PowerSquid - Making your wall warts get along...

More and more of the things we plug in and power up these days are digital - which means they chug DC juice, which means they need adapters for the AC wall sockets, which means wall warts. You know, the big ugly heavy bricks on the ends of the power cords that hog more than their share of the space around the sockets. The problem is that normal powerstrips aren't designed for these behemoths - the powerstrip being a relic of 20th-century design - resulting in many of the strips' sockets going to waste.

The Redesign: The PowerSquid line of flexible power strips, shown at left.

Alternately, The Bandaid: The Power Strip Space Saver, adapting existing strips with dongles at three bucks a pop.

Sure, these are the mundane, unsexy parts of life - and remaking the powerstrip into anything but a low-margin commodity is a bad business bet. But I'll be there are a lot of happy people out there using these products, and wanting to say "thank you!"