USB

Shares of online retail giant Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) were down more than 2 percent late Monday afternoon after a Wall Street analyst downgraded the company's stock and cut its target price.

Stay connected, powered, and charged wherever you may roam.

I love the Universal Serial Bus. It lets me connect, power and charge my gadgets. But laptop makers, peripheral makers and even car companies could make it much better by doing four simple things.

eWeek put out a slide show last week on “personal data storage gift ideas.” This was a thinly disguised ad for a variety of USB-based backup hard drives. At first I was going to link to the story, but decided to instead highlight some really useful backup gifts. A USB drive for backing up your files is better than nothing, but not good enough. Giving a year of online backup service will provide much better protection for your friend or family member.

Don't you love the way technology prices drop and drop? Think about an 8GB storage device attached to your keyring. The cost of solid state memory keeps plummeting at an amazing rate, and I applaud the chip makers and manufacturers integrating such memory into their products.