Increased-capacity flash drives are becoming popular with consumers

• Students at Eastside Preparatory School in Kirkland, Wash., are getting class materials in a new way this year: on a tiny flash-memory drive that plugs into a computer's USB port.
• Falling prices in computer memory have made these little flash drives -- also called pen, thumb or key drives -- into enormously powerful tools that are on the verge of changing the concept of "personal" computing.
• A few years ago Jay Elliot was looking for a way to help doctors move medical information securely and decided that flash memory -- which has no moving parts, unlike hard-disk storage -- was the perfect solution.
• But as memory prices kept falling, he realized there was room for more than just data.
• So he invented Migo, software that lets removable storage devices such as USB drives and iPods essentially function as portable computers.
• Plug a Migo-enabled device into a computer and enter your password, and a secure session launches in which you can send and receive e-mail and work on documents, with the background desktop and icons from your own PC rather than the ones on the host computer.
• Skype Technologies SA's Internet phone software is also available, meaning almost any computer can be used to make free calls over Skype, even if the computer owner never bothered to download Skype.
• "It becomes very, very malleable, and very creative on the part of the teacher, because the teacher can go beyond textbooks," he said.
• For the business world, startup Realm Systems Inc. soon plans to roll out its own USB-based "mobile personal servers," with several gigabytes of memory for a few hundred dollars a pop, that could be plugged into any PC to let mobile employees do their computer-related work.