Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: TOYS & GAMES (90%); STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (90%); COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES (90%); COMPUTER GAMES (89%); ARMED FORCES (89%); ONLINE COMPUTER GAMES (89%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (89%); WAR & CONFLICT (78%); MILITARY OPERATIONS (78%); INTERNET VIDEO (77%); EDUCATION SYSTEMS & INSTITUTIONS (76%); PRIMARY & SECONDARY EDUCATION (76%); VENTURE CAPITAL (75%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (75%); POLITICAL CANDIDATES (68%); ENGINEERING (66%); SECONDARY SCHOOLS (66%); PRODUCT MANAGEMENT (65%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (89%)
COMPANY: GOOGLE INC (55%); FACEBOOK INC (51%)
ORGANIZATION: CORNELL UNIVERSITY (91%); DARTMOUTH COLLEGE (84%); COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (84%); HARVARD UNIVERSITY (84%); PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (58%)
TICKER: GOOG (NASDAQ) (55%); GGEA (LSE) (55%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS518112 WEB SEARCH PORTALS (55%); SIC8999 SERVICES, NEC (55%); SIC7375 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES (55%); NAICS519130 INTERNET PUBLISHING & BROADCASTING & WEB SEARCH PORTALS (55%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (79%); SAINT LOUIS, MO, USA (59%) NEW YORK, USA (92%); MASSACHUSETTS, USA (92%); MISSOURI, USA (78%); CONNECTICUT, USA (73%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: At top, a marketing meeting of the student-run company behind GoCrossCampus, in New Haven, Conn. Above, an online map for the game played at Washington University in St. Louis. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEORGE RUHE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.C1)

Four of GoCrossCampus's founders, from left: Jeffrey Reitman, Sean Mehra, Matthew O. Brimer and Brad Hargreaves. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE RUHE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.C4)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

956 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 21, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders
BYLINE: By DAVID BROOKS
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Editorial Desk; OP-ED COLUMNIST; Pg. 23
LENGTH: 827 words
Fashions in goodness change, just like fashions in anything else, and these days some of the very noblest people have assumed the manners of the business world -- even though they don't aim for profit. They call themselves social entrepreneurs, and you can find them in the neediest places on earth.

The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of resume bling. Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they'd learned in business to help the less fortunate.

Now they work 80 hours a week, fighting bureaucracies and funding restrictions in order to build, say, mentoring programs for single moms.

Earlier generations of benefactors thought that social service should be like sainthood or socialism. But this one thinks it should be like venture capital.

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don't wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don't devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

Next to them, Barack Obama looks like Abbie Hoffman.

It also means that they are not that interested in working for big, sluggish bureaucracies. They are not hostile to the alphabet-soup agencies that grew out of the New Deal and the Great Society; they just aren't inspired by them.

J.B. Schramm created a fantastic organization called College Summit that provides students with practical guidance through the college admissions process. Gerald Chertavian, a former software entrepreneur, created Year Up, which helps low-income students get apprenticeships in corporations and packages its fund-raising literature in the form of an I.P.O. prospectus.

The venture-capital ethos means instead that these social entrepreneurs are almost willfully blind to ideological issues. They will tell you, even before you have a chance to ask, that they are data-driven and accountability-oriented. They're always showing you multivariate regressions or explaining why some promising idea ''didn't pencil out.'' The highest status symbol in their circle is a Rand study showing that their program yields statistically significant results.

Bill Gates, who fits neatly into this world, came to dinner with journalists in Washington last week. He looked utterly bored as the conversation drifted to presidential campaign gossip. But when asked about which programs produce higher reading scores, the guy lit up and became a fountain of facts and findings.

The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don't believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?

America Forward, a consortium of these entrepreneurs, wants government to do domestic policy in a new way. It wants Washington to expand national service (to produce more social entrepreneurs) and to create a network of semipublic social investment funds. These funds would be administered locally to invest in community-run programs that produce proven results. The government would not operate these social welfare programs, but it would, in essence, create a network of semipublic Gates Foundations that would pick winners based on stiff competition.

