As seen in the “Business” section of The Huffington Post.

Branding is a funny thing.

Just the other day, strolling back to my apartment (indeed, from a nearby Starbucks), I noticed an article in BusinessWeek questioning CEO Howard Schultz’s success in using Starbucks’ retro logo to re-brand Starbucks as, well, itself — that is, less corporate behemoth and more cozy cafe.

(If you haven’t yet seen it, and you’re not a frequent tall-soy-no whip-half caf-extra hot-skim latte drinker, it’s a much more rustic, coffee bean-colored version of their familiar, sanitized green siren.)

The new logo is a tough sell for most of the company’s current customers. Much of the world isn’t even familiar with the company as anything less than a one-stop, five-buck McLatte shop. Yet for those familiar with the company’s beginnings — remember when that Starbucks first came around? How captivated you were by the low lights, the “grande” and “venti” sizes, the whir of the automatic espresso machine? — Starbucks has long been lost in its own grandeur, like the prodigal son with too much caffeine in his blood to bother looking back.

Just when Starbucks achieved success in shareholder terms, they lost it in clutter, or quality, or overreach. Then Starbucks’ success became its own beast, and the values that the company invested so much in to attach to that little green disc logo became diluted, like a cup of…Dunkin Donuts coffee. (Or so they’d like you to think.)

But now they’re back, with re-trained baristas and free refills and personalization and smiles and — yes, even new brew.

For all the hooplah, the new Pike Place roast for drip coffee still tasted over-roasted to me. But as I ordered a straightforward, safe “grande vanilla latte” from a Starbucks that isn’t typically mobbed like the rabbit hole-sized one on the northwest corner of Bryant Park, I thought to myself: yes. This is what I want. To sit down with my laptop and my warm espresso beverage and relax to safe, alterna-jazz humming in the distance.

This is precisely the mental association Starbucks is banking you’ll make.

But the company only plans on using those brown cups for eight weeks. After that, the honeymoon is over — and the company’s hoping that you’ll forgive them all over again for returning chilly feel of corporate anonymity and the breakfast sandwiches that look as though they belong attached to the sidewall of fresh Goodyear rubber.

Starbucks would probably argue that the logo is a separate beast from the personal attention they now profess to practice, and that a return to the green logo doesn’t mean they still can’t be vintage Starbucks in practice. And I agree, in theory. But they’ve created a new brand. In the minds of consumers, vintage brown is (hopefully) bonded to service, and bright green is attached to convenience. The company is switching back to the green in an attempt to slightly alter the green logo’s associations. But I’m not sure that eight weeks can turn around decades of associations with that little green logo.

Which is why I think we need more brown cups.

Eight weeks of vintage Starbucks just isn’t enough for the company. Somehow, those muddied, fusty old logos escape the shadow of the company’s monolithic corporate reputation. In my experience, it was like a different coffee shop altogether — note I said “coffee shop,” and not chain — and while some critics say that’s bad news, I’d argue that it’s good. Schultz knows the value in that old logo, which is why he has (and should continue to) trot it out from time to time. The problem, of course, is how to reconcile that with the green one.

In other words, how to reconcile two different brands that attract two different consumers: Green logo people like drive-thru caramel macchiatos in multiples. Brown logo people prefer free WiFi and their name scrawled on their cup of freshly-ground Ethiopia Sidamo. Go figure.

It seems that Starbucks wants to bring everyone back to the green side — but I think they should welcome their brand dichotomy and capitalize on it. At first, I would say they should keep the brown cups for certain drinks — say, drip coffee only, since new focus has been placed on it. But that seems too divisive. Perhaps the company could open up “brown” locations — that is, those that attract its educated, average age of 42 and average income of $90,000 “core customers.” The green locations would function for the masses around that group. Again, this seems too divisive.

The only solution I can come up with is that Starbucks uses its vintage, brown logos on a regular basis — say, the first week of every month. I’d say call it “customer week,” but that would infer that the rest of the month isn’t. Somehow, they’ve got to get more cups in circulation. The brown logo is a branding success. They should continue to wonder: “What can brown do for you?”

There’s an incredible social power that Starbucks cups hold — after all, what is Christmas without red cups? With that in mind, perhaps Starbucks can reinforce its attempts to reconnect with its customers using the brown logo — and avoid the haphazard, “we’re in trouble, so we’ve got to bring out the brown cups and tell the media” thing they’ve got going right now.

