I used to work for WakeMate - feel free to ask me anything. This insane action from Greg doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
1) WTF?
2) How close is pg to this whole mess? I'm guessing this is no longer in his sphere of influence, but it would seem that given that Wakemate is a YC company he should probably clarify YC's position on this debacle. I realise this is more a question to pg than to you, but I guess you might have an opinion.
3) Do you think the problem that ultimately killed the company was a mismatch between the founders, or did that evolve as a result of the multitude of problems that the company encountered? I'm getting a hunch that all these mistakes by the company could have been the result of lacking a clear direction/leadership.
2.) I never talked to PG, I can't speak to that.
3.) The problems were absolutely cumulative over the course of development. Neither Greg nor Arun were engineers or technical in any way and the hardware developer had a full time job that was not WakeMate. I started ~1.5 months before launch and was told the hardware was functional. I managed to get the iOS version to work most of the time but the firmware was hosed in such a way that pretty much all units would fail over the course of a few months.
I initially had some good experiences with the android version which then got more and more unreliable until I stopped using it altogether. I was led to believe that this was due to bugs in the android app. Are you now saying that it is actually a firmware bug on the devices?
And if yes, is there any hope to have this fixed once everything is open sourced?
As to fixing the firmware - that's absolutely possible although we made some non optimal decisions with the hardware itself that caused the WakeMate to waste a lot of power. That's one of the reasons why the WakeMate's battery is comically large for the amount of usage you get out of the device.
Alright... I can see why Gupta wants to open source it. Smart and the right thing to do.