There's obviously a danger in getting government involved with these entrepreneurs. Government agencies are natural interferers, averse to remorseless competition and quick policy shifts. Nonetheless, these funds are worth a try.

The funds would head us toward this new policy model, in which government sets certain accountability standards but gives networks of local organizations the freedom to choose how to meet them. President Bush's faith-based initiative was a step in this direction, but this would be broader.

Furthermore, we might as well take advantage of this explosion of social entrepreneurship. These are some of the smartest and most creative people in the country. Even if we don't know how to reduce poverty, it's probably worth investing in these people and letting them figure it out.

They won't stop bugging us until we do.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: VENTURE CAPITAL (90%); EDITORIALS & OPINIONS (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (89%); ACADEMIC ADMISSIONS (77%); COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES (76%); FUNDRAISING (75%); STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (75%); APPRENTICESHIPS & INTERNSHIPS (74%); TEACHING & TEACHERS (70%); SOFTWARE MAKERS (69%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS (69%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (60%); SINGLE PARENTS (53%); LOW INCOME PERSONS (50%)
PERSON: BARACK OBAMA (54%); BILL GATES (51%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (51%)
GEOGRAPHIC: EARTH (88%)
LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Op-Ed
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times
March 21, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

BYLINE: By WENDY MOONAN
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; ANTIQUES; Pg. 31
LENGTH: 1048 words
'TIS A GIFT

To Be Complex

Shakers, members of the religious sect established in America in the 1770s, lived and worked in villages set apart from their rural neighbors for more than 200 years. They farmed, worshiped and strove to lead lives that were, in their words, ''plain and simple.'' At least that's the conventional wisdom.

''Shaker Design: Out of This World,'' a show at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan (through June 15), explores such assumptions.

''This exhibition is designed to shock people visually and intellectually and challenge preconceptions about Shaker design after 1820,'' said Jean M. Burks, the senior curator at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, who organized the show.

Interestingly, not all the designs displayed are Shaker. One gallery has 20th-century Scandinavian and American furniture inspired by Shaker design. Another is decorated with stenciled walls, colorful 19th-century textiles, Mochaware and fanciful pieces of faux-grained furniture that are contemporary, but antithetical to Shaker design.

In the show's first gallery the floor is painted a startling chrome yellow. On it sit masterpieces of 19th-century furniture from Shaker communities in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York. One piece of furniture is apple green, another is yellow, a third is lipstick red.

''People are used to Shaker forms, but not Shaker colors,'' Ms. Burks said. ''They tend to think of classic Shaker design as stripped-down brown wood.''

A small stand from about 1830 has two push-pull drawers -- that is, drawers that can be opened from the front or back. This would enable two Shaker sisters sewing on opposite sides easy access to the same drawers.

A handsome miniature cupboard with 10 drawers under it hangs from a peg rail.

''It is important to remember Shaker design is not static,'' Ms. Burks said. ''This is a case that has been shrunk.''

Near it is an enormous double trustees' desk designed for use by two Shaker elders sitting side by side. It has storage compartments on top and drawers below.

''Shaker trustees were the ones who related to the outside world,'' Ms. Burks said. ''They kept great records.''

Most Shaker villages produced commercial items to earn money for necessities like sugar and cloth. One gallery is set up like a shop to show the wide range of Shaker-produced goods, which include seed packets (a Shaker invention), brushes, wooden pails, tools, clothing, small silk-lined baskets and foodstuffs (jams, honey, canned fruit).

''Intellectually we don't think of the Shakers as commercial people, but they were very entrepreneurial,'' Ms. Burks said.

Although they did not embrace veneers or faux-grained furniture for their own use -- they made everything in solid wood -- they were happy to sell the public ebonized chairs when lacquer became a craze.

