10 places in Los Angeles to get a damn good cup of coffee

In the last few years Los Angeles has found its coffee roots. After a slow start the city is booming with exceptional baristas serving high quality beans. And that includes all the features coffee drinkers love: expensive machines, specific dairy options, local roasters, fair trade, and even vendors at farmers markets. There is also a competition …

Beethoven drank buckets of black coffee – Creativity advice from 90 artists

It’s nice to have creative friends, especially when you hit a creative block. You can call them up and ask them for advice. That’s exactly what Alex Cornell did and he turned it into BreakThrough! 90 Ways to Spark Your Imagination. Each one is a personal thought from an artist, writer, or musician – like …

Have you used Fab yet? – The design site has 7 million customers and is booming

If you can, imagine the intersection of Ikea and Etsy. Industrial home manufacturing meets quirky internet designers. That is Fab.com. From the CEO: There are now nearly 10,000 products on Fab every single day. (Btw. Ikea boasts having 9500 products on their website.)  We’re building the world’s greatest design store.   And it seems to be …

The Zero Waste coffee maker

One of the keys to living Zero Waste is to find those genius products that reduce your waste and offer a superior product. I’ve found just that for my coffee and it’s called the Moka. I like this coffee maker because there are no filters to change or pods to throw out. There are only …

Logitech creates a keyboard you can spill coffee on

A true innovation. Everything should be made waterproof. The New Logitech Washable Keyboard K310 Today, we’re excited to announce the Logitech Washable Keyboard K310 – the keyboard that loves a wash. From a light dusting to a rinse in the kitchen sink, this keyboard is easy to clean and easy to dry. We’ve all experienced that moment …

The iPhone as your wallet – Apple creates Passbook for iOS 6 – check-in to flights, buy a Starbucks coffee

The best way to learn about Passbook is to see it in action, the video below auto-starts at 1:32:55 (except on mobile devices):   In my personal quest to shrink my wallet, maybe even get rid of it, I love this feature. No more loyalty cards and gift cards, just my phone. More on this …

The Art of Fermentation in coffee, bread, beer, cheese, yogurt…

The list of fermented food in our lives is staggering: bread, coffee, pickles, beer, cheese, yogurt and soy sauce are all transformed at some point during their production process by microscopic organisms that extend their usefulness and enhance their flavors. The process of fermenting our food isn’t a new one: Evidence indicates that early civilizations …

Starbucks to improve its baked goods – purchases artisan bakery, La Boulange

Starbucks got the coffee right. Now, it is trying to do the same with the food. The world’s largest coffee chain announced on Monday plans to acquire for $100 million a small artisan bakery chain, Bay Bread and its 19-unit La Boulange bakery brand. The move comes just months after Starbucks (SBUX) purchased the tiny …

Start-up perks – the standards, impressive ones, & no way that’s amazing

We asked more than a dozen startups (Thrillist, Fab, Tumblr, Jetsetter, StumbleUpon, Asana, Eventbrite, Warby Parker, Rent the Runway, Coloft, ZocDoc, GetGlue, Foursquare, Birchbox, Modcloth, Evernote) what perks they offer and we’ve grouped these perks into three tiers, giving you the sampling of who offers what and why these companies think it wise to spend …

Growing coffee trees in California

In this day of the $6 cup of coffee, when bragging rights mean knowing not only the varietal but the beans’ latitude, anything exotic gets the antennae waving. Which may explain why Jay Ruskey of Good Land Organics is inundated with requests to visit his north Santa Barbara County farm, where he is the only person cultivating …