Something strange happened this week with WakeMate, a Y Combinator-funded project that was a tech world high flyer for a while. The product, a wrist strap that sensed your movement during sleep and ostensibly woke you at exactly the right time, was on hold. In 2010 the product apparently burst into flames (literally) and little was heard from the company at all.
Suddenly, however, co-founder Greg Nemeth began approaching media to write about a new WakeMate project. He wrote in an email:
MiLife+ differentiates itself from the other products in the space (Zeo, Lark, Fitbit, Nike+, Jawbone UP) in a few key ways:Nemeth also used the WakeMate Twitter account and email address to send word of a new project.
Over the next few days, Nemeth began talking about a Kickstarter project and then quickly moved the project to Indiegogo where it launched as a Three Thirds project (not to be confused with the name of the original company, Perfect Third).
Then all heck broke loose. Nemeth apparently wasn’t authorized to use the WakeMate list or the Twitter feed. People donated $37,000 to the cause in the expectation that WakeMate was behind another cool product. A little buzz built up but folks were confused: the email was riddled with typos and there was no mention of the product on the WakeMate site.
It transpired that none of this was WakeMate-sanctioned. Nemeth meant it to be a WakeMate product, but apparently his co-founder Arun Gupta didn’t get the memo.
“I intended on MiLife+ being affiliated with WakeMate but I did not communicate that to the people at WakeMate,” said Nemeth. “It was a mistake on my part. MiLife+ has been cancelled.”
Gupta, for his part, knew nothing of the product until everyone else did.
“I did not know anything about MiLife+ until yesterday afternoon,” he said. He wrote on the Wakemate blog:
In short, Nemeth went ahead and used Wakemate resources, meager as they might be, to pitch a new product. Lack of communication, a potentially unamicable split, and lack of social media controls all led to a perfect storm of product disappointment.
“Using the list was a mistake and the list has been deleted. Arun did not know,” said Nemeth.
WakeMate is no longer selling product and Gupta now controls the Twitter feed. Both parties are saying very little.
“The company still exists as we are keeping the product running and service up while we work on open sourcing the technology. No new features will be added to the WakeMate product,” said Gupta.
“This was an unfortunate situation but it has been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Hopefully we can just put this behind us,” he said.
[Image: Juan Nel/Shutterstock]
WakeMate makes personalized alarm clocks that sync with both a user’s body and their cell phone, enabling the iPhone alarm system to sound at the end of a REM cycle. The application/ wristband system also provides a full sleep analysis on their Analytics Platform. The WakeMate uses a science called actigraphy to analyze your sleep. Actigraphy uses an actigraph (the WakeMate unit) placed on a subject’s wrist to monitor the motion. The motion data is then analyzed to determine...
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