Funded here as well!
The $10.5mn being raised before does not bother me whatsoever. While there is an app that interfaces with the "widget," remember, it's a hardware startup-- the Sense in and of itself. They likely need that capital to get production started (with Kickstarter supplementing a portion and also providing a barometer for market demand).
One question I do have (know the Founder is not here), is if each pill is unique so that a spouse can share the Sense?
@santoshsankar IIRC correctly they explicitly mention the spouse use case, and provided a 2-pill pack option for $129 for exactly that purpose.
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Hunter
Sense, a gadget that sits on your nightstand and monitors your sleeping environment.The device includes motion, light, temperature, humidity, noise and air quality sensors in order to understand your environment.
Sense comes with a little device called Sleep Pill. It simply attaches to your pillow and invisibly tracks your sleep at night. You don’t need to put on any uncomfortable wearables or remember to charge something or press a button. Sense knows when you’re falling asleep, soundly asleep, thrashing about, or waking up.
All your sleep data from Sense and the Sleep Pill is viewable on your phone. The app tells you how well you slept, or didn’t. Easily see disturbances during your night. Sense’s Smart Alarm, knows the right time to wake you, so you will feel alert and refreshed. I use jawbone up and most nights forget to press the night mode!
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@kwdinc This looks amazing, though I probably wouldn't want to buy four+ sleep pills just to accurately track my sleep across my plethora of pillows. Also, the one-year life expectancy is a bit of a turn-off. If I were to have a sleep pill on each pillow, I'd be spending $400/year just to track my sleep.
I use a $1.99 app (Sleep Cycle) to track my sleep, and it's done the trick for three years, so I'm probably out of the scope of their ideal customer.
@kwdinc@stttories I've used Sleep Cycle in the past, but it ran my battery down, didn't sample often enough to catch when I was waking up most of the time, or give me any insight into what caused any differences I'd see. So I dropped off when it became paid. I'm excited to check out Sense, since it takes environment into effect.
Brilliant idea for a product, as the traction and success of sleep apps and sleep bands shows demand but they are all sub-optimal. And the design is something I would put in my bedroom.
Will be very interested to see how the app comes together, which will be crucial. In testing these products in the past those that seem to focus on "quality" of sleep have the real problem of simply being, well, qualitative. So I know my sleep wasn't great but what action do I take? IMHO apps like Sleepbot do a better by first focusing the UI on getting enough sleep, which is where most people fail anyway, and is also actionable. Then deal with quality second.
Either way, backed it.
It turns out Hello Inc. (makers of Sense) raised at least $10.5 million *before* launching this Kickstarter campaign, leaving me as a customer feeling a bit miffed as to why they didn't disclose this.
http://www.strictlyvc.com/2014/0...
@jtzou I am sure they thought about it a lot more than I have (which is hardly at all), but for me knowing they had raised $10.5 million makes me more likely to back it. It has greater chance of success, people with a lot more skin in the game believe in it, it's more likely to be a good product and a great team, etc.
Seems awesome and beautiful. But also the type of thing that I have polarized expectations for: to be life-changingly useful, or practically useless. I use Sleep Cycle, I like it a lot - mostly for the function that it wakes me up when I'm naturally more awake. Partly I feel like I have Kickstarter Fatigue (at some unknown point in the future I have a lot of random gadgets rolling in...) but also this is something that I'm happy to wait for, hear reviews about, and then based on those reviews I'm happy to spend an extra $30-$100-$200 to buy Sense then.
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I bought this a few months ago after realizing my fiancee and I weren't feeling rested after we moved into our new place. I love how Sense can work for both my fiancee and I without it being wearable. I also love how it's able to tell you when your room has perfect sleeping conditions (humidity, noise, light, air quality, temperature) and that they seem very accurate.
The only downfall so far is that it only works for regular sleeping hours (no naps and not for night-shift folks) and it for some reason fails to note when I wake up and get out of bed sometimes. That being said, you can always correct the times and it does learn after awhile. Overall a beautiful product, but it's going to take some patience to get where it needs to be.
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