To get rid of the tangled cables behind your computer, researchers from Sony Computer Science Laboratories have developped tranSticks, a media that acts as a virtual wire and as a shared memory card.

A pair of memory sticks, visually coded by color and symbols to avoid confusion, represents the two ends of each cable and transmits data wirelessly.

For example, to hook up your computer to a printer, you just grab two sticks, pop the first in the printer port on your computer, the other into the printer, and you let the wireless network figure out the rest.

The cards can also be used to allow two computers to share memory on a server and to synchronize files.

The system could be used practically within two years.

From MIT Technology Review.