We continued, this morning, to work from Peet’s coffee house, Menlo Park’s all-but-the-cheapest satellite office space (Le Boulanger is slightly cheaper but the WiFi has been broken for awhile).

For $2.60 (cup of coffee, own mug is $1.60; refill for $1.00) we got a small table and 2 hours of fast, stable WiFi – enough time to move a 3-photo layout over from Mobile Me to InMenlo and write some notes that will later be a Valentine’s post, after a little editorial polishing.

We also caught up our email, both personal and InMenlo, while three women at the adjacent table were busy planning a new food product launch. Wired mag has an article this month about how easy it is to productize things, even if you’re a garage operation, but my table mates were way ahead of the curve. Two women had a tasty snack that they were whipping up in their kitchen, much to the delight of their family and friends and a growing word-of-mouth audience.

The third woman was an expert at taking tasty, appealing items from the kitchen to the food plant and thence to distribution via the likes of Costco and Trader Joe’s. She even had advice on ways to offload the financial risk from the entrepreneurs to organizations with deeper pockets while retaining control of the product and potential profits. Yet another fascinating Peet’s overheard conversation…

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