Yesterday world press announced the availability of the first USB keys with U3 platform.
The U3 platform will permit USB devices to run programs instead of just archiving data.
I’m already imaging a whole range of virtualization applications: think about a salesman going to the customer for a product demo with his U3 key. Inside the key is ready a virtual machine with the product. The customer doesn’t even need to install anything, just run the VM with its launcher and use it till expires.
Or imagine creating an enterprise emergency network on bare metal PCs (for simplifying business continuity), reading the U3 key at BIOS as easily as today we partially achieve the task with Linux livecd distros.
Now this future is around the corner.