M2E Power, a company formed last year to charge electronic gadgets with human motion, has reported back that its system actually works.

Next year it expects to release a charger that can harvest enough motion from walking to replenish cell phones or other small gadgets, like GPS devices.

It says that six hours of cumulative motion can add 30 to 60 minutes of talk time to a cell phone.

The charger can also be charged via regular power outlet

Imagine your laptop is stolen.

Set aside for a second the likelihood that if it was you wouldn’t be able to read this story and think instead about how you might go about tracking it down.

There are existing services, such as LoJack, that are designed to help find purloined laptops by identifying the IP addresses where they are subsequently used and through other assorted methods.

But according to a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington, the price you pay for utilizing such services is a loss of privacy–as well as a reliance on a corporate third party to take care of you.

That’s why the team has come up with its own alternative, which it is calling Adeona, the name for the Roman goddess of safe returns.

The idea behind Adeona, according to Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, who gave a talk about the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, is to give people a method for safeguarding their laptops that relies neither on proprietary commercial software nor the centralized servers of the companies that provide such software.

Adeona, they said, is the world’s first free, open-source laptop-tracking system, and one that can be installed by users themselves, and which doesn’t require a corporate intermediary.