Adam Loving is a friend and co-worker who’s getting a head start on ideas for the next Startup Weekend. He’s already jotted down a few concepts that have been rattling around in his head, but “Early Birds” is the concept he’s running with at the moment.

He’s even gone as far as mocking up some basic workflow and screen shots of what a finished product might look like. Not only is it a great way to flesh out the idea, but it allows someone like myself to respond to a concept, rather than idea - like this…

I initially liked Early Birds as one of the top ideas on Adam’s initial list. For me sleeping and waking are two things that I feel I’ve never gotten right and I’m always looking to improve on. Early Birds one line synopsis of “mobile sms alarm clock game” was exciting enough for me to jump on.

Now after seeing Adam’s iterative thoughts on the idea through his mockups Robert Taylor responded with a simple tweet stating, “…a text won’t wake me ~ unless you resend it until I txt a respns”.

I agree. Nor txt nor tweet nor anything as similarly short lived will wake me up. What often does wake me up is a phone call. For one the ringer goes off for a long long time. Even if my phone is on virbrate (which it is 95% of the time) it will wake me up. There’s also something on a subconscious level because I will wake up for a phone call over an alarm from the same phone because I feel it may be important. More on this later.

However what interests me most is what Adam threw into the mocks, response time. Even with the idea of a a txt, response time is something that is very motivating to me. Again, I may wake up faster if motivated by something externally relevant rather than just my alarm.

So here’s my iteration. Stay with the web service and keep utilizing phones. I’m split on app or no app, but that’s a small detail. Push more for the competition factor of response time. Say my alarm is at 7:30am. From that point on I have up to 500 points (or worms as Adam calls them) to gain. Each second I don’t, the points drop. Finally if I don’t respond (button, txt, call, etc) in 15 mins I get 0 points.

If you want to get really fancy you could even have a daily trivia question through which you could earn a 2x multiplier. This would serve as another motivator to shake off the zzzz’s and wake up so you could gain the points. The real motivator in this case is playing with your friends. Streaks for good behavior and king of the Saturday morning wakup should be recognized to ensure maximum bragging rights.

Tropo and Twillio would be great candidates to help with all the “drirty work” of a web service version.

Now here’s the key. For me to pay for a service/app like this, I’d want to improve. Whatever it takes for me to sleep better and be able to wake up faster to beat my friends is a win.