Google Drive launched last week with quite a bit of fanfare, proving that even geeky stuff like cloud storage can make the mainstream news. But what is Google Drive and, more importantly, what can it do for you and the fam?

Think of Google Drive as a hard disk on the Internet. You can access it by dragging files into a special folder on your own personal hard drive or by visiting drive.google.com and downloading them over the web. Also any documents you write in Google Docs will appear in Drive as "links" to a web-based editor.

The best thing? You can install Drive on all of your computers and your special sync folder will be identical on every single machine. You can also drop a file into your PC's folder at work and come home and edit it on your laptop.

For most of the past month, my wife has been reading her Nook in our newborn baby's room, squinting at the e-ink screen in the near darkness. Luckily, something just came along that is going to make her life - and a lot of mommies' lives - better: the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight.

The Simple Touch has the same screen as the Nook and the entry-level Kindle models. But when you hold down a button, the screen lights up with a bright white glow. The backlit screen is easily readable in the dark and the black text on white background is easier on the eyes than a bright tablet screen.

With tax time come and gone, this is your chance to get - and stay - organized in time for your next big paperwork project. We've tried to go as paperless as possible around our house. Here's how we did it.

Step 1 - Death to banking. Using our bank's iPhone app (we use Chase, but other banks support these features), we're able to make deposits simply by signing and taking pictures of paper checks that come into the house. I also have most of my bill-paying set up through the app.

I do, however, always like to get paper copies of my bills rather than emails. It's a bit easier to organize that way and then I simply shred the offending bill when we're done paying. I haven't been into a bank branch in years and, as a technophile, I foresee a day when many branches will be totally robotic.