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Hi, coffee lovers! A new app helps you buy a cup for friends, family, and strangers.

Hi, coffee lovers! A new app helps you buy a cup for friends, family, and strangers.
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Cricket Wireless2

There's just something innately special about a hot cup of coffee.

(Or a cold one! Iced lattes are awesome too, if that's more your speed.)

Coffee obviously picks you up when you have a case of the sleepyheads. But if you think about it, it picks you up emotionally as well. I mean, why else are coffee breaks and coffee dates a thing?

And remember that story about the Starbucks employee paying it forward and giving free cups of coffee to Chelsea first responders? Surefire pick-me-up!

Well, one savvy entrepreneur is looking to blend the special something that coffee brings into an amazing app.

It's called Nack and it lets you buy coffee for anyone, anywhere. It's the brainchild of Paul Haun, a Rhode Island native who quit his job in finance to grow his new innovation full-time. He credits his cousin, former NHL player Tom Cavanagh, who sadly passed away in 2011, for inspiring him to pursue his passion.

Interestingly enough, he came up with the idea for Nack thanks to — you guessed it — a coffee run.

All images via Nack, used with permission.

"I would always think to grab a cup of coffee for a friend, assistant, or client, but asking and remembering how they like it is a hassle," says Haun. "By the time someone responds to a text or a quick call, it’s too late."

After noticing this gap in the market, Haun set out to create an app that saves your coffee preferences for those exact kinds of moments. But something was still missing. Haun was looking for a better hook to make Nack a bigger part of anyone's sacred coffee routine.

The idea? Why not offer free coffee? And even better, why not be able to send it to anyone?

Nack is all about spreading kindness and supplying random acts of coffee.

The app allows you to send coffee to a friend, family member, or coworker — all you do is pay for it in the app and the recipient can claim their coffee from select partners. The app also allows you to perform a random act of coffee by purchasing a cup of coffee for any user to claim. Haun describes it as sort of a digital way to buy coffee for the person behind you in line.

"Say you're in the drive-thru and you say, 'Hey, I'll grab this guy's coffee.' Doesn't matter if the guy's driving a Mercedes. You just feel like, 'Hey, this guy doesn't know what's coming. I'm just going to perform this random act of kindness,'" Haun describes.

The best part? You can even include a little message from the heart.

Thanks to tech like this, it's now that much easier to brighten someone else's day.

"We’re going to start to eventually give users some more options where you could say, 'I want to gift a random coffee to a person in this state, a random male or female,'" says Haun.

But Nack isn't stopping there.

"We’re working here now in my hometown in Rhode Island where now users are going to be able to gift a coffee to a random teacher, a random police officer, a fireman. We’re working with the city departments now to make that happen," adds Haun.

"It’s all about sharing random acts of kindness."

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Tory Burch
Tory Burch Empowered Women
Empowered Women

How one self-defense class changed this woman's life forever

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Shanda Lynn Poitra was born and raised on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota. She lived there until she was 24 years old when she left for college at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

"Unfortunately," she says, "I took my bad relationship with me. At the time, I didn't realize it was so bad, much less, abusive. Seeing and hearing about abusive relationships while growing up gave me the mentality that it was just a normal way of life."

Those college years away from home were difficult for a lot of reasons. She had three small children — two in diapers, one in elementary school — as well as a full-time University class schedule and a part-time job as a housekeeper.

"I wore many masks back then and clothing that would cover the bruises," she remembers. "Despite the darkness that I was living in, I was a great student; I knew that no matter what, I HAD to succeed. I knew there was more to my future than what I was living, so I kept working hard."

While searching for an elective class during this time, she came across a one-credit, 20-hour IMPACT self-defense class that could be done over a weekend. That single credit changed her life forever. It helped give her the confidence to leave her abusive relationship and inspired her to bring IMPACT classes to other Native women in her community.

I walked into class on a Friday thinking that I would simply learn how to handle a person trying to rob me, and I walked out on a Sunday evening with a voice so powerful that I could handle the most passive attacks to my being, along with physical attacks."

It didn't take long for her to notice the difference the class was making in her life.

"I was setting boundaries and people were either respecting them or not, but I was able to acknowledge who was worth keeping in my life and who wasn't," she says.

Following the class, she also joined a roller derby league where she met many other powerful women who inspired her — and during that summer, she found the courage to leave her abuser.

"As afraid as I was, I finally had the courage to report the abuse to legal authorities, and I had the support of friends and family who provided comfort for my children and I during this time," she says.

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One little girl took pictures of her school lunches. The Internet responded — and so did the school.

If you listened to traditional news media (and sometimes social media), you'd begin to think the Internet and technology are bad for kids. Or kids are bad for technology. Here's a fascinating alternative idea.

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Norton

This article originally appeared on 03.31.15

Kids can innovate, create, and imagine in ways that are fresh and inspiring — when we "allow" them to do so, anyway. Despite the tendency for parents to freak out because their kids are spending more and more time with technology in schools, and the tendency for schools themselves to set extremely restrictive limits on the usage of such technology, there's a solid argument for letting them be free to imagine and then make it happen.

It's not a stretch to say the kids in this video are on the cutting edge. Some of the results he talks about in the video at the bottom are quite impressive.

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