After recently doing a property up, I know from experience that re-wiring a room in a house is not as easy as it may first appear. Chucking out plaster to re-route electric cables is a time consuming and resource intensive affair. Once you have re-routed the cable you have to re-skim and then sand the surface to get the perfect finish.
Well Phillips may have just come up with the answer. The electronics giant Phillips have applied to a conducting wallpaper patent application. In effect, the idea is to make a wallpaper as we know it, with embedded conducting strips that will allow users to attach electrical devices to the wall and with the right connecter pins be powered off the wallpaper itself. This will remove the need for untidy cabling and if you get bored with the postion of your Plasma TV you can move it.
N.B. If you need to hang a device on the wall you will need to drill holes through the wallpaper, so if you like changing the postion of your new light for example you may end up with holes all over your wall?!
New Scientist broke this story on the 11th of February 2008.