The official answer, to this official question:

The Freedom Tray is a tribute to the world class manufacturing and dedication of the hard working people of this country. We are proud that the Freedom Tray is completely made and manufactured in the USA with US-made materials. Also, as the name implies, the tray provides you the freedom to live an organized, spill-free and uncluttered life without changing your day-to-day routine.

In other words, yes. It also holds drinks, fries, chicken, or drink-fries-or-chicken-shaped-things, has legs sometimes, and is basically a small plastic folding table with rubber bands, which costs $20. I now yield the floor to the ever-so-slightly not American-sounding Ewa Mataya Laurance:
Being in your car, watching TV, boating, camping, at the game, the race, or serving up burgers at the tailgate party! This stuff belongs in our constitution, somewhere. Along with a coupon for the Freedom Tray. [Wonkette]

TiVo
For a long while, TiVo was the undisputed king of TV recording. Other DVRs have come a long way in the last ten years, but they're all late to the party, and still playing catchup: The TiVo name is now permanently tattooed into the public's consciousness, synonymous with recording shows and backed up by still-impressive hardware.

But the fact that TiVo has attained a near-Kleenex level of brand recognition in the US doesn't mean a thing overseas. As of writing, the service is only available in a few other places—Canada, the UK, Mexico, Taiwan and Australia—where it has been met with limited enthusiasm. While the US, with its huge, old, fragmented cable industry, offers a fantastic opportunity for a meta-service like TiVo, smaller countries with one or two dominant pay-TV providers—which have their own increasingly formidable DVR alternatives—are tougher nuts to crack.

The Kindle
This choice might seem odd—or at least inconsequential—on account of the steady stream of new e-reader hardware available all over the world, but Kindle exclusivity is actually a technological feather in America's cap. Why? Because the source of the Kindle's importance isn't its hardware, but its connectivity and the service it's tied to.

Anyone can slap a case around a panel of E-Ink and add an off-the-shelf Linux OS—and plenty of companies have. But being linked wirelessly to a massive library of legal downloads, bestselling books, magazines and newspapers, is what will make a reader great. For now, the only mainstream reader that can claim such a feature is the Kindle, and the only country that can claim the Kindle is the US. Not that it can't go global—similar services for music and TV, like the iTunes store, have found ways to deal with tricky licensing and gone global—it's just that it probably won't for a while.

Push-to-Talk
Without a doubt, this is the technology that feels the most American on this list. Intended primarily for the workplace, push-to-talk technology has tragically seeped into the mainstream, subjecting millions of innocent mall shoppers to that incessant, inane chirping, and the shouting at the handset that accompanies it. Who hasn't been inadvertently pulled into the middle of a heated, long-distance argument about novelty Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches flavors while waiting in line at Walmart? Well, pretty much anyone who doesn't live in America—and not just because they don't have Jimmy Dean, or Walmart.

As it turns out, PTT's Amerophilia can be explained by little more than poor marketing. According to ABI Research:

In other world regions MNOs have failed to market PTT successfully to business users or have opted to market to consumers, and it just hasn't taken off.

Nextel, which was inherently crippled by a proprietary network technology that wasn't built out in any other country but the US, found success with PTT by pitching handsets to businesses as turbocharged Walkie-Talkies, not by marketing them directly to consumers, most of whom would have trouble imagining a more efficient way to make themselves look like brash assholes.

Video On Demand
iTunes has gone worldwide and services like BBC's iPlayer have brought the Hulu model overseas, but America still has the best VOD situation in the world, bar none. The problem is simple: Even countries with a healthy entertainment industry import a tremendous amount of American TV, often well after it was originally broadcast. This regional disparity seems kinda stupid in the age of the internet and VOD, but it's just as severe as it ever was.

European or Asian viewers have to wait for painful weeks or months for a domestic channel to license, schedule and dub international American hits like Lost or Mad Men, and hope, assuming their stations have a VOD service, that the show eventually finds its way online. As an ad-supported service and a product owned by the networks who profit from the above arrangement, Hulu's reluctance to stream content to countries is understandable, but the despair is deeper than that: You can't even pay for TV if you want to. People without American billing addresses are barred from VOD services like Amazon's Unbox, and will find their iTunes video selections sorely lacking.

Satellite Radio
Since is smells distinctly like a waning technology, satellite radio might not do much to stir your techno-patriotism, but goddernit, it's ours. The US has far more satellite radio subscribers than the rest of the world combined, all through the remains of Sirius and XM, now merged under the lazy moniker of "Sirius XM". Why? We have lots (and lots) of cars.

