The program was cool enough that my girlfriend anthropomorphized it; we called the voice Grizwelda, and she had the capability to add her own reminders.
Last year I switched to Ubuntu and had some trouble with text-to-speech at first, so my current alarm clock is just a program that just tells Rhythmbox to start playing at a certain time. (I just got Festival text-to-speech working reliably today, so I'm planning to add all my old features I had in Windows days.)
I'd be very interested to hear about your startup. Put the details in your profile?
Right now wakes you to various types of weather forecasts, time and also the day and date. We'll be adding more sounds and options too!
Please...would be great if you used our service :) Less hassle for you to create something on your own. Were all ears too for other forms of wake up communication people will find useful!
Perhaps possible with http://www.twilio.com/ ?
(As a way to get information to you without leaving your computer on - but some BIOS's have a wake-on-modem option so this might work for that with some tweaking).
a) My PC is too loud, I prefer sleeping with it (and everything else) turned off
b) I was using Citrus Alarm Clock on Windows ( http://www.ornj.net/citrus/ ), which faded in MP3s, but I woke up and turned it off within a couple of seconds, so it was rather a pointless feature. Less annoying than a loud buzzer though.
After waking up it takes me a while to boot - I could probably benefit from an audio reminder of what day it is and what I want to get up to do.
Actually, a cool app would be an alarm that plays music from your music library. iPhone apps are sandboxed so you couldn't do this directly, but maybe you could stream it from a remote file? Hmmm...
Though we do have a solution were working on!
Note/disclaimer Im curious because this is my start-up's field.