The Chatroulette Alarm Clock

The biggest innovation in alarm clocks since their invention has to be the slowly-increasing volume option on my phone. Seriously, try going back to your old full-blast alarm and you’ll wake up screaming. But all that says it that alarm clocks haven’t exactly been disrupted by the tech biz yet. So why not make them social like everything else?

That’s the idea behind Budist.ru, a Russian social network designed to be Chatroulette for wakeup calls. Started in September 2011, the site already boasts over 700,000 users via a splash page when you first visit the site, and has previously claimed to be growing at a rate of 10 percent a week. (That claim, along with the 700,000 number, were both touted earlier this year, so either the splash page is outdated or growth has stalled. My guess is the former, but it’s only a guess.) In June, the site secured $2 million in funding from the Leta Group, a Russian venture capital firm, based on a valuation of $7 million. Now Budist.ru is trying to take the network global.

The concept is fascinating. The moment you wake up, before your brain gets going full speed, is a time when you’re at your most creative and thoughtful, and what better way to put that time to use than chat with a complete stranger? Also, knowing that someone is waiting to chat on the other line might be just enough to get you past that half-awake threshold where you add another hour to the alarm and pass out again. Budist was rumored to be launching a U.S. arm after winning a number of big startup awards, and Tech Crunch wrote in 2011 that US service, called Wakie, had launched. But as of today, Wakie is still under construction, and the Wakie app in the iTunes store is still in Russian only.

So, with an English site still under construction — and the one alternative I can find, Talkoclock, which is shuttered indefinitely because “many elements of our project need to be reconstructed” — I decided to sign up with Budist to see if waking up confused Russians might become my new favorite hobby.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.