Dear Friends,

The brackets are set and March Madness is underway. To the chagrin of all the Miami Heat fans down here, the Celtics beat the Heat for the 2nd time this year on Tuesday. I filled out my brackets and have my favorite underdog, Gonzaga, going all the way! Who knows, maybe I’ll win that billion bucks that Warren Buffet and Yahoo have put up for their bracket contest.

Of course, on the other end of the scale is our own sorta bracket contest. It is worth signing up online or in the stores because you might win something! (Well, at least the odds are a whole lot greater.) Fill out your final four teams and the subsequent winners of those games in any of our stores, and you could win a $400 Small Dog gift card! Get all of the details at Smalldog.com/marchmayhem.

We have brought the Sonos line of audio equipment to our stores and I will be setting up the house down here in Key West as a demo of the gear. This is a great complement to some of the other home automation products we are testing out. Sonos makes some fantastic speaker systems that integrate with your Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. to give you great sound in any room.

One of the great features of Sonos is that it allows each speaker to play its own music from any of the Sonos music sources. For example, if you want Spotify on in the bedroom, but someone else wants to listen to a podcast in the office, it’s no problem. Or, create a house filled with sound by controlling them all at once with the same source. This is great for families and parties, and Sonos has a great setup for TVs and home theatre.

I have been trying to identify the trees, plants, and shrubs in my yard down here, but haven’t found a great app for that yet. We have a customer who runs a nursery here, so we are going to take clippings up to see if he can help. Has anyone seen a good app that identifies plants? Taylor suggested that I use Google and showed me how you can take a picture in Google search and it will try to identify objects. That is pretty cool, but it does not work well with plants, apparently. However, it’s a great idea for an app that could be used to identify plants, pests or other objects.

It is still cold in Vermont and I keep hearing of more ice and snow, so this week’s special is the Chill special! I am putting together two great portable music products by Chill Pill Audio. First up: Chill Pill mobile speakers in black for the ultimate in compact, big sound. We will also send you a Chill Box in your choice of color for Bluetooth wireless sound and conference call capability. To complete the deal, we will send you two Chill Pill 12-watt dual USB chargers so all your devices can be fully charged up for that next camping trip or journey to the beach.

This is a $170 value and for Kibbles & Bytes readers, it is yours for only $99 — purchase the Chill deal here!