Another gallery is devoted to the Shakers' religious rituals, sacred music, choreographed church dances and written communications about the Next World (heaven).

''Between 1820 and 1860, when the Shakers were the most isolated, the women produced incredibly complicated spirit drawings,'' Ms. Burks said. ''They clearly knew samplers and quilts from the outside world, because you see the same ideas and motifs in their representations of the heavenly sphere above and the earthly sphere below.'' The drawings include images of doves of peace, baskets of fruit, flowering trees, hearts and verses composed in accomplished calligraphy.

''The Shakers were not as simple as people think,'' Ms. Burks said.

COLOR EXPLOSION

Four-color printing, an 18th-century invention, is a complicated process. In the 1720s a German engraver, Jakob Christoffel Le Blon, discovered he could make a printed color reproduction of a painting using only three colors of ink along with black.

''Painting can represent all visible objects with three colors: red, yellow and blue; for all other colors can be composed of these three, which I call primitive,'' he wrote in ''Coloritto or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting,'' a book on display in the show.

It took Le Blon years to perfect his multiplate printing process, but then it was quickly copied by the French, who started mass production of prints after works by some of France's greatest talents: Watteau, Boucher, Greuze and Fragonard.

The Yale University Art Gallery displays Le Blon's ''progress proofs'' in the exhibition ''Colorful Impressions: The Printmaking Revolution in 18th-Century France'' (in New Haven through May 4).

Le Blon's print of a self-portrait by Anthony van Dyck opens the show. Many of the 100 or so images are presented in multiple impressions for purposes of study. One can compare different versions of one print to see what happens when a color is lost, for example. (Apparently yellow was the first color to fade when a print was exposed to sunlight.)

The show explains the newly invented engraving and etching methods used in France and names masters who perfected the techniques, like Janinet, Descourtis and Bonnet.

They could make prints that looked like red chalk drawings, pastels or watercolors.

''Replicating drawings so they actually looked like drawings was a brand new idea in the 18th century,'' said Margaret Morgan Grasselli, curator of old master drawings at the National Gallery of Art, who organized the show. (It was first seen in Washington.)

Prints in the 18th century were popular and affordable. The quickly expanding color-print market allowed the middle class to buy the same kinds of portraits, landscapes and genre scenes that the rich did.

The availability of French 18th-century prints is still part of their allure for collectors, but not many are very valuable.

''Prints are not rare,'' Ms. Grasselli said. ''You can find them anywhere, but not in good condition.''

The fine examples at Yale, two thirds from the National Gallery and the rest on loan from the private collection of a Yale alumnus, Ivan E. Phillips, are exceptions. An illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition. Dealers specializing in the finest of such prints include Emanuel von Baeyer of London, who was selling a fine Janinet ''Toilette de Venus'' (after Boucher) last week for $43,000 at the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: RELIGION (78%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (78%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (76%); EXHIBITIONS (75%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (60%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (57%) NEW HAMPSHIRE, USA (79%); NEW YORK, USA (79%); MASSACHUSETTS, USA (79%); VERMONT, USA (79%); MAINE, USA (71%) UNITED STATES (88%)
LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: A Shaker blanket box from around 1830 is in ''Shaker Design'' at the Bard Graduate Center. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BARD GRADUATE CENTER)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

958 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 21, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Seeking Profits (and Respect) in Ownership
BYLINE: By STUART ELLIOTT
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; ADVERTISING; Pg. 7
LENGTH: 1100 words
REMEMBER the riddle that was all the rage in elementary school, ''What has four wheels and flies?'' (Answer: A garbage truck.) Here is a contemporary version, from Madison Avenue: What has 24 wheels and flies?

Answer: A 12-member cycling team, which is emblematic of the ambitious efforts by agencies to diversify beyond making ads.

