1. DLO HomeDock Deluxe: A home entertainment center for the iPod which is the world’s first iPod dock that lets you view and select your iPod’s music on your TV screen, allowing you to navigate, select and play your songs using the included 18-button remote control.

2. Memorex iFlip: A video viewer for iPod which allows you to enjoy the video content stored on your iPod on a larger screen. It also charges your iPod and has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery for up to 5 hours of video playback.

3. Logitech AudioStation: Just add your iPod to create a full-function stereo that fills any room in your home with high-performance sound.

4. SpeckTone Retro: An iPod speaker system with a 1950′s Retro style. Very good sound output and strong bass, thanks to a bottom-side subwoofer. The SpeckTone is a stark departure from the ordinary, but don’t let the old style fool you. The sound quality of the SpeckTone is worthy of a strong endorsement.

5. Sharper Image iSoother: A ZipConnect speaker system for your iPod or MP3 player, an AM/FM digital radio, a backlit LCD talking alarm clock and a Sound Soother with 20 environments all played through dual built-in aluminum-cone stereo speakers. The universal ZipConnect module (with retractable 18-inch cable) allows you to conveniently connect and listen to music from any audio player with a headphone jack.

6. Apple iPod Hi-Fi: Fill your home with sound, not stereo components. Keep your music collection at your fingertips, not in countless CD cases. Change the way you experience digital music. iPod Hi-Fi delivers crystal-clear, audiophile-quality sound in a clean, compact design.

7. Bose SoundDock: Enjoy the songs on your iPod like never before. The Bose SoundDock digital music system is specifically designed to expand and enhance your enjoyment of the music stored on your iPod.

8. iHome iH26: The perfect portable alarm clock for when you are on the go with your iPod and iPod shuffle. The iHome iH26 comes with a carrying case with a handle to protect both itself and your iPod during your travels, and lets you not only listen to the music on your iPod, but fall asleep and wake up to it as well.

9. JBL On Time: A high-performance sound center that lets you wake up to music stored on your iPod. Just connect your iPod, MP3 player or other music source to JBL On Time and experience clean, powerful and dynamic sound.

10. Klipsch iGroove HG: Designed to leave no room unrocked, the new Klipsch iGroove HG is a convenient all-in-one digital music system that delivers audiophile-quality sound everywhere you need it.

About iPodnanomart.com
The website, launched in September, is a comprehensive resource for information about The iPod and iPod nano technology. iPodnanomart.com includes an extensive library of information about iPod products and accessories, and a comprehensive collection of user driven information about the iPod family.

10. SONY PLAYSTATION(R)PORTABLE PSP(TM)

Who says games are just for kids? Even executives will love the fun and excitement of the Sony Playstation(R) in transit! Much more than simply a mobile Playstation, the PSP(TM) is a lightweight and compact portable entertainment center with MP3 and video playback capabilities, a high- resolution 4.3 inch color TFT LCD screen, built in stereo system, input/ output connectivity and more. Games may be played online against other players via the 802.11 b Wi-Fi feature and users will simply adore the wide variety of cinema entertainment on this amazing handheld.

9. NOKIA N72 CELLULAR PHONE

Savvy and chic, the Nokia N72 cellular phone not only incorporates the latest advancements in cellular technology, but enhances its users’ smart and sophisticated sense of style. This mega-hip phone comes in both pearl pink and gloss black with a matching wrist strap and headset while allowing for photo and video enhancement with Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition. Furthermore, the N72 has USB 2.0 connectivity, Bluetooth capability, is available in Tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900) frequency and allows for up to 20 MB of internal dynamic memory. Tech-savvy and chic!

8. APPLE(R) IPOD(R)

The true definition of entertainment in transit, Apple(R) has released its 5th generation of luxury audio devices just in time for the holidays. Now available in a thinner design and five stylish colors, the iPod(R) 5G holds up to 20,000 songs, 25,000 photos and nearly 100 hours of video for endless media and audio entertainment while traveling, shopping or just hanging out at home. It seems like everyone has an iPod(R) these days so don’t let your loved one be left out!

7. BOSE QUIETCOMFORT(R) 2 ACOUSTIC NOISE CANCELING(R) HEADPHONES

Air travel is more hectic and cumbersome than ever, but at least you can enjoy some peace and quite during the flight! If your loved one has had enough of jet noise, flight announcements, crying babies and other airline noise pollution, then get them the luxuriously designed Bose Quiet Comfort(R) headphones. Their patented noise reduction technology was specifically engineered for airline travel, and blocks out all background sounds while providing a clear, rich audio experience for movies, music and much more.

