Forget the dollar and the yen. People value their cold, hard content.

By Pete Steege, product marketing manager, Seagate Technology

Steege looks at information as legal tender. Photo: Seagate

Earlier this year there was a bit of buzz that the US dollar was at risk of being dethroned as the world's default currency. I'm not a financial expert, so I can't weigh in with any authority on the US dollar's continued hegemony vs. other monetary currencies. But I do think the there is a new global currency looming on the financial horizon that will change how we transact business. The new legal tender: information.

Driven by the content Gang of Five (Google (GOOG), Facebook, Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), and TiVo (TIVO) ) and their peers, our day-to-day lives have turned irreversibly digital. We collect television shows and movies instead of just watching them. We download songs instead of just listening to them. We don't talk on the phone so much as we manage our messages.

Along the way, information has become a consumable. More than that, information is a commodity that we increasingly equate with a specific dollar value. How much does a movie DVD cost? It depends on who's selling it and whether or not it is on sale. Not so with online content. A digital song is $1, (well, more like $1.29)  a movie is $10, an ebook is $10, more or less.

This convergence of the value of digital content affects consumers' other possessions and purchases as well. For example, how much a personal computer is worth to its owner depends more on what is stored on it than what was paid for it. Two thousand songs stored on the hard drive? It's worth at least $2,000. More

Our correspondent goes to a geekfest and reports back on five new tools you need now.

Catch that mouse. Logitech's Performance Mouse MX is one to love. Photo: Logitech

I was in gadgetry heaven.

The Pepcom Holiday Spectacular in New York Thursday night was buzzing — and it wasn't just the sensation of mobile devices on vibrate mode.

With 80 companies — from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)  to Samsung — showing off their goods for the holiday season, the room pulsated with enthusiasm, competitiveness and innovation. It was like the recession didn't exist!

I can't go through everything I saw, but here are my top five picks of the most interesting, unique technology solutions for business (and then some honorable mentions). More

With a line of stylish new drives and a TV marketing campaign, Seagate hopes to make digital backup more popular than … well, flossing. Image: Seagate

Aaron Levie runs his own online storage and collaboration company, so he sounds a little sheepish when he admits that, before he founded Box.net, he didn't back up the files on his computer. He's not alone. Recent studies show that at most, 17 percent of PC owners use external storage for backup, slightly higher than the percentage of people who floss daily.

This statistic, as you might imagine, annoys storage executives as much as the flossing number annoys dentists. More

Iomega's Rev drives compete with portable hard drives from Seagate and Western Digital; EMC hopes to buy the company and turbocharge the brand. Image: Iomega

What happened to Iomega (IOM)?

It was a gravity-defying technology stock during its best run a decade ago. At its peak in 1996, the company's nearly $6 billion valuation meant many investors were betting it would be the future of digital storage.

Iomega seemed to be at the right place at the right time; broadband connections and music downloads were not yet common, and few tech companies recognized that storage would be a growth market. Meanwhile Iomega's proprietary Zip disks and Zip drives provided the capacity of a computer hard drive and the portability of a floppy disk, making it a snap to move chunky files like digital images or huge spreadsheets from one PC to another. More

Lenovo's critically acclaimed ThinkPad X300 laptop does without a hard drive. Image: Lenovo

While munching on a reuben at Birk's, a steakhouse in Silicon Valley, Seagate (STX) CEO Bill Watkins is explaining why he's not too worried about a these trendy new laptops that have everything but a hard drive.

On the surface, this would seem to be a big problem. Seagate, after all, is the world's largest hard drive maker with expected sales of more than $3 billion this quarter – so Watkins likes to see his wares go into more gadgets, not fewer. It's easy to see why he tends not to favor devices like Lenovo's sleek ThinkPad X300, which is winning raves for its light weight and silent operation, and its 64-gigabyte flash storage drive. More

New Home Server aims to bring big-business technology to the home — but it will be a tough sell

HP's MediaSmart Server runs Microsoft's new Windows Home Server operating system. Image from Microsoft.

Yes, it has come to this. Now that consumers have multi-PC homes, wireless networks, and thousands of digital files floating around, they need a computer whose sole purpose is to keep an eye on the other computers.

At least, that's Microsoft's (MSFT) pitch for a new class of machines built to run its new Windows Home Server operating system. Home Server products became available for pre-order this week from retailers including Best Buy (BBY), Circuit City (CC) and Amazon (AMZN), but it remains to be seen whether mainstream computer shoppers will buy the idea.

The concept is geeky, but the need for a home server is real, as anyone who has lost files to a hard drive meltdown will attest. The promise of the home server is that it will deftly perform many useful tasks that most computer users find too troublesome to do on our own.

For example, it will automatically back up every file on all the Windows computers in your home (so long as they're running Windows XP or higher). The home server will also allow you to use a web browser to access files that are on your home computers while you're on the road, and even remotely share them with friends and family. All the while it also watches out for the other PCs in its network, making sure they have the latest security software updates.

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Founder and CEO Michael Dell. Image: Dell

Michael Dell’s old game plan was ruthless and effective: Crush competitors by building products at a lower cost, and using the Internet to pass the savings on to value-conscious customers. That strategy made his namesake company a darling of the first Internet boom and the largest computer maker in the world.

But times have changed. In recent years archrival Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has stolen Dell’s (DELL) global PC crown by using HP’s larger size to cut costs and its retail relationships to grow sales. And while Dell has struggled, companies like Apple (AAPL) are using design savvy to simplify computing experience through devices like the iPod and iPhone.

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Servers like this one, which put information onto the Internet, let off a lot of heat – and it takes energy to cool them. Photo: HP

The Internet is hot. Not just hot as in popularity. Hot as in heat.

It’s so hot, in fact, that data centers – those expensive warehouses full of computers that serve up information – are racking up huge power bills. According to Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) calculations, a large data center with 70,000 square feet of space might guzzle $10.4 million worth of power in a year. Data centers require so much energy that over a three-year period, the computers inside could easily cost a company as much to plug in and cool as they did to purchase in the first place.

To deal with the power problem, and make some money in the process, HP weeks ago began selling a homegrown technology called Dynamic Smart Cooling. Today, the company is releasing numbers it hopes will convince customers that the technology works.

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Flash-based models such as the new iPod touch are increasingly upstaging Apple's hard drive-based players. Photo: Jon Fortt

In the iPod’s world, storage isn’t the selling point it used to be.

That’s one clear lesson from the sales rankings at the Apple Store, which posts a regularly updated list of the most popular iPod models. Though the iPod classic, which uses a hard drive to store music and video, offers a whopping 80 gigabytes of storage for $249, it is being outsold by the iPod touch. This, despite the fact that the touch has a tenth of the storage space and costs $50 more.

Why is the touch beating the classic? For one, the iPod touch has the benefit of good looks – it’s almost identical to the iPhone, this year’s must-have gadget. The touch also has a large display, built-in WiFi and web browsing. (The iPod touch is isn't Apple's best-selling model; number-one is the slim iPod nano, which starts at $149. It doesn't use a hard drive either.)

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When does a Chinese company's strategic technology investment become a national security risk?

Lawmakers were starting to ask that question Friday after 3Com, a struggling manufacturer of networking equipment, announced plans to sell itself to private equity firm Bain Capital Partners, and Chinese networking giant Huawei Technologies in a $2.2 billion cash deal.

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