I'm not sure how many people even use digital clocks in their room at night anymore to wake them up in the morning, with the advent of the alarm on the cell phone, but here goes, my wife has a digital alarm clock, and I can't stand the brightness at night.
I was thinking that it would be nice to be able to setup the alarm to shut off the display from time x to time y, with a button that you can hit to see the time (turns on the display), but basically the alarm would light up about 10 minutes before you have to get up, and then you will know what time it is,
Additionally, really do we need to know what time it is during the hours we're not at home? why not have the clock setup to shutdown or whatever until the time you get home, heck why not all appliances that can do it (obviously some like the fridge wouldn't work so well), but just have clocks that sync with network time (or something like that) and never have to set a clock again, and never have to see a clock at night again.
Shoot why not add wake on lan to all of them, then setup a website that will send a message to your clock, to turn on and then sound the alarm, there are probably tons of bad reasons why not to do this but ahhh whatever, anyways then if the lan is dead, then the clock just turns on (still keeps it's own time) and the last alarm set would be the new alarm..
