"clocky" the devious alarm clock

[RGR]

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The alarm clock that runs and hides so you'll never oversleep again

Julia Gronnevet / Columbia News Service

Jason Bailey once slept past a 6 p.m. class. Greg Paciga would hit the snooze button for hours on end. They are not unusual -- they're just late sleepers. And now there's an alarm clock that'll get even the groggiest of night owls out of bed in the morning.

"After the first few beeps I always hear a nice loud thump as it hits the ground running," wrote Paciga in an e-mail message.

The escaping alarm clock is here.

Clocky, as it's called, hit the market Feb. 13, and is the result of inventor Gauri Nanda's own battle with her circadian clock. The 27-year-old created the runaway alarm clock while she was a graduate student at MIT.

"As a designer, it was obvious that the alarm clock needed to be improved, both in functionality and in personality," Nanda said. She was studying at the MIT Media Lab, which focuses on the intersection of technology and design, when she invented the clock. Her other inventions include pneumatic clothing with a detachable part that, when placed on the floor, senses that it is no longer clothing and inflates to become seating. "My focus was wearable technology," she said.

Her prototype Clocky was covered in brown shag carpeting and had big rubber wheels at either end of its body. When Nanda hit snooze, the clock would rev up, leap off the nightstand, land on the floor and roll around, its random wheel function moving the clock around until it found a suitable place to wedge itself -- under a couch, for instance, or under the bed. There, the clock would crouch, waiting for snooze time to be up. Then it would ring again. The invention generated enormous media coverage.

"A lot of customers have been anxiously waiting for the launch because they heard about Clocky over a year ago when he was only a prototype and I was still a student," Nanda said by e-mail.

The interest in the clock led her to start her own company, Nanda Home, www.nandahome.com, after graduating from MIT. Nanda and her few part-time employees have sold just under 3,000 Clockies so far, primarily by word-of-mouth. The current Clocky comes in white, aqua and mint, but Nanda is planning a shaggy version, too -- in homage to the original prototype. Users have taken to posting YouTube videos of their Clockies waking up and running away, as if the alarm clock were a new, cute pet.

"A lot of people who purchase Clocky are parents who want one for their child," she said. The target demographic for the $49 clock is the 18 to 30 crowd.

But why is getting up in the morning so difficult that one might be driven to invent an escaping alarm clock, or to buy one?

"They're not lazy, they're just phase-delayed," Dr. Gregory Belenky said of the people the rest of us call night owls. Belenky is a research professor and the director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University in Spokane. By studying night owls' sleep patterns, a clear picture of normal, but delayed sleep rhythms emerges. "Adolescents have delayed sleep phases on average," Belenky said. In some people, the adolescent's delayed pattern persists into adulthood, and they stay forever phase-delayed and tired in the mornings.

[mrs]

< thinks its hilarious >

[RGR]

< thinks its hilarious >

Yep, I suggested to Hannah that she needed it!

[Scarletprayers]

I think I'm gonna get one for my niece.................she can hit the snooze for hours

[mrs]

< thinks its hilarious >

Yep, I suggested to Hannah that she needed it!

I've never used snooze button tyvm

[RGR]

< thinks its hilarious >

Yep, I suggested to Hannah that she needed it!

I've never used snooze button tyvm

Neither do I..........I just reset the clock!