After about eight months of blogging, postings 200 articles (about a quarter of which are either authored or commented by me), and reading thousands of WebPages, I decided to take on a more challenging role in the coffee industry. Since news about the dispute between Ethiopia and Starbucks over the coffee trademarks broke out, I have spent several long nights reading about almost anything regarding the coffee industry (and intellectual property, and learned a great deal about both fields.) As I researched the root causes, and the subsequent handling, by both parties, of the trademark dispute, nothing surprised me most than the information gap that exists in the multi-billion dollar industry. Information exchange is so deficient in the coffee industry that most people at one end of the food chain do not have a clue about what is going on at the other end of the spectrum. Of course, there is no scarcity of information about coffee and related businesses on the internet. In fact, the info...