The venerable Joel Spolsky asked recently why someone hasn’t made a device that clips to the back of a desk and:

* It’s a power strip
* It’s a network hub
* It’s a USB hub
* You clamp it onto the back of any desk

The idea being that:

This would make it easy to plug in laptops, USB peripherals, and all your rechargers at your desk without crawling around on the floor.

He links to a device that does some of this, and runs ~$150/device. At that price, I think a better solution is a docking station–when you get down to it, I don’t want to plug in 4 things every time I sit down even if it doesn’t involve crawling under the desk (power, video, usb, ethernet and possibly audio). I think it’s unlikely that all the features needed above are really necessary when you just show up for a meeting, or hop over to your coworker’s office for a short hacking session. Many conference rooms these days already have tables wired for ethernet / power and svga video to a projector.