Dear Friends,

There is nothing more important to talk about than the devastating earthquake in Haiti. As I watched the news on Wednesday with my wife, I was overcome with sadness for the horrific misery that befell the proud people of Haiti. This poor country has not gotten many breaks and this earthquake is one of the world’s most severe disasters in terms of human suffering.

At Small Dog, we responded yesterday by making Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontiéres), already one of our “pet” charities, much more visible on our website and announcing that we are matching donations in our customer donation matching program. We posted on Facebook, Twitter and on our blog. The word spread, and as of this writing, we have raised about $19,000 for this group.

Our matching program has gone viral. I just got a call from a woman in Phoenix that is posting it on her popular blog and is matching our matching! As you know, we limit our match to $200 but we have received as much as a $1,000 donation and they are still coming in. We also cap the match at the extent of our annual charitable giving budget and hope to match each donation; however, if we hit our cap, we will continue to collect money to forward on to Doctors without Borders.

Our eWaste team, Kali, Kerry, Katie, Cindy and I, has pledged to increase our fundraising for the 2010 event so that we can move some of that money to this effort to further leverage our customers’ generosity. It feels good to do this and is completely consistent with Small Dog Electronics’ commitment to people, planet and profit. I want to thank YOU, our customers, for the donations and for allowing us the opportunity to make them even more effective!

I was out with the Chill Pill Audio team at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. If we measure economic recovery by attendance at the annual CES show, we are in for a banner year. The 2009 show was very poorly attended and there seemed to be a sense of doom surrounding the show, little innovation or excitement. 2010 was a totally different story with record attendance, a lot of new products and new companies exhibiting and a sense of excitement for the industry.

I really liked the 3D televisions, but have some high degree of skepticism as to whether they will find much of a market. I also was able to see the new Chevy Volt with the built-in iPhone control. It looked much nicer than I expected. Chill Pill Audio exhibited for the first time, and we had a crowded booth for the entire show. Rob and Kerry did an awesome job with the booth and both were hoarse and tired by the time we headed back to Vermont.