Satellite radio actually has roots as a proudly international service—after all, it is broadcast from frickin' space—having been developed in part by a humanitarian-initiative company called 1Worldspace, which was established to broadcast news and safety information to parts of the globe without reliable terrestrial radio infrastructure. They still exist today, but they broadcast to fewer than 200,000 subscribers, mostly in India and parts of Africa. Satrad's American success can be solely credited to our auto manufacturers, who eagerly installed satellite units in new cars for years, healthily boosting subscription numbers (but not necessarily car sales). With no comparably pervasive car culture to take advantage of anywhere else in the world, satellite radio is a tough sell.

Laserdiscs

When Laserdisc player production finally spun down a month or so ago, it wasn't much of an occasion. I mean, aside from inspiring a little grade-school nostalgia and upsetting a hobbyist or three, the event wasn't materially notable. For us, that is. It turns out that Laserdiscs were much more popular in Japan than America during their heyday—about 500% more popular.

Why? The Japanese success of the Laserdisc (or Videodisc, as they were marketed there) comes down to the two things: money and anime. From launch, Laserdisc prices were lower in Japan than in most other markets, which accelerated adoption. Anime fans appreciated the format's improved fidelity, which drove sales at the time and eventually led to the still-active secondhand LD market. Laserdisc players, though no longer produced, are still available in the shops of Akihabara and elsewhere. At a Best Buy in Akron? Not so much.

Nokia Phones

When Nokia does something interesting, we take notice. Otherwise, in the US the company exists in an awkward netherworld of ultra-high name recognition and almost infinitesimal relevance. To most Americans, Nokia looks like a budget-phone maker. To most of the rest of the world, they're the undisputed king of cellphonery, and not just in name—they're by far the largest manufacturer of handsets on the planet. They literally dwarf their competition, selling double the volume of their nearest competitor, Samsung.

By the numbers: Nokia moved 113 million mobile devices in the last quarter alone, their entry-level 1100 handset has sold over 200m units, and at one point the N95, a precocious, clunky do-it-all handset topped the mobile phone sales charts in the UK. Where does the US stand in all of this? Of those 113 million mobile devices sold last quarter, just five million found their way to North America. Even the iPhone matched those numbers while RIM's BlackBerry nearly doubled them. Nokia is the gadget equivalent of the BBC—most Americans know about it, but the rest of the world depends on it.

Mobile TV

I'm not talking about expensive, pixelated video-over-3G services here. No, I mean full-fledged digital TV streamed straight to your handset, PC or PMP. Brazil has it, South Korea has it, and of course, so does Japan. The tech used in Japan and Brazil is known as 1seg, and it broadcasts over UHF alongside regular HD content. In Japan, more than two thirds of new mobile phones support the standard, which is a part of daily life for many people. Here, it's basically unheard of.

DMB is a alternative standard, targeted at a much wider audience. Developed in South Korea, the satellite and terrestrial version of the tech (S-DMB and T-DMB, respectively) are already in widespread use there and T-DMB is being deployed across much of Western Europe—trials appear to be going fairly well. Unfortunately for us, the VHF and UHF bands used by the T-DMB standard have already been claimed by preexisting TV programming and the military, so don't expect to see terrestrial TV on AT&T or Verizon phones anytime soon, though yours might be capable of the pay-for-play MediaFlo service that nobody uses.

Osaifu-Keitai, or, Your Phone Is Your Wallet

In much of the world, including the US of A, mobile payment systems have been ignored or abandoned after fitful starts. Not in Japan (if you're noticing a trend here, good job!). Osaifu-Keitai, the e-wallet standard adopted by Japanese telecom heavyweights NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank and au, essentially renders wallets obsolete. Phones equipped with Osaifu-Keitai can be charged with money, download tickets for anything from a sporting event to a plane trip, serve as official identification or link to a credit card.

Due to uncertainties about demand for such a service and loads of red tape , no comparable standard has emerged stateside, and it's a shame: If you can come to terms with the nebulous privacy issues associated with carrying so much private information on a losable device, it does seem like the plain, obvious and fundamentally good type of technological progress that is probably, with or without our assent, inevitable. Oh well.

Next-Gen Instant Messaging

AOL (emphasis on the A), burdened with decades-old stereotypes about its tech-tarded users and a persistent association with both geriatrics and late-'90s Meg Ryan movies, doesn't have the best public image. But they do still run the nation's most popular messaging platform! AIM, despite being a vestige of a service that its parent company doesn't really care much about anymore, is the de facto standard for messaging in the US (and Israel, strangely). As we saw earlier though, that doesn't always mean much.

Worldwide AIM/ICQ/iChat numbers are massively outclassed by MSN, or Windows Live as it's been called for the last few years. In China, the largest IM market, most people don't bother with either, opting for the Tencent QQ service. Both were born a solid five years after AIM, but their extra features—mostly messaging add-ons meant to appeal to a younger set—are questionably useful. It's not so much that sticking with AIM has left Americans on an inferior service, it's that it has isolated us, in a small way, from the rest of the messaging world.

