Hasta La Gadget!

Microsoft entered the market for notebook coolers Tuesday morning, expanding the software company’s reach further into PC peripherals.

The Notebook Cooling Base will be available in July for an estimated retail price of $29.95, Microsoft said.

The addition of a cooling base is somewhat disconcerting, given that Microsoft designs operating systems that consume CPU and memory cycles, producing heat, which is then transferred to a user’s lap. Ideally, Microsoft would design a slim operating system that could be run at a slower speed or in a lower-power mode, eliminating the need for such coolers entirely. But we digress.

In any event, the Cooling Base contains a fan and is slanted ergonomically, to make typing easier. Just 1.16 inches thick, it also contains a cable management clip and is USB powered. It will be available in white and black.

If you consider that design somewhat dull, take heart: Microsoft also said itsArc Mouse will be available this month in four limited-edition colors: frost white, eggplant purple, deep olive green and marine blue for $49.95 each. The Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 will also ship in a limited-edition color palette, including blue sapphire, red garnet, pink topaz, green emerald and purple amethyst for $29.95 apiece.

Education technology is not our usual beat, but Brian and I saw a cool demo today that impressed us. It was by mimio, which makes a series of classroom tools that can turn regular old surfaces–blackboards, dry-erase boards, even just walls–into interactive surfaces.

You first load the included software onto your PC and attach it to a projector, which beams an interface filled with all sorts of learning tools, quizzes, and multimedia. Then attach the Interactive Bar to your surface and, using the Interactive Stylus as a mouse, you can manipulate anything on the screen: write and draw, drag and drop, play audio and video, and so on. There’s also a tablet for remote interaction. The whole system is very portable, so you can take it from classroom to classroom easily. The various solution combinations start at around $549–much more reasonable than similar products that need to include a board.

Take a look at our video of the demo (including me acing some addition) after the jump.

The Netflix Player by Roku that hit the market last year is getting a name change–and a significant upgrade. The $99 set-top box will retain its original price tag, but will henceforth be known as the Roku Digital Video Player. It will also now offer content from Amazon’s On Demand service, which includes over 40,000 titles.

One of the chief complaints about the Netflix box was its lack of selection; because Netflix is subscription-based and not a-la-carte, major studios didn’t get on board, and the on-demand selection remains primarily indie films and older releases. Amazon’s On Demand service, however, is similar to iTunes and Blockbuster: you can rent or buy films, and thus, new releases from major studios abound.

The rental prices for movies, as well as their restrictions, are at this point an industry standard. Any new release will likely rent for $3.99, with some older titles available for $2.99 or even $1.99; television shows will generally be $1.99. As with iTunes and Blockbuster, users have 30 days to watch the rented content before it disappears, and the viewing period for a movie is still a paltry 24 hours from when the user first presses play.

News that the second iteration of the Amazon Kindle would have text-to-speech functionality prompted talk about the death of the audio book, but those fears appear to have been premature.

Amazon will now have rights holders opt in to the Kindle 2’s “Read to Me” feature, the company announced on Friday, so it will likely take some time before Amazon gets approval from those rights holders on its entire collection.

The offering converts books into speech. Customers can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and can select a female or male voice. Read-to-Me also works for newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other personal documents.

“If you are in the kitchen and you want to put the feel like being read to, the Kindle will read to you,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the Kindle 2 launch, where he demoed the technology by having the Kindle 2 read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address aloud through its stereo speakers.

Rights holders were apparently not too thrilled with the feature. Amazon maintains that it has not violated any law with “Read to Me” but wants to respect the rights of copyright holders.

“Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given,” the company said in a statement. “We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”