Filed under: Products and services, Starbucks (SBUX)

When Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) brought back founder Howard Schultz to revitalize the company’s image, product line and customer experience, the coffee chain’s edge had disappeared. It had lost customers, revenue, the niche and most important — the overall experience — to newer competitors. That was not to state Starbucks still was not king, but it become diluted in the race for newer growth.

Well, to heck with that. Schultz slowed down growth after re-emerging as the company’s CEO early this year, deleted breakfast sandwiches from the menu, retrained the company’s baristas and ensured that fresh-ground coffee smells were the number one priority for each customer coming in the door to experience. But Schultz isn’t stopping there. He also wants customers to push back to the company using MyStarbucksIdea.com. In other words, the coffeehouse’s own social networking site. Schultz wants to empower his customers to help shape the future direction of the coffeehouse he founded.

This is more than a blog or a forum — customers can discuss ideas, argue about them, post new ideas, vote on ideas and form more views on improving the Starbucks experience. Well, I though this was exactly what Schultz was busy doing these days? Is he really interested in what each Tom, Dick and Harry thinks?

Will customers really give him all this feedback? I’m skeptical. I concur that balancing the customer’s needs and the business’s needs is critical — one can’t overpower the other. Still, will this even have an effect on Starbucks at all? If it really is this interested, it needs to market the MyStarbucksIdea website just as much as its mocha lattes. Give every customer notice that they can have a voice in this.

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KentuckyFC writes “It doesn’t happen very often but astronomers have discovered a new class of pulsating white dwarf. The work began last year when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey found a few exotic white dwarf stars with carbon atmospheres. A mathematical model of these stars showed that in some circumstances the dwarfs could pulsate as the carbon was cycled through the atmosphere by convection. Now a few days observation of one of these stars has shown that it does actually pulsate as predicted.”

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KentuckyFC writes “It doesn’t happen very often but astronomers have discovered a new class of pulsating white dwarf. The work began last year when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey found a few exotic white dwarf stars with carbon atmospheres. A mathematical model of these stars showed that in some circumstances the dwarfs could pulsate as the carbon was cycled through the atmosphere by convection. Now a few days observation of one of these stars has shown that it does actually pulsate as predicted.”

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Invisible Pink Unicorn writes “A gamma ray burst detected on March 19 by NASA’s Quick satellite has set a new record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. The burst had a measured redshift of 0.94, meaning the explosion took place 7.5 billion years ago. The optical afterglow from heated gas was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The previous most distant object visible to the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light years from Earth.”

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Invisible Pink Unicorn writes “A gamma ray burst detected on March 19 by NASA’s Quick satellite has set a new record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. The burst had a measured redshift of 0.94, meaning the explosion took place 7.5 billion years ago. The optical afterglow from heated gas was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The previous most distant object visible to the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light years from Earth.”

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ArieKremen writes “Israeli Avraham Trakhtman, a Russian immigrant mathematician who had been employed as a night watchman, has solved the Road Coloring problem. First posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler, the problem posits that given a finite number of roads, one should be able to draw a map, coded in various colors, that leads to a certain destination regardless of the point of origin. The 63-year-old Trakhtman jotted down the solution in pencil in 8 pages. The problem has real-world implementation in message and traffic routing.”

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ArieKremen writes “Israeli Avraham Trakhtman, a Russian immigrant mathematician who had been employed as a night watchman, has solved the Road Coloring problem. First posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler, the problem posits that given a finite number of roads, one should be able to draw a map, coded in various colors, that leads to a certain destination regardless of the point of origin. The 63-year-old Trakhtman jotted down the solution in pencil in 8 pages. The problem has real-world implementation in message and traffic routing.”

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christian.einfeldt writes “Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig really ‘gets it’ when it comes to the efficacy of distributed open source code production. Now he is attempting to use distributed production methods to expose corruption in the US Congress with the launch of another ‘CC’ organization — this time it’s called ‘Change Congress’. CC (as opposed to cc for Creative Commons) would invite users to track whether US legislators are willing to commit to Change Congress’ four pledges. CC will rely on users to record and map the positions of candidates who are running for open seats in the US House and Senate. Change Congress will use a Google mash-up to create a map depicting which legislators have taken the CC pledge, which have declined, and which have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform. The four pledges (which are not numbered 0 through 3) call for greater transparency in government, and less influence of private money in shaping legislation.”

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Pickens brings news that researchers from Rice University have discovered that it’s possible to store hydrogen inside buckyballs. Hydrogen can be an excellent power source, but it is notoriously difficult to store. The buckyballs can contain up to 8% of their weight in hydrogen, and they’re strong enough to hold it at a density that rivals the center of Jupiter. “Using a personal model, Yakobson’s research team has tracked the strength of each atomic bond in a buckyball and simulated what happened to the bonds as more hydrogen atoms were packed inside. Yakobson stated the model promises to be particularly useful because it is scalable, that’s it can calculate exactly how much hydrogen a buckyball of any given size can hold, and it can also tell scientists how overstuffed buckyballs burst open and release their cargo.”

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cortex tips us to a story about a nationwide effort to incorporate advanced technology into the next generation of prosthetic arms. Researchers for the DARPA-funded project are developing feedback techniques that range from sensors on the surface of the user’s skin to electrodes implanted on the inside of the user’s skull that intercept and interpret signals from the motor cortex. Quoting: “‘Think about taking a sip from a can of soda,’ Harshbarger says. The complex neural feedback system connecting a native limb to its user lets that user ignore an entire series of complicated steps. The nervous system makes constant automatic adjustments to ensure, for example, that the tilt of the wrist adjusts to compensate for the changing fluid level inside the can. The action requires tiny to no attention. Not so for the wearer of current prosthetic arms, for whom the act of taking a sip of soda precludes any other activity. The wearer must first consciously direct the arm to extend it to the correct point in space, then switch modes to rotate the wrist into proper position. Then he has to open the hand, close it to grasp the soda can (not so weakly as to drop it but not so hard as to crush it), switch modes to bend the elbow to correctly place the can in front of his mouth, rotate the wrist into position, and then concentrate on drinking from the can of soda without spilling it.”

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