If your office is anything like so many offices across the country, there’s a good chance that you have a common coffee machine in there somewhere. You might also have a water cooler for both employees and customers to use to quench their thirst. These are good things to have in an office, to be sure.

However, if your office is anything like so many other offices, there’s a good chance that you’ll find a stack of disposable paper cups next to the water cooler and another stack of Styrofoam cups next to the coffee machine. These are there as a matter of convenience, but they’re far from being the most environmentally friendly option.

While you may want to have a small supply handy for incoming customers, it is a great idea to encourage employees to bring in their own reusable mugs, tumblers, and cups to use with the coffee machine and water cooler. While each individual disposable cup makes little difference, this can have a dramatic environmental impact when you consider the thousands of cups filling our landfills every year.

Have a little green initiative in your office and, better still, offer promotional mugs and other products to your employees and customers. This way, not only are you doing your small part to help Mother Nature, you’re also offering another way to promote your brand and market your company.

For the traveling professional, one of the most frustrating situations is when you’re late for an early morning meeting and your car doesn’t start. You crank the key and you get nothing. When you’re in need of a jump start, the last thing you want to happen is to get that well-pressed shirt dirty.

Sure, you could take the conventional route with a jump start and look for a good Samaritan who will help you with a set of jumper cables, but that could get your clothing quite dirty. That’s not the impression you want for your important business meeting. As such, it may be better to consider a simple product like the Closed-Hood Car Jump Starter. Can you guess what it does?

Instead of popping the hood on the dead car (yours) and the helper car (the good Samaritan), all you have to do is plug the respective ends of the Closed-Hood Car Jump Starter into the cars’ 12V cigarette jacks. After five to ten minutes, the green light turns on and you can give your car another crank of the key. Before you know it, you’ll be on the road and on your way to another successful business meeting.

Find the Closed-Hood Car Jump Starter on ThinkGeek. It retails for $24.99.

With Tiger Woods returning to the Masters and other people heading back to the links in the next couple of months, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight a golf-related site as this week’s BlueFur customer of the week. If you’re looking to take a few strokes off your game, it’d be a good idea to check out No Bogies, a site that focuses on improving your golf game.

On the site, you can expect some good deals on everything from the “most innovative golf clubs” to golf training aids, practice equipment, and accessories. Using the newest hybrids and wedges, you’ll have no trouble getting out of the rough or out of the bunker and back onto the green for a one-putt. Get those bogies out of your game and trade them in for some more pars and birdies!

Along with the main No Bogies website, there is also a blog that is updated on a regular basis with new golfing equipment, tips, and hints. For instance, you can get off to the perfect start with the Perfect Driver 370. It features an 11.5-degree loft and a slightly shorter staff for improved accuracy while maintaining the same distance.

If you are a BlueFur customer and would like to be featured in a future blog post, send an email to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

Are you looking for a great WordPress theme to accompany your sports-related blog? Five different themes catering to this niche are now available at Web Hosting Help Guy, addressing five of the most popular sports on the planet.

Just in time for spring training is the Baseball Theme. Hard court heroes will likely enjoy the Basketball Theme. Gridiron gurus can look forward to the Football Theme. Hit the pitch with the Soccer Theme. And smash your way to success with the Tennis Theme. They have all been designed to suit their respective niches.

All five of the free sports themes are completely widget-ready right out of the box, making them easy to customize to best suit your needs and preferences. The accompanying imagery is appropriate and do not infringe on any league trademarks. You’ll also find that they are all Gravatar enabled as well.

For more on the five free sport WordPress themes, including live demos and download links, head over to the developer’s website. Get in the game!

This edition of In the Sphere is dedicated to international travel and what you can learn with a little bit of globe-trotting, even if it is within your own city, state, or country.

Ben Spark has a great post at Blogging Tips discussing why you should geotag your way to success. Taking regular photos is a great way to capture your memories, but using GPS to pinpoint the exact location of each shot is even better.

EcoVelo is all for eco-friendly transportation, but it’s also important to recognize some of the hurdles you may encounter along the way. While there is a waist size and inseam for pants, bike sizing is an art and not a science. There are too many variables involved to create a simple, standardized form of bike sizing.

HorsePigCow offers some quick tips for Tokyo trips. Despite being one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world, Tokyo may have fewer Wi-Fi hotspots than you expect. Further still, your regular international GSM phone won’t work there nor can you buy a prepaid SIM there either.

Neil Patel explains how he was able to achieve so much success in what he does. In fact, he describes seven things that Seattle taught him about business. He talks about acquiring businesses, executive compensation plans, networking events, and more.

Jeff Cutler was recently over in Las Vegas for a convention and he had a less than stellar experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. They charge for receiving packages, Jeff’s room wasn’t ready upon arrival, and the parking charges are inconsistent at best. On the bright side, travel can be fun.

There are all sorts of opportunities to get your brand “out there” on a regular basis. You are likely already familiar with many of these. You may already have a company blog, for instance, as well as company Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. Your marketing efforts may have even extended into promotional products like pens and t-shirts.

One area that many companies (and individuals) continue to ignore is the branding of shortened URLs, particularly in the 140-character confines of Twitter. By and large, people make use of standard services like TinyURL and Bit.ly for their URL shortening needs, but there is a branding opportunity here for often-used links.

This can be done one of two ways. First, the standard URL shortening services oftentimes allow users to define their own short URLs. Instead of a random jumble of characters, the identifier can be a branded name or recognizable word. For instance, you can try http://bit.ly/makemoneybook to get the Make Money Online book by John Chow and Michael Kwan. That’s far better than something like http://bit.ly/abhhfR.

Going one step further, you can brand a short URL with your own domain by using redirects (or other similar solutions). If you try going to http://michaelkwan.com/moneybook, you’ll end up on the same page as the first bit.ly link above. This way, if a tweet containing that link is retweeted (or otherwise shared) elsewhere, it can retain that level of branding.

Your brand is your lifeblood. Without it, your company easily blends in among all your competitors.