One app that's been creating a lot of buzz of late is Wakie, the social alarm app with a twist.
Imagine waking up to the sound of a complete stranger's voice. You've just imagined Wakie, the app that wakes you up by connecting you to a call from someone you've never met before.
Setting up the app is rather simple. Once it's installed, users simply have to enter their phone number and wait for a phone call from an automated service to verify that the user is a real person. Then, the user enters their age and gender and they have successfully set up the service.
Users are separated into two groups, "sleepyheads" and "wakies." Sleepyheads are the people who need to be woken up, with wakies being the ones who do the job.
If the user is a sleepyhead, they can then set a time to be woken up, at which point the app will notify a random person so that they can call the user. All contacts are made completely anonymously through the app, meaning that there should be no fear of someone else obtaining your number.
Calls on Wakie last one minute as a maximum so there's really no opportunity for the conversation to get too awkward or to progress beyond a simple wake-up call. Many suggest that this is a good thing, keeping the app for what it's made for -- waking people up.
Wakie itself was started as a website in Russia in 2011, being released to Android and Windows Phone earlier this year, and then iOS a few months later.
"This started as a way to fix my own problem because no alarm clock could wake me up in the morning," said Wakie co-founder and CEO Hrachik Adjamian, who started a website-coding business as a teenager, leading to clients calling him at all hours of the night. Over time he realized that he found it difficult to get back to sleep after getting a phone call. "I thought that if these calls weren't about business but were from friendly people who just wanted to talk and make you happy that morning, that would be great."
Wakie was started five years later and the app store launch brought in 100,000 users in only a week.
As expected, some people find the service a little weird and out of their comfort zone. But for those who don't mind a bit of conversation to start the day, Wakie might just be the alarm for them.
