It’s not news that waking up early in the morning adds hours of productivity to each day. Early to rise is a sign of carpe diem, that is, seizing the day, with all its freshness. And this pursuit becomes a struggle every day. Haven’t we all wished to have an alarm that will force us to wake up no matter how determined we are to go back to bed after hitting the snooze button? The good news is we now have something that does this. For the ‘snoozaholics’, this is the perfect app. ‘Walk me up’, an alarm clock app is a product from Bazzinga Labs. This app gets dismissed only when the user walks a few steps. Yes, you read it right. Once the alarm rings, the user can turn off the alarm only after the user starts walking a predetermined number of steps which is set by the user.
The app also uses sophisticated algorithms to make sure that you do not cheat the app by shaking it instead of walking. A penalty is imposed on the user by increasing the number of steps to be taken by five if the user is found to be cheating. “The phone’s accelerometer counts the number of steps one takes after the alarm goes off. The app uses pattern recognition to try to match the motion which can be considered as a step walked by the user,” say founders, Abhinay Bagaria, 24, and Mohammad Shabaz Moosa, 23, both, Computer Science graduates from MIT-Manipal. Walk me up has had more than 1.85 lakh downloads as of now. It’s available for free in its Android version while it charges `120 for iPhone users.
A bootstrapped venture, when they started out on creating the app, they had no knowledge about the mobile apps ecosystem. Many rookie mistakes and hardships later, they reckon that it is the testimonials of users who raved about how Walk me up helped them ditch the habit of sleeping late. As a user says, “Walk Me Up is the only thing other than my mother that can wake me up”.
The entrepreneur duo was always open to ideas suggested by the users. Most alarms wake you up rudely as it rings at its highest volume. On a user’s request, they updated the app with the ‘gradual alarm’ feature whose alarm volume increases gradually. The app has a sleek user interface with features such as Evil Mode, Voice Assist and Quick Alarm to add value to it. This is a must-have app for all snooze-lovers.
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