MiniDisc

The story of the MiniDisc epitomizes tech regionalism: A solid, capable contender for recordable audio format dominance, the MD was met with enthusiasm in Japan. It was extremely advanced for its time, rolling fantastic, CD-like audio quality with the recording abilities of a cassette, all in a package that was more portable than either. Despite being introduced in the early '90s, the format held up well against the first generation of MP3 players, which, with their limited capacities, slim feature sets and high prices, didn't really provide a perceptible advantage over the venerable MD units. Sony had a solid product—and even a bit of a hit—on its hands.

At least, that's how the story went in Tokyo. Despite Sony's best efforts—and what seemed like an endless string of product revamps—the MiniDisc was never more than a marginal player in the US. Sure, it earned plaudits from audiophiles and musicians (check out the recording information for the thousands of concerts on Archive.org if you don't believe me), but the format never took off, either as a recording medium or, due to risk-averse record companies and the high cost of the actual media, as a competitor for the CD. When MP3 players came of age, the MD's door to America finally latched shut for good. Sony, of course, took a while to get the message, and Steve Jobs was laughing the whole time.

You can sign up for free over at the Club Nintendo site, and we warn you, while we signed up for an account without a hitch, when we actually tried to do anything (like register our games for those precious coins that will buy your rewards), the site got very slow, and even logged us out randomly more than once.
Apparently all of the good stuff runs 800 coins. If anyone has been able to register their games, please leave a comment as to how many coins you per each game. We've bought so much Nintendo crap that we're bound to have something free waiting...we'd hope. [Club Nintendo via Kotaku]

The Spirit stores 1GB of tunes, including 15 preloaded patriotic tracks like Lee Greenwood's God Bless The USA. At just 2"x 1 3/8, it seems a little small for American Hummer-driving, Big-Gulp-drinking tastes. But who are we to ever question something that in some way almost resembles the American flag? Pre-order your Zvue Spirit today for $35.99. [Zvue via anythingbutipod]

Negroponte hopes that this will increase the sphere of influence of the OLPC, whilst simultaneously giving the project a wider global presence and creating a larger development community. Though Negroponte did not initially plan to include the US in the OLPC project, he admitted that not including the home country in the plans indefinitely would have been "kind of ridiculous." There are no dates given for nationwide release, but expect further details to drop soon. [PC World]

Two years ago, the Internet Governance Forum was formed due to a compromise between world leaders, consequently the forum decided to meet yearly to discuss matters concerning the information medium. The first meeting concluded that the US should maintain control of the internet, but the position was agreed to be open to discussion on an annual basis. At present, the US government is responsible for the nomenclature of internet addresses. This point is resting increasingly less easy with other world leaders, as the naming system really defines how users make use of the internet. With the internet's increasing power as an information source (propaganda tool), governments globally, understandably, all want a piece of the action.

As the US government funded much of the internet's development, it holds veto rights against Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, (the California based nonprofit organization it selected to manage domain names). The event is unlikely to make any fundamental changes to the infrastructure as it stands, yet the voices of dissent signal an unsettling future for the governing parties that wield control over the internet's current direction. Is it time for a change to the original system? What do you guys make of the underlying discourse? [Yahoo News]

This price differential, evaluated by Commonwealth Securities in their latest «iPod Index», is caused by a load of taxes and import costs that pushes most of the purchases to US-based grey market import channels.

According to the report, there are almost no shops in the continente. For the whole of Argentina, she says, there's only one «Apple Center MacStation» (which is the name Mac oriented shops have there) located in downtown Buenos Aires. Venezuela, which is the number one iPod market in Latin America, doesn't have any official Apple representation in the country, and all products are sold through third parties.

To add insult to injury, the iTunes Latino Store actually doesn't work in South America. Only people living the USA can access it. All in all, a pretty sad picture of the state of all things Apple just across the border; a state that is echoed by the opinion of users and bloggers from these countries, who feel that Apple just doesn't give a damn about them. – Jesus Diaz

¿Por qué a Apple no le interesa America Latina? (in Spanish) [Silicon News vía Gizmodo ES]

The screens are 9-inch and touchscreen, which are powered by an actual individual PC running Linux. These are all interconnected via Ethernet, which grab streaming video off of three file servers in the plane's belly. You can listen to music, watch TV, get pay-per-view movies, or even order food from the touchscreen.

The best part? They ported a bunch of Linux games—including Doom— so you can play it right on the screen. – Jason Chen

Thanks Ibelli!

If you want an iPod dock that looks as good as your iPod, be ready to shell out $140 bones to grab this one for Xmas. – Jason Chen

Product Page [iDream USA via iLounge]