Calendar integration is critical and should be free. You should also add some "smart" alarm functionality so you can gradually wake your users over a course of several minutes with increasing light and sound. People want to wake up gently first, and only care about content secondarily.

If you add ads, you'll scare away users... unless maybe you partner with guys like Groupon or Ticketmaster so you can present deals, coupons, and events.

Regarding your Edit, I'd be interested to hear why you think anyone is looking to make important decisions at the "moment of alert", especially when that moment is when they wake.

To conclude, maybe I'm just not your target audience. I like my morning routine to be tranquil and calm, and I learned after trying Zazu that I prefer to be the one to engage my brain rather to have it forcibly engaged by my alarm clock.

On the production app, you can now change the tone of the alarm (it was a later alpha-phase function).

I do agree that the TTS engine on the phone is horrific, we're working on a deal with Nuance to use their TTS engine. Their engine sounds amazing.

We're also working on calculating what the novelty of a piece of information is to a specific user. The User Experience of the application will be something like "here is a list of information sources that I want to hear from" then we'll let you know what we think you find the most important (novel).

As for the reformulation of text into short headlines, are you more interested in the general concept of the headline or a general summary of the article?

I'm going to try to convince some people that the calendar should be free, because it's a major "I need to know this stuff, this is why I'll start to use you" feature.

We'll try to never present Plain Old Ads, we're trying to engage users with brands. We believe there could be a real connection between a user and their material world. Radio-style shout-outs are just too irritating.

The "moment of alert," at the moment (pun not intended), is really more of a future thing. We're envisioning that if your wife emails you, Zazu will chime in and let you know that there is something you should check on; or if a meeting gets canceled, Zazu will let you know that you now have time to head home (there's traffic on your normal route, so you should take the backroads) and catch a movie with your family. As cheesy as that sounds, we really believe that people could find some utility in being up to date without having to explicitly look for whatever information you need to know. The current manifestation of that idea is a glorified alarm clock -- with the moment of alert being when the alarm goes off. Yes, I do realize that we are creating a moment of alert for our users, but what better time is there to plan your day than at the beginning of it? --, but we're just testing out the waters.

This feedback is great, I really appreciate it. Thanks!

Feedback: the homepage doesn't really explain what it is clearly. The wording can be better ("wakes you up verbally"?). You should show screenshots of the app, and try to communicate its value/why it's cool (with quotes from users perhaps). I couldn't even find a screenshot in the blog.

We're aware of the lack of information conveyed on the website. That's on the backlog, but it's just recently been pushed closer to the top of the stack.

I hope this doesn't sound rude - I don't mean it to be. I really like your idea.

- There's a lot of odd looking empty space around the logo. In general the homepage just looks like you've placed the elements in random locations. Maybe move the Blog/Team/Press/Contact links to a horizontal list to fill the space at the top and lose "The Perch" for starters.

- The text on the rotating set of images is hard to read due to downsampling and jpeg compression. You probably shouldn't have paragraphs of text displayed in this way - I want to read it at my own pace. I don't want to rush because the image is about to change.

- The logo's colour at the top is far too similar to the background. The green would work much better.

- Have an informative page title. Currently it just says "Zazu". Others may know about SEO implications, but imaging I'd looked at your site earlier and couldn't remember the name - the first thing I would try is typing "Android" or "Alarm" into my Chrome/Firefox bar.

Currently installing the app itself...

- The first screen said something like "Use existing login or enter an email address and password to create and account". Does that mean if I misspell my email address I'll actually just create a new account? You should have a quick "New account? Yea/nay" dialog.

- As yet no email confirmation saying "Welcome to Zazu!"

- I'm not sure about the AM/PM option on the "new alarm" screen. It's not consistent with the default Android alarm screen, and incrementing the time over the AM/PM boundary isn't optimal this way.

- IMPORTANT: A bug. Create several alarms. Deleting one deletes them all.

That's all I have time for. Basically I like the idea. You need to tighten up the execution. {olish up the interface and the website for the real thing, try and integrate with Google Reader or similar (I don't want to set up my feeds all over again), change the word "infostreams" to feeds or something.

Good luck!

1) The green color scheme clashes with the red and orange banner.

2)The duck doesn't stand out because there's little contrast between it and the banner. I suggest changing the banner colors to something that blends in better with the rest of the site.

3) The barcode takes up a lot of the screen, but isn't valuable. With a short name like Zuzu, people can easily search for it on their phones. The goal is to excite them enough to search for it.

4) Get rid of the "Perch" menu bar. All those links can be horizontally listed under the banner giving you more space to show off the product.

5) Make the box of scrolling pictures MUCH bigger, stretching across the entire screen (horizontally). The words in the pics are too small to read.

6) Get rid of the "Wake up and win with Zazu" image and keep the tagline "Zuzu wakes you up verbally..." on a single line.

I hope this helps. If any of this is unclear and you'd like me to make annotations on a screenshot, let me know.

Goodluck!

"Zazu wakes you up verbally to your calendar, weather, and news!"

To be above the fold. Right now it's going under it.

Sorry, but you will need to get another name.

I liked the implicit pun in this bit "but we will not rest until it's done" for an alarm clock related start-up that's really funny. It basically says you will not be eating your own dogfood :)

Promoting 'zazu' as a brand when you do not have 'zazu.com' is working for someone else without getting paid for it.

You yourself refer to it all over the site as 'zazu', not 'getzazu'.

see: http://www.zazu.com/

Maybe he's just playing hard to get but it could also simply be the truth.

The guy is called 'Glenn Zazulia'.

These guys call themselves 'zazu'. Not 'appname'.

Just like 37signals calls themselves '37signals'. Not 'appname'.

You say that really well. Your site doesn't. Is there some reason you can't just say exactly that on your website?

See http://vimeo.com/15444551, around 4:20.