Category Archives: Consumer Packaged Goods

Wake Up!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Nothing wakes me up in morning better than the smell of freshly brewed coffee. Unfortunately, that requires me to get out of bed and head into the kitchen. Well, European industrial designer, Josh Renouf, is currently working on an innovative solution.

The Barisieur is a bed-side coffee pot that also functions as an alarm clock. The noise from the stainless steel ball bearings that boil the water through induction heating plus the smell of the coffee will gently wake you up, as opposed to the ringing of an incessant alarm clock. It features compartments to store coffee beans, sugar, and milk. By preparing it all before bed you can ensure your coffee will be fresh and delicious as it wakes you up in the morning. Prices are estimated to be between $250 and $420, and you can sign up now to receive updates as to when it will be officially for sale.

What Sparks our Fire: Starting the day off right – with a cup of coffee.

Do you love our posts about coffee products as much as we do?

How Do You Unlock Your Phone?

img-spacer

The days of using a button or passcode to unlock your phone appear to be long gone. The simple “slide to unlock” feature that Apple released with the first iPhone in 2007 is already outdated. New Apple and Samsung phones are placing emphasis on new technology that allows you to use your fingerprint to securely unlock your phone. The folks at Motorola with their partners at VivaLnk agree that their unlock feature needed an overhaul, but it’s not exactly the same as what Apple and Samsung are doing.

Owners of the Moto X phone can now use temporary tattoos to unlock their phone. All you need to do is place the back of your phone over the tattoo to simply and quickly unlock your phone. Users no longer need to worry about password protecting their phone and taking the time to enter it. Is this more useful than a fingerprint scanner? Probably not, but it is a great attempt by Motorola to differentiate its offering from the competition. The tattoo is the size of a nickel, lasts for five days, and connects to your phone by using near field communication technology.

What Sparks our Fire: Seeing Motorola attempting to differentiate itself from the big guns of mobile technology.

Would you use a tattoo to unlock your phone?

Control Your Phone

qblinks1-599x400

Wearables are popping up left and right as accessory devices to help interact with your phone better than you could before. But, not everyone wants to wear a smartwatch on their wrist in order to be further connected to their phone. Qblink is a remote control for your phone and raising money on Kickstarter now.

Misplace your phone? You can set off a ringing noise by pressing the device. By connecting to your phone over bluetooth it can also notify you of emails, text messages, and other alerts you receive to your phone by just blinking on this separate device. Through the Qblink app you can easily customize what each color light notification means. Additionally, it tells local temperature and the battery lasts up to a year.

What Sparks our Fire: Even better and simpler ways to interact with our smartphones

Would you use a remote for your phone?

An Even Better Coffee Cup

90cd2a51685eb01554416ecb067f4960_large

You already know about our loving relationship with coffee. You also know we love innovation that makes our coffee drinking experience better and more convenient. So don’t act surprised that we’re posting about yet another Kickstarter doing just that – improving our morning ritual of consuming caffeine.

Smash Cup is the essential coffee cup for traveling coffee connoisseurs. Nobody enjoys lugging around a big mug with them, enter Smash Cup. Once you’re finished drinking your morning cup of joe, smash the cup and watch it collapse into a pocket sized disk easy to carry around. The Kickstarter has already surpassed it’s goal of $10,000 and ships this fall.

What Sparks our Fire: Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.

How else could our experience with coffee be improved?

Go Ahead, Eat It!

EdibleWrapper

The last time you finished a bag of chips or some other tasty snack, you probably crumpled the bag unhappily in your hand and looked for a trash receptacle, or shoved it in your bag and found it later, probably with the same amount of unhappiness. Fortunately, there might soon be a delicious solution to your plastic problem: wrappers you can eat.

The project, called WikiCells, seeks to use “natural packaging” to keep foods fresh in an edible, nontoxic way. It has been speculated that this packaging could actually be used to season or flavor the food it protects, such as a fruity packaging for yogurt, or a chocolate membrane for hot chocolate. The possibilities are incredible, and may just be able to solve the plastic problem that has been plaguing our landfills.

What sparked our fire: The nature of which doctors are lending their expertise to help reduce our plastic waste problem.

How will the emerging edible wrapper technology effect the consumer packaged goods industry?