Dying Technology: USB memory sticks

These little gems are still the delight of tech conferences, but they are the 3.5-inch floppy disks of today. To start, there is less need to transport data in any kind of physical format, considering the fact that you can just e-mail things to yourself or store it on a protected network. This is really about cloud computing, a technology that emerging technologies analyst Jackie Fenn says will be transformative. That doesn’t mean cloud computing will kill hard-drive technology or take away local storage entirely. As she puts it: "For the foreseeable future, synchronization with cloud and local storage is the most likely scenario."