Hasta La Gadget!

A little more elegant than the tinny plastic or huge-woofered alternatives, this little speaker comes in the shape of a shopping bag, and packs a fairly decent (for small speakers) 30 watts of output. You can pop your iPod or other MP3 player into the top, and the handles of the bentwood case can be used to hang it up.

Sadly, it is both non-stereo and non-portable: you have to plug it into the mains, which precludes wandering the streets uptown and blasting out the strains of Mozart to an appreciative crowd of lunching laydeez. ¥31,500, or $335.

Product page [E-Select via BBG]

Are you familiar with One Less Car? It’s a Maryland campaign to get cars off the road and people onto bikes, but you’ll find stickers (what is the bike equivalent of a bumper sticker? A fender sticker?) from elsewhere all over the world.

We’d like to start a similar campaign, only not for bikes. No, this insidious form of pollution isn’t confined to the streets, but it invades and takes over our homes. The campaign will be called One Less Cable, and freeing us from the tyranny of rubber coated cords is its aim.

We begin with the PocketDock from SendStation, a tiny replacement dock for the iPod and iPhone. It is extremely simple. On one end there is a male dock connector which slides into the iPod. On the other, a jack socket and a mini-USB port. Why is this useful? Because it means you can sync and charge your iPod with any old USB cable. On trips, there is no more bringing Apple’s white cord along with the cable that hooks up your camera, your cellphone and everything else.

The price is $30, or €30, depending on where you are in the world, $20 less than Apple’s dock, although it lacks a remote control. There is one problem, though. It comes with a pair of six-foot cables to hook to your stereo’s line-in sockets, so we guess the PocketDock won’t be receiving “One Less Cable” certification just yet.

Product page [SendStation]

Darkfield Laser Tracking might sound like something the Death Star uses to find and kill pesky Rebel spaceships, but it is in fact much more mundane, albeit useful. The tech is in fact a new trick from Logitech to solve a problem that has plagued more stylish offices since the mouse-ball rolled out of town.

Two new mice have the mysterious Darkfield Lasers which enable them to track on glass. This means that you’ll not only be able to work at the dining table, but at that expensive crystal and chrome desk that has sat useless for all these years.

Regular optical and laser mice track marks on the surface of the table, but glass is too flat and too see-through. The new lasers actually peer inside the glass and reveal its microscopic imperfections. The result is that these two new mice, the Performance MX and the smaller Anywhere MX, will track on any surface except laboratory grade glass (and regular glass needs to be more than 4mm thick. If it isn’t 4mm thick it’s probably not safe to use as a table anyway).

Both mice also come with Logitech’s tiny set-and-forget USB receiver and weighted spinny-wheel for fast scrolling. The small Anywhere MX is $80, the bigger Performance is $100.

Product page [Logitech]

Remember Chumby, the cute media player that allows users to pick information widgets and then streams it from the internet?

It is set to get a wider platform as the company executives have decided to port its software on to other gadgets to create a “powered by Chumby” brand, reports Forbes.

The move means instead of selling just the Chumby device, its makers can license the software that powers it to other companies who want similar functionality in their gadgets. Chumby, for instance, can pull together information such as weather, music, news and photos from the Web and stream it to the user.

The $200 Chumby launched in the U.S. in February 2008 and is currently available in U.K, Japan, Australia. But the device hasn’t been a hit among consumers. Moving away from a single box strategy and licensing its software could bring greater exposure to the device and the concept behind it, beleive Chumby executives. It’s a strategy that other gadget makers have tried. Earlier this year GPS navigation device maker, Dash, killed its box and shifted its focus from selling hardware-based GPS devices to just licensing its applications and services to run on other products. In June, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion acquired Dash.

Chumby is betting on a similar strategy. The company is already negotiating with companies such as Sony, Samsung, Broadcom and Marvell to be included in products such as digital picture frames, TVs and Blu-ray players.  Chumby powered gadgets are expected to be available this holiday season, the first of which is likely to be a digital photo frame.  Photo frames with Chumby software could include pictures from sites such as Flickr, internet radio, weather and even twitter feeds.

Photo: Chumby

The Backpack is an ingenious, gravity-secured shelf that sits on the rear stand of an iMac or an Apple Cinema display. The punched-aluminum platform pushes against the rear stand and a couple of clips reach around to grab the back, and the shelf just hangs there. And don’t worry: There’s no metal-on-metal action. The clips are protected by non-scratch inserts.

This is clearly a home-makeable product, but we love the smooth lines and Apple-like finish to this commercial version, plus the design details (there is a scale on the slots where the clips attach so you can make sure you have it perfectly centered, for example). The product page, too, is like being at Apple.com, and even the price is a Cupertino-cloning $29.99, with a six-pack for $150.

Product page [Twelve South via Noquedanblogs]