Barkley, an agency in Kansas City, Mo., is spending about $50,000 to sponsor the team, in the category for riders ages 15 to 23, with Hincapie Sportswear, a company in Greenville, S.C., that specializes in apparel for cycling, biking and outdoor recreation. The team members wear jerseys bearings the logos of Barkley and Hincapie, along with the logos of other sponsors like Giant bicycles.

The goal of the agency's stake in the Hincapie Barkley development team, as it is called, is to gain nitty-gritty experience in sports marketing as well as marketing to consumers who are young -- or young at heart.

''It's a great way, a unique way, to get information we can use for existing clients or new clients,'' said Brian Brooker, chief executive and chief creative officer at Barkley, which until 2006 was known as Barkley Evergreen & Partners.

''If we're in a pitch for any account in the active lifestyle field, it's instant credibility,'' he added.

Barkley is taking part in a trend that is meant to reshape the way agencies earn profits, experience and, to some degree, respect. The intent is to look beyond traditional services like creating advertisements, buying commercial time or planning media schedules.

In some instances, agencies are going into business with clients by taking ownership stakes in companies or sharing revenue from the sales of products that the agencies advertise.

For example, Sugartown Creative earns a percentage of the revenue generated by the Il Palagio range of premium-price organic foods. The agency was hired in 2005 by Trudie Styler and her husband, the musician Sting, to work on the account.

And Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners, said last week that it would be given a ''significant'' equity stake in AmericaFree.tv, a company that offers 20 online channels of video clips, in exchange for handling tasks like branding, marketing and redesigning the company's Web site (americafree.tv).

''We're looking for opportunities that would enhance our knowledge of what's going on in the media business,'' said Chuck Porter, co-chairman at Crispin Porter and chief strategist at MDC, ''and these people we feel we can partner with.''

Another rationale for the agreement is that ''it's basically sweat equity,'' Mr. Porter said. ''They don't have the revenue to pay for the kind of marketing services they would like to get, so instead of them paying us a fee, we're taking a piece.''

Mother, the innovative British agency, announced on Tuesday the introduction of Mother Comics, a line of quarterly graphic novels to appear inside issues of Time Out London magazine, a Mother client. Plans call for the novels to be collected by the end of the year in a stand-alone publication that will be distributed by the Time Out Group.

''This is our calling card,'' said Mark Waites, joint creative director and a founding partner at Mother, ''flexing our creative muscles.''

''Maybe some young marketing hotshot will look at an issue and say, 'Wow,' '' he added, and hire the agency.

Some agencies are making forays into peddling products on their own rather than through joint ventures with clients. A shop called Brooklyn Brothers hopes to bring out a brand of organic chocolates under the Fat Pig name. Anomaly created a company, Lucky Media, that sells ads on the backs of lottery tickets, which it sold to the Michigan State Lottery. The partners at Ground Zero bought a vodka brand, Pinky, from a client and are distributing it through a company, Liquidity, based in the agency's Los Angeles office.

The most prodigious producer of products may be Gyro Worldwide, a Philadelphia agency that created a retail brand, Sailor Jerry, after the nickname of Norman Collins, a World War II tattoo artist. Sailor Jerry clothing is sold in stores and online (sailorjerry.com). Gyro even licensed the Sailor Jerry brand to a client, William Grant & Sons, for Sailor Jerry Spiced Navy Rum.

As enticing as entrepreneurial ventures outside the realm of advertising may seem, they can involve pitfalls, just like the traditional aspects of the business. In 2004, when Crispin Porter & Bogusky was hired by Method, a maker of cleaning products, Method gave the agency an equity stake. That proved problematic two years later, when Method left Crispin Porter for TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.

''It didn't work out the way we envisioned,'' Mr. Porter said. Crispin Porter retained its equity in Method, meaning that the agency is in the odd position of hoping a major competitor succeeds with an account it could not keep.

And as Barkley cheers on its cycling team, employees there must hope that the sport does not gather more dark clouds than it has already with doping and cheating scandals centered on well-known athletes like Floyd Landis.

