Sleep Talking Saves Energy

Skyping while your computer sleeps.

IM'ing while your laptop snoozes.

Remote access to a sleeping desktop.

A new energy saving gadget will let you do all of this. The common thread? Your computer is "sleep talking." Really. It's asleep...but it appears awake to the network. And if you suddenly need all your computer's computational strength, the prototype, called Somniloquy (which means "talking in your sleep"), will wake up your computer via the USB bus.

Read the full press release here on sleep talking to save energy.

Or jump to the paper, presented on April 23 at USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2009) by UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student Yuvraj Agarwal.

Yuvraj Agarwal worked on this project when he was an intern at Microsoft Research, Cambridge in the summer of 2007, and continued afterwards at UC San Diego. Steve Hodges, Ranveer Chandra, James Scott, and Victor Bahl from Microsoft Research are Somniloquy co-inventors and authors on the NSDI 2009 paper. Agarwal’s Ph.D. advisor and paper-coauthor is computer science professor Rajesh Gupta from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Sleep Talking around the web

Fast Company by Ariel Schwartz

Tech Radar UK
EcoGeek picked up the story via TreeHugger via PhysOrg via EurekAlert via UC San Diego via me.
Engadget picked up the story on April 25.
Gizmodo too...via Engadget via PhysOrg via EurekAlert via UC San Diego

A nice story on WindowsForDevices.com
Slashdot picked up the WindowsForDevices.com story
UPI ran the sleep talking story
the LA Times technology blog linked to the story on the UC San Diego news site