Category Archives: Magazines

Move Over, Espresso

Nov 15th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCO

A new machine could reshape the speciality-coffee business

NEAR the hard-working espresso machine at Ritual Coffee Roasters, a café in San Francisco, sits a stainless-steel box about the size of a desktop computer. This box, the Clover, produces a cup of coffee with a spectacle of streaming water, whirring motors and an ingenious inverse plunger. Zander Nosler, the industrial designer who invented the Clover nearly three years ago, seems to have done the impossible: attracted a cult following for a new coffee-making machine that is both slower and vastly more expensive than other machines and requires the undivided attention of a trained operator.

Read it on The Economist’s site…

Posted in Magazines, The Economist

Review: Javatrekker

November, 2007

To bring us our daily cup of coffee, nearly 30 million farmers in more than 50 countries toil in conditions unimaginable for most drinkers. “All of the major issues of the twenty-first century — globalization, immigration, women’s rights, pollution, indigenous rights and self-determination — are being played out through this cup of coffee in villages and remote areas around the world,” writes Dean Cycon in the prologue to his new book, Javatrekker.

Cycon is well-placed to show readers what it means to use global trade to consciously create a better world: he’s a founder of Coffee Kids, a nonprofit that uses donations from coffee companies to improve the lives of children in coffee-growing regions. And Dean’s Beans, his Massachusetts-based Fair Trade coffee company, is the epitome of a successful and proactive progressive business.

Read it on the Common Ground site…

Posted in Magazines, Whole Life Times

The World on Your Desktop

As the internet becomes intertwined with the real world, the resulting “geoweb” has many uses

Sep 6th 2007

“EARTH materialises, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore.”

That vision from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, a science-fiction novel published in 1992, aptly describes Google Earth, a computer program that lets users fly over a detailed photographic map of the world. Other information, such as roads, borders and the locations of coffee shops can be draped on to the view, which can be panned, rotated, tilted and zoomed with almost seamless continuity. First-time users often report an exhilarating revelatory pang as they realise what the software can do. As the globe spins and switches from one viewpoint to another, it can even induce vertigo. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, The Economist