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What I’ve Got: Club-Mate

Caffeinated and ever-so-slightly sweetened Mate (MÄ-tə) tea. Made in Bavaria, but home in Berlin, this soft drink is the legal psychostimulant of choice in a city too chill for coffee. Club-Mate is fu

What I’ve Got: Github

Github is a platform for putting source code on the Internet, which has taken over the rough-and-tumble computer engineering world. Its genius is threefold. First, it’s affected a dramatic increase in

Mobile

What I’ve Got: Square Cash

Square Cash is Square’s shot in the crowded peer-to-peer payments space. An interesting exercise in minimalism, Cash takes no app and hardly any interface. Instead, it piggybacks on your email client.

What I’ve Got: OMSORG Shoehorn

High value item at low material cost. Plus, it’s a loss leader for the mattresses!

What I’ve Got: Snuggie

The tension between the unusualness of practical product use and the marketing materials in blissful denial of that reality resonates in an ironic age, which prides itself on an awareness of and disil

What I’ve Got: Vine

GIFs excite for 1) their lightweight integration into webpages, 2) the rich entertainment potential of motion visuals, and 3) the high signal-to-noise ratio of the short loop. Vine took these, and add

What I’ve Got: Fantasy Basketball

March Madness has a lot of things going for it. Basketball is our game, a game the US invented and leads. The tournament is national, stitching the whole country together in something that feels big a

What I’ve Got: Budget Airlines

Airlines like RyanAir, Easyjet, and Spirit are jumping into the business model vacuum left as air transit authorities deregulate the industry. They’re nickling, diming, and cutting perks, but customer

What I’ve Got: Nextdoor

Nextdoor is like Facebook, only instead of manually adding and confirming connections, users are assigned a social network based on what small, neighborhood-sized bucket their street address falls int

What I’ve Got: Superhero Movies

With X-Men, Amazing Spiderman, and Captain America sequels on the horizon, and even more superhero productions planned for the next year, American commercial cinema seems to be fixated on telling ever

What I’ve Got: Native Advertising

Traditional advertising mainstays — like print journalism — are collapsing, while targeting platforms and interactive media haven’t yet proven their value to brands, in the face of an increasingly adv

What I’ve Got: Netflix

Rising above the “innovator’s dilemma” from its successful DVDs-by-mail model, Netflix launched the first subscription-based, premium-content video-on-demand platform to compete in the open market. Ri

What I’ve Got: Rewards Credit Cards

Americans have never need too much reason to consume, but here’s a new one. Card issuing banks (like Chase, CapitalOne, and AmEx) collect an interchange fee (usually around 2%) on all transactions, an