I would argue that most people don’t care if Starbucks baristas were re-trained one day. Or that they’re making changes at all. All customers really care about, believe it or not, is seeing that in action when they stop by for a cup of joe. They don’t want to hear the announcements — they want to see them. Thanks to the company’s efforts, the brown cups have become the embodiment of change.

In the end, what I do know is this: in the separate worlds of brand management and “coffeenerdness,” as Sports Illustrated’s resident caffeine expert Peter King has coined, the brown logo is making positive waves. Don’t ruin a good thing.

As seen in the “Politics” section of The Huffington Post.

You know all this coverage of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia University?

Well, guess what — it’s all a bunch of baloney.

While everyone from CNN to The New York Times gets caught up in the politics of Ahmadinejad’s remarks, the real story behind the podium is how much this event — wait, pseudo-event — is a victory for both the Columbia University and Iranian public relations teams.

That’s right: Columbia and Iran 1, U.S. Media Sources 0.

While the press debate in newsprint and over the airwaves whether homosexuals exist in Iran and the existence of the Holocaust, the real story is how Ahmadinejad’s visit to the Ivy League school is a non-event to most people and, in the words of the late Daniel J. Boorstin, a pseudo-event to the press covering it.

According to Boorstin’s definition in his highly-regarded 1961 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, the Bollinger-Ahmadinejad prizefight met all four requirements of a fluffed-up circus of hot air, er, I mean a pseudo-event:

1) The event is not spontaneous but instead a planned event;

2) It is planted primarily for the media to report on it;

3) The reality of the situation (academic discourse?) is ambiguous;

4) It is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By this measure, our beloved news outlets shouldn’t have reported on this story at all. Do I even need to ask who reported on the presidents of Turkmenistan, Chile and Malawi who also spoke that day? No, probably not, because Geraldo Rivera was too busy asking people who were locked out of the university’s campus to shove their protest signs in the camera lens.

In just once piece of evidence of this truth, Bollinger’s heated introduction to Ahmadinejad was far more extensive and planned than his introduction for the other three aforementioned foreign heads of state. You can agree with him or not on his take on “academic discourse,” but there’s no denying that his day’s efforts got him leading stories on all the major national and regional news outlets all day.

So who really wins in this scenario? Certainly not the protestors, journalists or average Joe America. But investors in Iran and Columbia trustees? Start rejoicing. That’s coverage that money can’t buy.

As seen in the “Business” section of The Huffington Post.

When it comes to the economy, we ought to look much deeper for a solution — like on the atomic level.

Some researchers at Purdue University recently claimed to have perfected a new hydrogen-generating technology that they first announced earlier this year — a “pollution-free energy source” that can break down water directly into hydrogen and oxygen without input power. According to TG Daily, “This technology’s greatest potential asset is the ability to create hydrogen on demand. If the researchers vision becomes a reality, this means that a vehicle’s fuel tanks can be filled with safe water. Only one device near the engine compartment is required to actually produce the explosive hydrogen.”

That got me thinking: whatever happened to the push for hydrogen-powered cars?

Last I remember, it was sometime in 2003 when President Bush spoke about the benefits of hydrogen fuel. “Tonight I’m proposing $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles,” he said in his Jan. 29 State of the Union address. “Hydrogen fuel cells represent one of the most encouraging, innovative technologies of our era,” he said in early February of the same year.

But since then, I haven’t heard much. If it’s so encouraging, how come the average American hasn’t been, well, encouraged?

It’s been a long while since I’ve seen a hydrogen-powered BMW on the street, and even the non-hydrogen hybrid Toyota Prius has come and gone, at least as a status symbol. Outside of ivory tower labs and automobile company drawing boards — and a cute slapped-together government website — the promise of exhaust pipes dripping water is hard to find, especially among today’s headlines.

Maybe it’s the din of Iraq, but I want to know: What happened to hydrogen?

As seen in the “Business” section of The Huffington Post.

My friends over at Popular Mechanics magazine were lucky enough to score a first look at a new device created by Microsoft: A coffee table-sized touchscreen computer that loses the mouse, the keyboard and the reputation that the Redmond, Washington company is running out of ideas.

Talk about an exclusive.

The table, to say the least, is wild. It’s capable of resizing images and transferring them to wireless devices with the user’s fingertips, basically transforming a touchscreen computer as we know it today (a series of pushable “buttons” on a device that’s plugged into the wall) to a dynamic surface capable of adding capability of all sorts of impressive wizardry to a “normal” surface.

Pottery Barn, watch out — Bill Gates is coming for you.

