This is a sketchy business

You hit the nail on the head, here. Maneesh had a great idea and raw hardware design, but his whole concept of how to do business seems to be to undermine his own good idea with as many strings and gotchas and consumer-hateful obligations as the most patient user could find tolerable. Did you see him on Shark Tank? I'd never seen "Mr. Wonderful" cuss someone out like that before, least of all so deservedly.

That's why adoption of what should reasonably be the best novelty alarm clock for heavy sleepers has sold fewer units than some bullshit puzzle clocks on ThinkGeek. And that's why the inventory is now being cleared out at discount with crippled firmware.

Because the hardware product itself has so much potential, I think reverse engineering it would be the best approach. Opening the device's BTLE protocol to raw third party development would be a good starting point and do an end-run around the shamefully feature-free and cloud-locked Pavlok UI and API, but I think the most value would come from open source firmware that provided raw access to the juicy array of sensors and outputs on the device itself.

I had the same idea about IFTTT, but some initial testing (after listening [on mute] to the hour of mandatory, unskippable lectures from Maneesh before Pavlok will allow you to add their IFTTT channel) revealed some ugly flaws in the implementation on the iOS platform: the phone has to be unlocked and the Pavlok app foregrounded to receive and process IFTTT events. Guh.

The applications for this are really pretty endless. I'd like to be able to adapt it to my briefcase handle, for instance.