
I've been aiming to write a Rayleigh random number generator-driven alarm app for my iTouch (to do random-phasic sleep, e.g., countdown 20+X minutes, X drawn from a Rayleigh(20) distribution). If something like that could integrate with your app, that could be really cool. Crowdsourced sleep research :)
It's so easy to do, in fact, that I had already paid before I realized that the device isn't scheduled to ship until 3 days after my daughter is scheduled to ship.
I bet my graphs are going to be REALLY interesting.
The Fitbit looked very fun, but the site didn't mention an alarm function. I'm already envisioning a long slog toward convergence, because some day I want my phone to do calorie-counting and smart-alarming. After all, I already keep it near me all day and night...
It's a lot like Glastonbury ticketing. Deposits in autumn, full payment in January. This is extra profitable because in January many people are short on cash post-christmas and either can not or choose not to pay the full amount. You get to keep the non-refundable deposit and then sell the ticket/product again to another person.
As an aside, any idea on how hackable the Wakemate is? Presumably other devices could talk to it over bluetooth, eg a homemade arduino based alarm clock. Will the bluetooth protocol and data format used be published?