In high school my bedroom had two outlets in use – one for a lamp, the other for my stereo. That was it.

Now my large studio is filled with maxed-out power strips juicing my laptop, computer monitor, external drive, printer, router, Wi-Fi router, TV, stereo and DVD player, not to mention cellphone and digital camera chargers, and of course those pesky lamps.

Power cords are my enemy. They so quickly and easily muck up a clean interior I’ve so painstakingly put together. For years I’ve fantasized of wireless electricity. A day when the power outlet became obsolete. Well, we’re almost there. Almost.

At this years’ Consumer Electronics Show, a handful of companies showed off flashy gadgets with pads that allow wireless charging. The pads work via a coil built into them that generates a magnetic field when plugged into an outlet. If you place a gadget with its own coil built into it on the pad, the magnetic field generates a current within the second coil, in turn charging the device.

Palm’s much-talked-about Pre, features such a pad. WildCharge built a pad that works with any phone as long as you attach their adapter to your mobile. While all of these are great steps towards a wireless world, the only way this will be adopted fully is if multiple items can be charged on the same pad. That’s where Fulton Innovation comes in.

The Michigan-based company has developed coils that can be embedded into tables and the like so you’ll eventually be able to power your blender, coffee maker, you name it, just by placing it on your kitchen counter. Bosch, the power tool manufacturer, and Texas Instruments have teamed up with the company and are working on building new products with the built-in coils.

Now you may remember that this padded electricity idea was tried once before. Splashpower, a British company, introduced own charging pads in 2004. They declared bankruptcy four years later with no products to speak of. So how’s this new crop of pads any different? They aren’t, because they use the same electromagnetic induction theory as their failed predecessors did, but now there’s an attempt to standardizing wireless electricity amongst the industry.

This past December the Wireless Power Consortium was formed. The group is dedicated to cementing a common standard for wireless charging. Hey, we may avoid another Blu-ray/HD-DVD kerfuffle! So far big players like Philips, Sanyo, Logitech, and Texas Instruments have all joined the W.P.C., along with the coil manufacturer Fulton Innovations. If they can agree on a single way to charge, we may soon be rethinking how we organize the tech in our homes. No more designing around the power outlet.