6. TOMTOM ONE PORTABLE GPS NAVIGATION SYSTEM WITH BLUETOOTH COMPATIBILITY

Navigation systems are sizzling hot gifts this year and if your special someone spends a lot of time in the car on business, then the TomTom One is perfect. The TomTom ONE portable GPS navigation system combines the portability and cutting edge technology of a GPS touch screen with an elegant and simplistic design. User friendly and compact, the TomTom One includes a Plug & Go pre-installed memory card, which means there’s no need to download or manage complicated software, and contains the latest and most complete maps available. With the TomTom One, the user is ensured a quick safe route with door-to-door navigation from anywhere in the country. And since that special someone will be singing your praises each time they use the TomTom to avoid a traffic jam, it’ll be the gift that keeps on giving!

5. SAMSONITE DUAL WATTAGE CONVERTER KIT

A must have for the ladies! Never “fry” your gadget again while traveling overseas! The Dual Wattage Converter kit allows you to use your travel iron, hair dryer and other appliances around the globe by converting 240-volt foreign electricity to US standard 120-volt. Its five county coded-adapters help the traveler to easily plug into corresponding outlets in the UK, Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and North and South America. And to put it’s value in perspective, it could be mean the difference between your special someone attending that big sales meeting with spectacular curly hair, or a flat, lifeless ‘do!

4. LINGO TR_2203 PACIFICA TALK TALKING TRANSLATOR

Nothing’s more frustrating than not being able to communicate properly when asking directions, ordering a meal or stumbling through basic conversations in a foreign land. With the Lingo TR_2203 Pacifica Talk Talking Translator, your favorite traveler will no longer have to learn a foreign language to converse overseas. This state of the art translator converts over 200,000 words and 25,000 useful and popular phrases in 10 different languages, and then teaches the user how to phonetically pronounce the words at the touch of a button. Also acting as a business organizer, the Lingo TR_2203 allows the user to store all appointments, contacts and memos, provides metric and currency conversions and holds real world time in over 200 cities. Light and compact (5.5 ounces), the Lingo Pacifica Talk 10 is small enough to fit in a shirt or pant pocket and has an easy-to-use keyboard.

3. DELPHI XM MYFI(TM) PORTABLE SATELLITE RADIO

As hectic as traveling is, it can be equally dull. With the Delphi XM MyFi(TM) Portable Satellite Radio, however, your special someone will never be bored. They’ll enjoy real time content from a huge array of custom radio stations, 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world. This incredible portable audio device additionally incorporates the XM Ultimate Playlist, up to 5 hours of fresh content and a host of XM channels (with no computer downloading or list management) live from coast to coast by satellite feed. The Delphi XM MyFi unit can also wirelessly transmit to any FM radio speaker system, car, home or portable device and comes complete with a large, illuminated LCD display, personal stock ticker, sports score ticker, alarm clock and more.

2. IGO JUICE70 UNIVERSAL NOTEBOOK POWER ADAPTER

OK, let’s face it … without enough “juice,” even the most sophisticated and valuable gadget is worthless! That’s why the iGo Juice70 is near the top of our list. The portable iGo Juice70 Universal adaptor weighs less than 9 ounces and allows for the recharging of notebook computer power as well as a second media device (such as a cellular phone or MP3 player) simultaneously.

… and if we can get a drum roll from the Little Drummer Boy …

1. SLINGBOX(TM) BY SLINGMEDIA

About KoolConnect

KoolConnect Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of advanced digital and HD media on demand solutions to luxury and upscale hotels worldwide. KoolConnect was the first company to offer HD VOD in the hospitality industry and today serves nearly 20,000 rooms in prestigious properties in the US, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Dubai and Caribbean. To learn more about KoolConnect, visit http://www.koolconnect.com/.

Nicholas Negroponte set out to build a $100 laptop so that children in third world nations could get on the Internet with everyone else.

People thought he was crazy.

Intel knows he is.

But in November, Negroponte’s dream comes true when 5,000 units come off the assembly lines at Quanta Computers. Quanta, one of the world’s biggest computer manufacturers, signed on earlier to partner up with the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and the first test units are due next month. The new units, called the XO, are low power laptops that can be hand generated in areas without electrical outlets.

Fortune Magazine senior writer, David Kirkpatrick, illustrated some level of doubt about the project, especially from Intel CEO Craig Barrett, who wrote a letter to the Nigerian government:

“The OLPC represents a limited version of the modern PC, reliant on old hardware that limits its functionality.”

Wrong.

The computer actually uses an ultra-low power technology provided by–survey says–AMD, Intel’s biggest rival.

In a strategic misstep and a bad piece of publicity for Intel, already seen as the stumbling giant against the hipper AMD.

Negroponte may be idealistic, but he is actually putting computers into the hands of those who simple wouldn’t have them otherwise.

