Ent. 404: An Austin Tech Christmas List

When I was growing up, my grandmother would get the JC Penney Christmas Book in the mail and have us circle the things we wanted for Christmas. I always got excited for November when the book appeared on her coffee table, and I would spend hours circling the stuff I wanted.

The JC Penney tradition naturally faded away when I got old enough, although it probably carried on until I was way too old to be circling toys in a catalog. Since I can’t mark up the JC Penney book anymore, I’m starting my own Christmas list tradition with a new twist.

If you were to make your list based only on products emerging from Austin’s companies, what would it be? At first, I thought this would be a difficult list to assemble because I’m focusing mostly on tech and startups. I thought that there simply weren’t enough companies making “real” products in town. But the exercise of compiling the list was enlightening. You can make a pretty darn good Christmas list with the stuff coming out of our fine little city. Here goes!

Dell Adamo XPS – there’s just no way this couldn’t make it on the list. Even the regular Adamo would be sweet. And both are quite an upgrade over my current P.O.S.

A HomeAway vacation. Who doesn’t like getting a plane ticket and a brochure in their stocking?

A LifeSize video conferencing unit for the office. It’s a weird one for this list. But come on, everybody LOVES videoconferencing! Videoconferencing pretty much eliminates any chance of those “I thought I hit the mute button” blunders, too.

A CheapTweet shopping spree. Just get me one of everything that they tweet about for an hour.

A uControl-based security set-up for the house. Mostly just because a live video feed would solve the year-long mystery of which dog goes nosing through the trash every day. But security is cool, too.

A gift basket of stuff (read: fatty foods, beer and wine) from Whole Foods. Ok, so it’s not really tech-related, but a Christmas without good food and alcohol is not anything I ever want to know.

The SpawnLabs HD-720. Nothing would be more fun than dragon-punching Chun-Li remotely while sitting in your cube at the office.

A PocketPack for your iPhone. This is particularly helpful for people like me who have Costanza-like habits of keeping every receipt, coupon or random shred of paper in their wallets. In fact, it could probably be marketed as a medical device that relieves back pain.

A platinum pass to SXSW. I don’t think anyone can argue with this one.

That’s my list. What about you? Am I missing anything important?

Posted by Kevin LaHaise http://kevinlahaise.com/ Kevin LaHaise pens the Enterprise 404 column for Austin Startup. He thinks the business software world desperately needs a sense of humor. In his day job, Kevin does PR for technology companies and focuses on bringing new technologies to market. To read more posts click here.