Tag Archives: iPhone app

My iPhone tells me that I need another espresso… I don’t need to be told twice!!

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I hit a nice little gold mine for my iPhone today. Being the first day to play with it, I will tell you about the app… then report back after playing with it for a week at work.

The app, Caffeine Zone2, has you enter when you drink things with caffeine in it… mostly in the area of coffee and tea based drinks. From that information, you will be alerted when the caffeine (per the apps calculations) in your body has dropped down and a coffee might get your energy back up. Note that Caffeine Zone2 does have a disclaimer saying the apps recommendations comes from calculations and no real blood testing is done.

Along with when you might want to drink a cup of coffee, Caffeine Zone2 will also calculate when the last cup of coffee for the day should be based on when you plan on going to bed. The app will warn you when you enter the drink information… so to make a decision from the information you should enter your caffeine intake prior to drinking.

The app uses your body weight to help make decisions, but there is no way to enter if you where (or what) eating when drinking your coffee. The presets for drinks in Caffeine Zone2 include 3 drink sizes and defaults for how long it took you to drink. If you are drinking espresso drinks, there is an option to put in the mg of the drink… I looked around and found “The USDA value for Espresso coffee is 64 mg caffeine per fluid ounce.” on this site.

You do get a nice graphic that shows a rise  when you drink, tapering off over time. A downward line crossing the center line will be an impact on your energy and the blue area is sleep time. Use your finger to slide left/right through time.

 

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News: Starbucks, Starbucks and Personalized Coffee Bags

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Starbucks has two news items worthy of a mention and there is also the new ‘personalized coffee bags’. We had mentioned late last year that Starbucks was raising their prices. We got a lot of emails stating that folks didn’t see the increase in their area. We do not know if the increase was delayed or if it was just being rolled out across the states a few stores at a time. We did see specialty drinks go up 30 cents in Ft. Worth and then a week later go up in Dallas. While we still hit a Starbucks when we have a espresso need and no small shop is available, this price does put the drinks just over our comfort level. We’ll report back on what we end up doing.

Another Starbucks news item was the announcement that the beta for smartphone payments of in store purchases was successful so they are rolling it out to more stores. Currently, there is just over 7,000 stores around the US that you can pay for your coffee and snacks using your smartphone. There is an app for the iPhone (free on the iTunes store here) and there is a BlackBerry app too.  There are most likely Android and Microsoft solutions but we don’t have links to those yet. The iPhone version of the app has a way to ‘reload’ your card and a location finder too.

And to wrap up the coffee news is an offering we found from Boca Java: Personalizing Your Coffee is as Easy as 1-2-3! Choose from either 8oz. bags or 2oz. bags. Fun for Weddings, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, Grand Openings, Holiday Gifts, In-Room Coffee Service, Invitations & Announcements, Reunions, Conventions & Trade Shows and Corporate Gifts. You can see their offerings on their site. Personalize Boca Java Coffee with Your Own Image!

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