Snoozester Case Study – Wake Up Call Service

Snoozester, Inc., a technology company, was officially founded in January 2005 to provide scheduling and notification services for businesses and individuals. Snoozester’s initial focus was to develop a state-of-the-art, presence-aware communications platform that would be capable of delivering notifications and reminders in innovative ways. This platform is now known as the “Snoozester Engine.”

The Snoozester Engine consists of a centralized queue and a series of call processors. The queue manages the upcoming events scheduled via the Snoozester Engine; the call processors retrieve the scheduled events from the queue and then deliver the scheduled calls to the recipients. This model helps to ensure that Snoozester’s systems are fault-tolerant, highly available and scalable.

In addition to facilitating the scheduling and notification services offered to Snoozester’s business clients, the Snoozester Engine is used to power the Snoozester Wake Up Call Service. The service, which was developed alongside the Snoozester Engine, allows users to schedule wake up calls online and receive them on their phone. Snoozester wake up calls leverage the Snoozester Engine in order to provide advanced features such as: phone number verification, a choice of multiple “characters” (pre-recorded voices), a snooze button, SecureAwake (a feature that helps to ensure calls are not missed by calling back until the user answers and indicates that they are awake by pressing a key on their telephone keypad) and abuse prevention (each calls prompts the user to “press nine if you did not request this call,” doing so suspends further calls to their number).

Snoozester released a beta version of the Snoozester Wake Up Call Service in May 2005. The purpose beta release was to build the Snoozester brand while load-testing the Snoozester engine by offering free wake up calls. During the beta testing period, Snoozester delivered over 200,000 wake up calls to nearly 1,000 registered beta testers.

After a 15 month beta-testing period, Snoozester officially released the Snoozester Wake Up Call Service to the general public in August 2006. The release included numerous enhancements to both the Snoozester Engine and the Snoozester Wake Up Call Service. These enhancements were derived from the valuable feedback provided by the beta testers. The wake up call service became the first commercial usage of the Snoozester Engine in a production system. As of October 2006, the wake up call service, in conjunction with the Snoozester Engine, has been used to schedule and send approximately 250,000 wake up calls (in addition to those calls sent by Snoozester’s business clients).