What’s more, the computer is pretty hot. It serves as a laptop and a tablet PC with energy saving features you can’t even get in most current laptops that would costs thousands. The XO has on-board audio, USB ports and limitless usage as a pull string (which replaced a hand crank) is used to power a generator manually.

This is amiable work, and it’s coming to fruition. Good for Negroponte.

Firstly, Google is up in trading today after spending over a billion and a half dollars acquiring YouTube. Meanwhile News Corp is down today as the details of this trade begin to trickle down and bad news for the newspaper business continues.

According to the Wall Street Journal, News Corp tried to jump in and possibly make a counter offer to buy out YouTube, but the startup video service didn’t even return their calls, indicating one of two things: either the 20-something founders were diehard-locked-in to Google, or they were terrified that if they shopped around, their payday might slip through their fingers.

While indicative of their age, this course of action still seals a huge acquisition for the search engine leader and in all honesty, pissed off the boys at News Corp, who met according to the Journal after the deal to discuss the possibility of banning YouTube links on MySpace.com

Things remain cordial, however, as Google and News Corp executives, including Rupert Murdoch, plan to meet in Los Angeles this week. Smartly, the two companies see that despite their competition, they both can make a lot of money off each other.

Shares of Apple Computer are down slightly today as their stock option scandal churns. Federal prosecutors have begun to look into the company’s option practices, according to reports.

As a bit of breaking news, a plane crashed into a residential building in New York today, according to a CNNMoney report. CNN is also reporting that this development has dragged market prices lower this afternoon. All eyes are now focused on this development.

Finally this week Alcoa, the first blue-chip company to release its earnings, posted an 86 percent increase in net income and is reportedly having its best fiscal year in the aluminum company’s long history. Despite that, the company did not meet analysts’ expectations and predictions. This development is driving stocks downward today, and Alcoa itself is down five percent despite an 86 percent jump in income. There are clearly economic explanations for this, but it is amazing to see this be the case.

And that, my dear friends, is the rag for this week.

This deal also gives Google a pivotal coup in its competition with Microsoft and News Corp.

News Corp’s MySpace, the number one social networking website in the world, moved away from YouTube’s services this summer when it started its own video uploading and embedding service, indicating it was not looking to make a move on YouTube. Another possibility was for Microsoft to strike a deal and move toward video services on Facebook, which Microsoft struck an advertising deal with in August. Facebook is already one of the top internet photograph sharing websites.

The billion-dollar deal means Google sees great revenue possibilities in YouTube, as they were willing to pay a huge premium in making their largest acquisition in company history.

YouTube has risen to icon status in the Internet sub-culture, and its corporate status has been rising since inking content deals with CBS and Sony earlier.

Money remains the motivating factor. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, said in a press conference that YouTube would be just the first in a “video revolution” and a series of investments Google would make in an effort to increase their attractiveness to potential investors.

What can you count on? Short, 10-second advertisements before video clips, more text-based advertising and advertising targeted to video categories.

All in an effort to make money on what’s free.

Google News lost a court case in Europe and as a result, the Belgian court that heard the case has ordered Google to stop using content from Belgian newspapers without obtaining permission or paying a royalty/fee to the copyright holder of the news stories.

Here is the original court paperwork.

This is very significant news, as it represents the first victory for the old order of “elite media” over the new media Internet sources like Google News. The lumbering giant that is the newspaper seems to have stirred and, at least for the moment, has claimed a victory. At this point, no news stories from sources in the Belgian Association of Newspaper Editors will be found on Google.

The Belgian media group represents the French and German-speaking media outlets in the country, according to an Associated Press brief that was hidden on page eight of the Metro, today. Google News lists headlines, short excerpts and even thumbnails of news photos presented as previews to link to the full articles.

This is a big victory for the traditional newspaper, but the traditional newspapers aren’t reporting on it with any degree of aggressiveness.

Slashdot, Brand Republic and the Star Bulletin have picked this story up so far. Only one of these is a newspaper.

Other papers have made reference to it, but the story is being buried under a barrage of advertisements on the deep inside pages as a small, un-detailed brief.

Among the new additions to the technophile’s sweet tooth, an 80gb iPod for $349, a thinner iPod Nano with 24 hours of battery life, and a teensy 1gb iPod Shuffle. Apple also plans to launch a $299 device that will allow users to stream content to their televisions and home theater setups. The product, tentatively called iTv, will cost $299.

We all knew they were coming soon, but I think one colleague worded it best: the new iPod killers are being made by Apple, not Sony or Microsoft.

These toys are good. They are everything the previous version of small iPods should have been.

The Nano is no longer a scratch magnet for starters. The piano black iPod Nano was shiny and beautiful out of the box, but as a car depreciates as soon as you leave the dealership, the Nano is prone to scratches as soon as you plug in your earbuds.

