How Hot is My Coffee?

There are people in this world who travel from restaurant to restaurant measuring the temperature of coffee. Too hot and it burns, affecting flavor and safety. Too cold and it disappoints and can turn "bad" more quickly.

Rather than employing a coffee temperature consultant, fast food restaurant and coffee shop owners/managers should consider a more simple solution: coffee cups with temperature gages.


Much like hypercolor t-shirts or mood rings, coffee cup sensors would display red, yellow, green, or blue to indicate "too hot," "hot," "warm" and "cool" on a simple strip facing outwards and a temperature sensor inside.

To reduce or eliminate marginal costs from this, consider allowing marketers to provide temperature-sensitive to-go cups with advertising on them.

This idea is credited to a friend who shall remain anonymous until he claims it, and was inspired by a trip to Dottie's Cafe last summer in San Francisco.

High Rez

My new philosophy: like clothes in your closet (or on your floor, if you share my penchant for shirt tossing), ideas should be sold or given away if they aren't used for a year or more. If you haven't time, inclination or confidence enough to sell them -- set them free!

My friends and colleagues have heard me rant my way through this gem anytime I get my grubby paws on a goblet of cab-sauv for years now. Cab-sauv inspires me to rant because it has comparatively high levels of a substance called Resveritrol in it. Resveritrol is found in grape skins, among other things, so it is not at all surprising that it is found in red wine, which is made with the grape skins whereas white wine is not.

Resveritrol has recently shown in lab tests to not only treat certain common types of cancer but also prevent them with low toxicity. There's a lot of science behind this, but the idea is simple: do for wine what the "South Beach Diet" label is doing for frozen food.

Next steps:
1. Form a not-for-profit foundation called Chemoprevention Labs
2. Contract a chemist and an attorney to patent a process for quickly and accurately measuring levels of Resveritrol in wine and other foods
3. Secure private or public funding (allow twice as long for public $s)
4. Enact a marketing campaign to extol the virtues of Resveritrol on the general public
5. Design & manufacture a label that reads "High Rez"
6. Partner with up-and-coming wineries with a strong list of reds and provide labels at dramatic discount, along with educational literature
7. Donate bottles with the "High Rez" label to fundraising events put on by major organizations and celebrities (e.g. the American Cancer Foundation; Susan G. Komen; Lance Armstrong)

Note: It is important not to make any claims of the medical benefits of wine on the bottles themselves; Also, the wineries should note make medical claims. Instead, the goal is to educate the public on the benefits of Resveritrol, and then provide them with a simple way to determine which red wines contain the highest concentrations of it.

Think of how pomogranite juice became a craze, or green tea -- the power of antioxidants was communicated to the public, and then foods were labeled as being high in antioxidents. This avoids sticky FDA review/approval and also the very obvious fact that alcohol consumption in high volume is terribly unhealthy, and would counteract any chemopreventative qualities from grape skin extract.

That's the idea. What do you think? Do you have any ideas? Certainly they don't need to be as lengthy as this...

Share Your Ideas

How many times have you had an ingenious idea, but no time to make it happen? Rather than letting your ideas die on the vine, share them! I will start, but want submissions so we can build a fertile pasture in which the seeds of creativity can flourish.