Good To The Last Tweet: Coffee Machine Drips Updates To Twitter

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.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4495142&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

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.