Although Canon still rules the day when it comes to digital cameras the company shouldn’t rest on its laurels. New from the concept lab of independent designer David Munscher comes the Canon Snap camera. Able to fit snugly on your finger the idea is to merge the high-powered functionality of Canon’s larger product line with a sleek and tiny form factor. Hopefully, the suits at Canon are listening. — Adario Strange

While iShoes certainly will push you along at a leisurely 15 miles per hour, you might look a little silly wearing them. iShoes are an invention designed by brothers Ilya and Boris Kaganovich from Minnesota, and work a lot like roller skates, except they are motorized and controlled with a hand unit. Weighing eight pounds each, the skates are powered by electric motors that are good for five to seven miles per charge.

Useful for a short range journey, but you might not be getting back. Right now the iShoes are just a prototype, so no pricing or availability — though we do have a video for you after the jump. — Kevin

Vendor

f you are a true fanboy of everything Mac, and you are super-excited about the launch of Leopard (the latest operating system from Apple), then celebrate by purchasing a gold-plated MacBook Pro. Computer Choppers has upped the bling quotient with a gold and diamond-encrusted laptop for those with more money than sense. The computer itself is nothing special with a 2.2 or 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 802.11n Wi-Fi, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB internal drive, but it’s the gold plating that makes you sit up and drool.

Two versions are available; a 24-karat gold-and-diamond version, with the diamonds filling the Apple logo, or the plain gold version sans shiny rocks. They’ll set you back $9,000 and $6,000 respectively — it’s just unfortunate it only comes in the 15-inch version instead of the more useful 17-inch line. I understand gold plating your tech is all the rage these days, but a big gold brick sitting on your desk is going to get stolen as soon as you turn your back. — Stephen Schleicher

Take the jump for another shot of this highly expensive, high-tech laptop.

Vendor

NEC has a new supercomputer it’s touting as the world’s fastest. The SX-9 is capable of processing a peak 839 teraFLOPS, and a peak vector performance of 102.4 gigaFLOPS per individual core. Well hey, that’s a lot of FLOPS. The picture above might be a little misleading, but each SX-9 is actually a little taller than your average person. Like the computers of old that were as big as a room, you don’t want one of these sitting on your desk. Yet.

Supercomputers are incredibly useful in fields where there’s an enormous amount of information which must be handled regularly, like weather forecasting or fields that rely on advanced mathematics. Progress has been fast: at the beginning of 2007, IBM and Cray had supercomputers capable of processing 280.6 TFLOPS and 318 TFLOPS, respectively. Deep Blue, probably the most famous supercomputer for taking on chess champion Garry Kasparov, was capable of processing 11.38 GFLOPS. — Kevin Hall

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