As for the Shuffle; it just wasn’t ready when it first came out. The new iPod Shuffle is the most portable ever. Instead of buying an armband or belt clip (and instead of Apple letting third party manufacturers take a piece of their pie) the new Shuffle IS a belt clip. It’s small, but still functional.

The 80gb iPod finally enables the user to take a full library of media files with them. It is the next logical step in the right direction.

Also announced today, Apple has teamed up with the NFL to bring users all of this seasons games and NFL GameDay for $1.99 each.

Apple has, once again, set the bar high as the competition does what it can do to catch up with the last generation.

Small, portable, USB compatible devices, capable of holding several gigabytes of data, are a viable alternative to compact disk media for file transfers and data storage. The two mediums have combined to crush the archaic floppy disk under the weight of its own 1.44 megabytes.

These thumb-sized vaults of information have found a new and immediately popular niche in their ability, thanks to faster USB technology, to run full program applications at speeds comparable to native hard disk access. This realization has led to an entire industry filled with “portable applications,” software programs that run completely on removable USB memory drives and make no changes to system settings or files. This development adds new meaning to the words plug and play. When the user is finished, the drive can be unplugged and used in the exact same way on a different computer.

Most of the currently available portable applications are freeware, meaning they can be used free of charge without limitation, and many of them, including portable versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, are part of the open source software revolution.

One of the more popular sources of self-named portable software is PortableApps.com. The consistently updates site has the latest portable/standalone versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and a variety of other useful applications including the popular Microsoft Office replacement, Open Office and a fully functional visual FTP client.

A second site that makes the rag cut is The Portable Freeware Collection. This site gets the PRrag seal of approval because its owner not only makes constant updates, but consistently removes software from the database if it contains any form of adware or spyware or makes any changes to your system settings or hard disk.

This is why open source, non commercial, software is working so well and becoming so popular. Before the open source boom, you couldn’t download a simple program without facing the consequences of unwanted advertisement software and other computer-slowing, security-compromising junk. In those days, between 2001 and early 2004, unwanted programs ruled the land and were a far greater security risk than any virus or worm at the time.

That was the age of the spyware. The age after the basic death of Netscape and prior to the stable release of Firefox, which was released in September, 2002 under the name “Phoenix.”

The PR guy wanted to give portability a try, so I purchased an RiData 2GB USB 2.0 compatable drive. It is a little wider than I was expecting but lightweight and inexpensive.

Using Firefox and Thunderbird along with the rest of the PortableApps Suite, I also gave myself Gimp Portable, a lightweight open source graphic and photo editing solution.

I like it. The only thing I’d worry about is that if this takes off and people start to rely on the portable applications and their password saving features, USB drives will become more valuable than wallets. The lesson here is that you should always protect your data. If you’re prone to losing things, do not save your passwords on your portable apps.

Another feature is the convenience of Open Office. This is a full feature productivity suite with most of the bells and whistles you’d see in comparable commercial products, and it’s free and open source means anyone with the ability can take its code and turn it into whatever their heart desired.

Thus, the age of spyware closed and the age of open source, transparent, software has emerged. The only question that remains is, what comes next?

The Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin died yesterday in a tragic accident while filming features for a documentary. PRrag will discuss his impact on our world and remember the enthusiastic outdoorsman.

The “Data War” continues. MySpace recently partnered up with iTunes rival, SnoCap to provide digital music download services.

This is an interesting move and certainly helps SnoCap much more than it helps MySpace. A company like SnoCap would be all too happy to sign a deal with the Internet’s largest social networking portal and its tens of millions of registered users. As nearly everyone lines up to challenge Apple’s utter dominance in the digital music (playing and downloading) market, this may be the most promising move yet to offer Apple serious competition.

Slumbering giant, Yahoo!, may have been stirred last week. Their treasurer, Gideon Yu, joined YouTube, the fast-growing, free personal video hosting and sharing service, as their first-ever chief financial officer.

This is a huge move for Yahoo! if it pans out the way I think it will. The number one web site in the world for traffic faced the very real possibility of losing its advertising market share to Google and scrambling Microsoft as the two continue to trade shots back and forth, signing major web sites to exclusive advertising deals. Yahoo! finally positioned itself to sign a major player as YouTube was one of the only major web portals without such an advertising deal in place. Yu will be in a position to guide YouTube down Yahoo! way.

PRrag.com will continue to follow Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

In a bit of breaking news, Tom Freston, CEO of Viacom has resigned. Reuters is reporting Philippe Dauman will succeed Freston at the helm of the major media company.

Freston, one of the founders of MTV Networks, gave no immediate reason for his departure.

You’ll also see this week’s Mid-Week Market Rag tomorrow with more tech and financial industry news.

That’s the rag mop-up for now. Thank you for reading!