''We're aware of the challenges,'' said I. V. Whitman, the vice president and director for account planning at Barkley, who was instrumental in connecting his agency with Hincapie Sportswear. ''We're standing for the future of cycling, through the 15- to 23-year-olds.''

''There are about 43 million people in America who ride bikes,'' he added. ''We're on their side, not on the side of the handful of people involved in performance-enhancing drugs.''

The contracts that Barkley has with the members of the Hincapie Barkley team include ''a code of conduct and ethical behavior,'' Mr. Whitman said.

Rich Hincapie, president at Hincapie Sportswear, said he welcomed the interest and investment from an ad agency not only because it represented ''new funds coming into the sport,'' but also because ''we're trying to change the image'' of cycling.

''What they will do with the Web, with public relations, can take the sport to a higher level,'' he added.

As bad for an image as winning through cheating can be, playing by the rules and losing is no romp around the velodrome either. When Mr. Brooker of Barkley was asked what would happen if the team finished last in all its races, he offered a positive spin.

''We'd still get a lot of great information from the athletes, from the people who attend the events,'' he said.

''And I think you learn as much when you lose as when you win,'' he added. ''Sometimes, more.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SPONSORSHIP (90%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING (89%); CYCLING (77%); SPORTS MARKETING (77%); SPORTS SPONSORSHIP (77%); BROADCAST ADVERTISING (76%); PRIMARY SCHOOLS (73%); BRANDING (69%); FOOD INDUSTRY (64%); COMPANY PROFITS (64%); ORGANIC FOODS (50%)
COMPANY: BARKLEY EVERGREEN & PARTNERS INC (55%); CRISPIN PORTER & BOGUSKY (52%); MDC PARTNERS INC (52%)
TICKER: MDZ (TSX) (52%); MDCA (NASDAQ) (52%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (68%)
GEOGRAPHIC: KANSAS CITY, MO, USA (72%); LONDON, ENGLAND (59%) SOUTH CAROLINA, USA (79%); MISSOURI, USA (72%) UNITED STATES (79%); ENGLAND (59%); UNITED KINGDOM (59%)
LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Mother, the British agency, is creating a line of graphic novels that it will distribute in Time Out London magazine, a client. The Hincapie Barkley cycling team. The Barkley agency is betting that its sponsorship will give it new credibility with clients.
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

959 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 20, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Starbucks Plans Return To Its Roots
BYLINE: By BRAD STONE
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1105 words
DATELINE: SEATTLE
Howard D. Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, announced sweeping changes on Wednesday for the company as it seeks to reconnect with customers who have left for competitors or pared back their coffee budget in hard economic times.

The initiatives are intended to restore an authentic coffeehouse experience to the stores and, in turn, re-energize an ailing stock that has lost half its value in the last 15 months.

In front of 6,000 investors, employees and analysts at the annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Schultz introduced an improved automated espresso machine that grinds coffee for each drink and has a lower height that will allow customers to see baristas making their beverage. He said the company would roll out the Swiss-made Mastrena machines to three-fourths of Starbucks stores by 2010.

Mr. Schultz also announced the acquisition of the Coffee Equipment Company, the four-year-old Seattle-based maker of the Clover coffee machine, which brews a more expensive, higher-quality coffee one cup at a time. The price was not disclosed. Starbucks will roll out Clover systems in select markets.

Mr. Schultz described a host of other plans: a pungent new coffee blend, a partnership with Conservation International to certify environmentally responsible whole-bean espresso products,and a rewards program for users of the Starbucks customer card.

Beginning in mid-April, users of the customer card will be able to customize their drinks -- with soy milk or vanilla, for example -- at no cost.

The announcements are intended to help Starbucks hang on to customers in the face of intensifying competition for brewed coffee from Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's, which is widely introducing espresso beverages this year.