But as cool as this table was — you know, in that geeky oh-my-God-cool kinda way — the most interesting thing to me is that this device further strengthens Microsoft’s foray back into the hardware business.

For sure, Microsoft already cranks out plenty of hardware, including the popular XBOX 360. But in the personal computing wars, not much has changed in 15 years: Macs are still made by Apple alone (and proud of it!), and PCs are made by a revolving group of vendors, including Dell, Compaq and IBM.

But Microsoft’s forte (or weakness, depending on who you talk to) was always its software — Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and everything else that came preloaded on that shiny new PC of yours. The company owns the lion’s share of the platform market, and was (until now) content to keep on programming.

No more.

The coffee table, called the Microsoft Surface, marks the company’s true parry to Apple’s thrust for dominance. It’s an innovation in both hardware and software — the hardware uses infrared cameras as its “eyes” and wireless technology as its “hands” while users manipulate the acrylic tabletop, and the software is probably the first product in a long time that looked more like a Mac than a PC (and no, I’m not talking about Vista, either). Though the Surface is still very much in development, I saw nary a window nor a start bar on the multitouch device — a sign, at least, that this might be Microsoft’s first big break with its old template.

Instead of your office, Microsoft is going for your living room and your kitchen (just when granite countertops had been all the rage, too!). Effectively, when Apple zigged with its iPhone, Microsoft zagged with this. Interestingly, I just don’t see any direct competition…yet.

Will it be a success? It seems the whole thing is too early to tell, even if the Surface at first glance looks like a refurbished computer from 1976. Whether it manifests itself as proprietary technology or bionic IKEAware, it’s certain that surface computing can further the assist our lives with technology.

To boot, just watching the video, I’m getting serious Minority Report vibes from this machine. It’s a reminder that computers are not just individual devices anymore but integrated with the static objects that surround us. The good news? It’s this kind of computer that won’t have your partner complaining that you’re always on it.

The bad?

Well, the question remains: How will we turn it off?

As seen in the “Living” section of The Huffington Post.

Never say a failed science experiment is a true failure. It might just come back and, well, recycle itself.

How’s that for energy conservation?

Using repurposed data from an old Apollo 15 experiment, a recent University of Michigan study suggested that the perfect place to monitor Earth’s climate system would be the surface of the moon. Moreover, the study calls for an international effort to put such technology to study climate change.

This is great news. Why? Not because it’s another scientific advancement (we all love those). But because it could settle, once and for all, the perceived debate of the existence — and extent — of Earth’s climate crisis.

But at the same time, it’s empty news, because as much as scientists can pelt the country with data supporting global warming and climate change, everyone else is too busy buying air conditioners.

Now, I must have been the last person on Earth to see An Inconvenient Truth (this weekend, in a half-hearted attempt to justify to myself the unusually scorching temperatures that have fallen over my little corner of the U.S.). And take from it what you will. But it seems to me that Al Gore’s signature slide show is starting to change the way people think about why it’s so damn hot outside in May.

So when a scientist suggests a new way to measure the data that Al Gore has been peddling for so long, I can see why it could be hard to get even the environmental crowd on board. Why do we need to spend money proving what has been already proven? Shouldn’t we just put the money toward the solution?

Well, it shouldn’t be that black and white (hot and cold?). In the documentary, Gore mentions that that famous, first full-frontal photograph of Earth, “Earth Rise,” changed the way humans perceived the planet. You could say that the vivid photo gives us the same kind of comprehensive perspective as hidden camera footage gives the fashion victim on TLC’s What Not To Wear.

This is the proper way we need to measure the Earth: As a whole, but in a vacuum, much like many experiments are performed.

We need one less variable.

So why wouldn’t some lunar data capture do the trick? This moon-based monitoring technology would show us what goes in and what comes out, unsullied by the atmosphere, hydrosphere or biosphere. It could piece together the local findings of satellites to show us that we’ve got a fever whether or not we’re standing in the sun.

In other words, it should put to rest the grumblings of a contingent that have effectively reframed an ironclad issue. Plus, we’ve gotta use that dusty moon for something other than an excuse to sell tourists shiny packs of freeze-dried food.

But what about money, you say? The self-proclaimed geeks over at Slashdot are in a tiff over the hypothetical price tag on such a proposal, and the jury’s still out on an estimate.

But though this is probably one more idea destined to be left off the political to-do list, it’s a great way to justify how much funding should go toward fixing the Earth — and defining the point when it’s actually fixed.

I say bring on the technology and get the whole picture. As one Slashdotter so aptly put it, if you can’t measure success, how do you know it works?