Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Business 2.0 compiles the "coolest" gifts one can give this Christmas season. Apparently, they use a defintion of "cool" with which I am not familiar.

The suggestions range from the legitimately cool:

Sony Librié EBR-1000
$479 www.dynamism.com/librie

This is the future of print. Currently available only in Japan, Sony's Librié is a next-generation e-book reader with a high-resolution electronic-ink display that's supposed to look great in bright sunlight.

to the dorky:

Slingbox
$250 www.slingmedia.com

I'm on the road at least two weeks a month, and as an avid sports fan, it kills me to miss out when my favorite teams play. Few hotels offer DirecTV's NBA League Pass, so even though I'm a League Pass subscriber, I'm usually out of luck.

If I had a slingbox, I could watch what's on my home TV from my broadband-connected laptop by streaming a compressed video feed over the Internet. There's even a virtual remote control to let me change the channel at home from anyplace on the planet. I'd never miss an L.A. Clippers game again.

to the just plain terrifying:

Nabaztag
$114 www.nabaztag.com

Tops on my list is the Nabaztag, a Wi-Fi-enabled toy rabbit from France that changes color and moves its ears to provide real-time information about weather, traffic, stock price movements or incoming e-mail.