Mouli Cohen - Entrepreneur

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After last month's announcement of Starbucks' new recycling program, the Seattle-based coffee maker has just released a new line of instant coffee with the title "Via." Starbucks has been struggling as well-to-do 9-5ers have cut back on lattes and frappuccinos during the recession, and hopes to grab at least a piece of the $21 billion instant coffee market. Obviously, instant coffee has the potential to drastically reduce Starbucks' annual output of waste, but the decision seems to be much more business-driven.

Entrenched competition from brands like Nestle, Kraft, and others, will not make it easy for Via to become a household name, but some experts see this move as a life-saver. However, only time will tell how ready Starbucks addicts will be to abandon their trusty baristas. The other question is how else will the company attempt to cut back on overhead, given the vast over-expansion of the Starbucks brand in the past decade - New York in particular. You can't throw a rock in the big apple without hitting a Starbucks.

This move towards home-brewed Starbucks may also be in response to Mcdonald's new line of lattes and "fine" coffee products, which aims to take a chunk out of Starbucks grasp on the boutique coffee market. According to Reuters, "Starbucks will trumpet Via's debut in the United States and Canada with a week-long advertising campaign that will highlight in-store taste tests pitting Via against Starbucks brewed coffee."

Although the price will be higher than the other on-the-shelf competition, Starbucks is banking on name recognition and brand loyalty to push Via ahead in the world of instant coffee.

I've written in the past months about solar power's prospects outside of large-scale solar farms and residential paneling, mostly as it would apply to gadgetry and daily use items. But it's clear now that cell phones, as I've mentioned before, are a new frontier for the budding solar market, especially as they apply to the developing world. Africa and India are the prime example of marketplaces that are waiting to explode with this new technology. Because traditional power is much more sparse in these two continents, solar powered cell phones will make it much easier for people who would otherwise have to trek miles to the nearest electrical outlet to use cell phone technology to their benefit. And, of course, India and Africa are both bathed in sun.

MSNBC cited Uganda as a prime market for solar cell phones in an article last week: "Just eight percent of the country's 32 million plus population have electric grid access. Even when the grid is there, like where Mawa lives in Mulago, a poor suburb of Kampala, the power is costly and the service is intermittent." So far Nokia, Samsung, and a few others have ventured to make these phones readily available to developing nations, but it's safe to say that many more companies will be looking to capitalize on the opportunity in the near term.