Just when you think you’ve seen it all …
I’m here at the Next09 conference in Hamburg, a two-day conference about the future of the web and media that kicked off today with an afternoon of keynote presentations by Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Keen, Umair Haque and more. There was one booth out in the hallway that caught my attention however, and after seeing it I felt the insatiable urge to get it on video. Out went the Flip, and here’s the result: Markus Lezaun from new media agency Blanko talking about his Twittering coffee machine.
Here’s how it works: basically, a webcam attached to the coffee machine detects when the text on its display screen changes and sends the image to a computer, where it is matched with images in a database. When a match is found (which succeeds most of the time but not always, depending on how good the light is), a status update is automatically sent to the Blankomat Twitter account. The whole thing was set up by a 16-year old intern of the agency, probably when he had too much coffee.
Useful? no. Cool? Depends on who you ask, but it just goes to show to what lengths people will go to find a use for Twitter these days.
In the future all of our machines will be Twittering. Love the scotch tape.
Sounds cool, but not useful. Many different applications are being created based on twitter and am not sure if there are any useful apps out there. Anyone has any suggestions?
At least I find the one that am using to be very useful. It’s the real-time search engine http://www.boilingpage.com. In fact, I checked it out based on some comments in one of the TC posts. Quite an useful search engine, I was able to find a lot of interesting web pages. Worth a try.
sounds as valuable as most tweets:)
I don’t get it…is the web cam looking for patterns in the coffee drippings?
No it’s ‘reading’ the small display screen on the coffee machine and an app processes what it says.
well that’s even more lame.
seriously, i did not expect more intelligence from a coffee machine
Dam.. to think all those PR people were wasting their money begging TC to write stories about them when they could of just..
What are you talking about? PR people love us!
http://www.tech...embargo-policy/
Everyone wants to get their website in TC…agreed… and all I was saying is all you need is a coffee maker that tweets…. not one of my best comments.. but it is tuesday which is one step away from monday and the lakers lost I think… too much gin or beer or whatever I was drinking… and not enough coffee… what I want is beer that twitters…
They can also buy advertising on TC
maybe this thing could go IPO?
I think that any fresh consumable that is prepared in batches is a prime candidate for twitter, especially if it within 10 minutes travel time for it’s customer base.
So you think of large coffee urns in dorms or barracks, pizza’s or bakeries near large apartment complexes, etc.
Of course, you want it to be wired internally, not a webcam on a stick.
Maybe also a dry cleaners? So you know when you can pick up that item you need for this evening?
wouldn’t “old-fashioned” SMS work just as well?? Why the need for tweeting?
And with this twitter has jumped the shark.
Knowing when a fresh pot of coffee has been made isn’t useful?
This is just an old story which got twitterized: http://www.cl.c...qsf/coffee.html
“…in the Year two thousaaaaaaaand….”
Okay so maybe this isn’t particularly useful but the concept of using Twitter as an inexpensive notification system for monitoring electrical/mechanical changes is pretty clever! The concept could very well be adapted to produce something useful and productive.
Such as home alarm systems
Or plants that need watering…oh waiiiittt….
http://www.thin...lectronic/add2/
actually 18 years old:
http://www.cl.c...f/timeline.html
Late 1991 A group of thirsty researchers including Paul Jardetzky and Quentin Stafford-Fraser point a camera at a coffee pot and write custom software to allow the image to be displayed on all their screens.
Maybe more useful would be turning the camera around so everyone could see who took the last cup w/o making more?
We have a toilet that twitters ..
http://hacklab....now-on-twitter/
The toilet is @hacklabTOilet on twitter …
I’d like my coffee pot to tweet when it’s done. That’d be nice.
So why is this a big deal? Couldnt you have done this with EMAIL a looong time ago?!
Twitter is email for those with no one to write to.
What a shit none story. Anybody could have made this, it’s not even vaguely intuitive. I mean, really, do I get front paged on tech crunch if I make a twitter account that checks if I’m in bed or not?
Extend the metaphor a bit … and its a webcam that monitors you in bed, recognizes changes in your bed behaviour, compares these with a set of your known bed behaviours, then tweets about it.
Guess what? I made a twitter app that kicks you in the balls. Is that a story? Ok? No! Twitterfying everything is ridulomous. Its the mid 1990’s all over again. Instead of email and http, plug in Twitter.
Such an idea has been already implemented.
http://alpha.mi....jp/blog/?p=386
This twittered coffee machine does not have webcam, but has CdS and USB interface.
I think there should be some credit for the anonymous 16-year-old who cam up with this. Anyone know who he was?
Simon Schwär http://twitter.com/typos built the machine.
Well, the machine was supposably built by Mr. Auerochs™ of Jura.