There is no way this product will ever ship. Greg, what are you even going to do with 150k or even 250k or 1mm? You already burned up almost a million bucks on this exact same idea when I was working for you and it was a huge waste because of your terrible execution and stubborn reluctance to seek or take any advice from anyone whatsoever.<p>The market has judged you and found you lacking. Cede your resources to a more efficient actor in the market and go home.
It's unfortunate, even if MiLife+ turns out to be everything as described, my and most others experience with WakeMate was terrible. From poor hardware, to a buggy app, to the general indifference of their customers' suffering, does not instill confidence in any future products related to WakeMate.<p>Shouldn't there be an extensive apology blog post that apologizes for the failures of WakeMate and contrasts that with what MiLife+ will be in both product and quality of service?
I first heard of this via email ... an email that had a spelling error, associates itself with Wakemate (but is a different domain) and when I visited the Wakemate site, find it is offline.<p>Up until I saw this HN link, I had assumed the Wakemate accounts had been compromised and marked the email as spam.<p>Given the issues they had with customer relationship/communication management with Wakemate, it looks like they haven't learnt from their past mistakes.
I'm going to echo everyone else's concerns here and say that the drama from wakemate, lukewarm-to-nonexistant support, and now just letting the wakemate domain expire altogether have not exactly inspired confidence in this product. Maybe if a year down the road, it seems to be useful, I'll pick one up.<p>There's a lesson in PR here, though. I'm normally all over these types of products. This should have been the easiest sale in the world.
Did anyone else catch that they said Kickstarter in the video and its clearly on Indiegogo?<p>(link to YouTube specific time, but its the same video from Indiegogo) - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCZQvguYTqg&feature=player_detailpage#t=157s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCZQvguYTqg&feature=playe...</a>
Having gone through a bunch of wakemates that stopped working or were DOA's, their horribly unresponsive service as a result of that (and not to mention their botched launch), I have absolutely no faith in this team being able to deliver.<p>Which is a shame because the product itself, like the wakemate before it, sounds very cool.
I hate to be piling on, I'm sure this is an unpleasant enough thread for the Wakemate team to read, but MiLife+ is a pretty horrible name. Wakemate was a great name. MiLife+? Come on, even Microsoft names their products better than that!
I'm usually excited about these things, but count me out on this one. I was an early backer of Wakemate (pre-ordered over a year before it finally launched). I have yet to receive everything I paid for, the product itself was defective, and I could never get any responses from customer support, so I'd rather not go through that again.
This seems to be the same thing as a fit bit, jawbone up, etc. Except worse in that it requires a phone and unlike the fitbit, will interpret tooth brushing as vigorous exercise. On top of that, it requires a subscription. The BodyMedia series of devices are better than this one and are the same price.
Would have loved some final communication from the WakeMate team. They seemed to just quietly fade away. I was one of the fortunate ones who got sent a replacement wristband when mine stopped working, but now I only use the app as a basic alarm without the wristband.<p>I can't imagine getting anything else from their team unless I heard some explanation of what happened with WakeMate.
I'm really interested in this, but to be honest the drama from the last product makes me hesitant if I can trust the company. I'll probably wait until they for sure have them in stock.
It also looks like they took down the website and app for Wakemate, which seems to have come as a surprise for the dozens of people that were still using the product.
How does this thing know when I'm eating or exercising? I assume it's got a gyro and accelerometer; how does it know if I'm doing squats or just waving to a friend on the street?