''This was more of a position statement. They are going back to their core,'' said Sharon Zackfia, a securities analyst with William Blair & Company. ''They are saying, 'We are not going to change who we are, we are going to defend turf aggressively.' ''

Mr. Schultz obliquely referred to the powerful new rivals in an afternoon question-and-answer session with reporters. ''A lot of people are making unique claims about coffee and what they do,'' he said. ''What's interesting to me is that they are not coffee roasters.''

But Mr. Schultz tried largely to keep the focus on the company's internal challenges and future moves. ''This is the first time the U.S. business is under pressure; it's a character test,'' he said. ''But it's not about the economy. We don't want to use that as an excuse. And it's not about the competition. Don't believe the media hype. There's no coffee war going on. This is about us.

''We somehow evolved from a culture of entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation to a culture of, in a way, mediocrity and bureaucracy,'' Mr. Schultz said.

His remarks combined self-criticism with musings on the turbulent economy, which he noted was reducing traffic to Starbucks stores. The company faces a hurdle that may be impossible to overcome in the short term: Will penny-pinching Americans, in the grip of an economic downturn, still pay $4.10 for their daily dose of white chocolate mocha-flavored coffee?

Mr. Schultz said several times that the economy looked grim for the rest of the year, particularly in regions of the country hit hard by the subprime mortgage crisis.

Starbucks has also suffered from rising wholesale prices for coffee and dairy products. In the face of those pressures, Mr. Schultz returned as chief executive 11 weeks ago after serving eight years as chairman. He quickly announced 600 layoffs and the closing of 100 of the least profitable Starbucks stores in the United States. He also said Starbucks would stop selling a line of breakfast sandwiches that were served warm, creating an aroma that overwhelmed that of the coffee in stores.

At the heart of the new announcements is a desire to revisit the company's early devotion to high-quality coffee. The new coffee blend, called Pike Place Roast, is a reference to the location of the first Starbucks store. Starbucks will introduce the blend in stores next month. Baristas will be directed to brew smaller batches of coffee and refresh the coffee in urns every 30 minutes. Today, coffee can sit in Starbucks's urns for as long as two hours.

Mr. Schultz called the new blend ''a coffee so fresh that those people who drink it with milk and sugar will want to drink it black because of the sweetness.''

Also on Wednesday, Starbucks introduced a new online community, mystarbucksidea.com, where Mr. Schultz and other managers will contribute to a corporate blog. Customers will also be encouraged to visit the site to make suggestions and interact with employees. The site opens on Thursday.

Looking further ahead, Mr. Schultz said that the company planned to introduce health- and wellness-related food and drinks and energy beverages later in the year.

Wednesday's meeting represents what Mr. Schultz hopes will be a striking turnaround in the speed and spirit of innovation at Starbucks. In the first half of the decade, the company thrived on product introductions like the Frappuccino, a frozen coffee drink. The last innovation widely thought to be successful was the Cinnamon Dolce Latte -- in early 2006.

Mr. Schultz partly has his own relentless ambition to blame for the woes at Starbucks. In the last two years, citing ever-larger expansion goals, the company doubled its number of stores to more than 15,000 in 44 countries -- many in comically close proximity to one another and to competing coffee shops.

Analysts say new stores cannibalized traffic from existing stores and thinned the ranks of well-trained Starbucks managers and employees. The company then tried to create efficiencies among stores, adding technology like massive automated espresso machines, which have little of the romance or aroma of the old hand-operated machines.

In the second half of last year, Starbucks's same-store sales -- a significant number watched by Wall Street -- declined for the first time.

Shareholders and employees began lining up for Wednesday's event as early as 6 a.m. As a barbershop quartet sang and employees dressed in Starbucks's green aprons handed out free coffee, many shareholders expressed excitement over Mr. Schultz's return.

''I'm glad Howard is back at the helm. Starbucks is his heart,'' said Jan Melin, a retiree and shareholder from Seattle who was there with her husband, Bill. ''I have every confidence he will turn the company around so this stock can take our family on our 50th wedding anniversary trip next year.''