Hasta La Gadget!

If you like a little cute with your tech, you’re going to love this product–and it benefits the World Wildlife Fund, too. Active Media Products just released the second in its series of endangered species flash drives, this one in the shape of an emperor penguin.

The little guy is 2.2-inches call and is made of PVC-free non-toxic silicone. The drive itself is free of lead and mercury, which are found in some other USB drives, so it’s good for the environment, too.

The drive comes in 2GB ($12.95), 4GB ($18.95), 8GB ($26.95), and 16GB ($42.95) capacities, which are all available from Amazon. Five percent of the retail prices goes to the WWF. Click here for more pictures. I love how the headless penguin looks when stuck into a notebook’s USB port.

If you need to get the complete collection, the first model, a panda, is still available.

Microsoft’s Project Natal took a step away from the stage
and closer to the living room when Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan and Mark Wilson took
the system for a test drive.

While the preview did consist of some of the same
style of tech demos we saw on Monday, the exciting part involved playing
Burnout Revenge, an existing 360 game, with the system. The game was able to
run even with Natal‘s processing
overhead, controlled via an air steering wheel and moving feet forward and
backward to represent the gas.

Despite their dedicated efforts to get the
system to hiccup, Gizmodo was impressed with the device, commenting on how
natural and polished the experience felt. Despite the usual pre-production
glitches, Natal seems ready to take
on the gaming world whenever it comes out. Video after the jump.

Not all of the consoles present at E3 this year were made by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft–only roughly 99.9-percent of them. There was another console manufacturer on the show–Conny, a Chinese company was showing off a handheld called the M2, which, if the press material is to be believed stands for “multi-games, multimedia.”

The device has a 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen, which can be used with a finger or the included stylus. There are two cameras on the rear of the device–one for stills and one for video. The handheld can also play video and music. There’s also a built in accelerometer. Players can affect games by shaking the device or turning.
Perhaps the coolest thing about the M2 is that users can plug the console into a TV and use the device as a gesture-based controller for the action on screen.

The device ships with 100 games. More are available for download. The M2 has yet to come to the States, but Conny says it’s working on it.

Klipsch is hosting several photo caption competitions to celebrate the release of its new Image S4 headphones and HD Theater 300 system.

Contestants will be provided with a photo of the products. They then write a witty caption in 140 characters or less. Klipsch will select the best caption for each photo, and the best authors will win a pair of Image S4 headphones ($79.99). Klipsch will also randomly select a participant from all the entries to win the HD Theater 300 ($399.99).

Visit Klipsch.com to access the contest. The winners and their captions will be posted on Klipsch’s Facebook Page. Contest ends September 7, 2009.

I visited Book Expo America in midtown Manhattan earlier today to check out the ways in which technology has seeped into the publishing world. From all the reports I’d heard leading up to the event, I expected something of a subdued gathering–a quiet mourning for the last days of paper publishing. It’s a testament perhaps, to the bubble that those us in the tech world live in that the show was anything but quiet: Registration lines snaked up and down the halls.

I’d heard talk of there being something in the neighborhood of 20 percent fewer exhibitors this year as well, but the large convention hall upstairs was packed to the walls with exhibitors, with industry attendees clogging up the aisles between booths.

Finding ebook readers was an entirely different matter. The vast majority of companies showing off these devices were segregated to a small piece of carpeting dubbed “New Media Zone.” Amazon was there with the Kindle, and Sony was showing a variety of its devices, but both companies were relegated to small tables in what couldn’t really pass for full booths.