With the temperature in Mumbai rising steadily, suburban commuters have demanded that the railways speed up installing water vending machines at all stations.
So far Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has installed 15 water vending machines on the stations to cater to suburban commuters and allow them to purchase purified water at a much cheaper rate. Besides, environment friendly containers can be reused to refill water, thus reducing plastic waste.
Water Vending Machine
Safety of the machines in India could be a big issue: both from thieving and vandalism. Yes, even ATMs mostly have guards. The fact that the machines can be accessed round the clock, don’t need to manned and don’t require too much space are big advantages.
SINGAPORE – Full-time national servicemen who need army supplies can now turn to a vending machine. It supplies items like zip lock bags, batteries, powder, socks, insect repellant, singlets and shorts.
Anyone who’s ever fantasized about a personal fast-food vending machine to satisfy cravings at a moment’s notice need look no further — provided they’re really good at building stuff out of Legos. The folks at Astonishing Studios, a YouTube channel dedicated to constructing candy machines and food-makers out of Legos, constructed a Lego Vending machine made entirely of the tiny plastic blocks that churns out Burger King Whoppers, Cokes, and fries.
As Gizmodo notes, the machine is powered by a Lego Mindstorms module hidden in the back, and includes a motorized cash slot which will collect five $1 bills before depositing the food.
This isn’t the first time the mad scientists at Astonishing Studios have worked their LEGO magic on fast food. They’ve built a number of other machines fueled by greasy drive-thru fare, including a Chicken McNugget dispenser and a McDonald’s french fry machine.
14-year-old Entrepreneur raises $100K to create First Aid Vending Machine
From School Project to Startup Sensation
What started as an eighth-grade project could soon turn into a multi-million-dollar company thanks to a 14-year-old entrepreneur from Alabama and his diligent work ethic.
A decade of playing baseball as a first baseman and pitcher inspired Opelika High School freshman Taylor Rosenthal to create a first-aid vending machine.
“No one could find a Band-Aid when someone got hurt,” Rosenthal said.
When the Young Entrepreneurs Academy — a program designed as a class for students interested in learning how to start their own small businesses — asked his class to brainstorm ideas for a company. Rosenthal’s mother and father, who both work in the medical industry as an x-ray technician and sports medicine trainer, respectively, helped him develop his idea for the machine, which they called RecMed.
From Classroom Victory to National Stage
Rosenthal’s RecMed pitch went on to win first place in his class, which earned him assistance from startup incubator Roundhouse to develop the pitch for a regional competition in Boca Raton, Florida.
“Have you ever been to an amusement park, and your child falls to the ground and scrapes their knee?” Rosenthal asked in his original pitch. “Then, you had to walk all the way to the front of the park to get a Band-Aid?”
The vending machine allows consumers to purchase first-aid packages to treat ailments such as cuts and blisters or buy individual supplies like bandages and rubber gloves.
A Young Visionary Among Seasoned Founders
In January, Rosenthal went on to win second place in the Techstars competition at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He will be featured at TechCrunchDisrupt, a startup conference in New York, where he is the youngest person to ever be accepted to the event.
Rosenthal’s mentor at Roundhouse, Kyle Sandler, said he is the youngest entrepreneur at the company, where the average member is in his or her 30s. Rosenthal spends all his free time at Roundhouse, where he even has an office, he said.
“We had to throw him out of Roundhouse on Christmas Eve because he wanted to keep working,” Sandler said. Rosenthal is even a local celebrity, with the mayor of Opelika declaring Dec. 16 as “Taylor Rosenthal Day.”
The straight-A student says he sees a need for RecMed in any “high-traffic areas where children can get hurt,” such as amusement parks and sports stadiums. So far, Six Flags has ordered 100 machines and several more “major” companies are interested, he said.
The Pizza Vending Machines, outside Costcutter opposite Southwark Station, delivers a hot pizza in under two minutes.
The customer pays and then chooses a preferred recipe by using a keypad. The pizza is then served on a cardboard tray ready for immediate consumption.
The vending machine, which contains both a fridge and an oven, can be stocked up to 102 pizzas. During its first day of operation the stock was sold out.
Staples Bets on Vending Machines for On-the-Go Office Needs
Staples Inc. has installed vending machines at Logan International Airport and a handful of college campuses, hoping to learn whether captive consumers in need of emergency office supplies will pay a premium for computer mice, pens, headphones, batteries, or travel-size Monopoly games.
While no one actually used the two red vending machines sitting across from US Airways’s ticket counters in Terminal B one afternoon this week, plenty of passers-by stopped to get a closer look at what was inside. Many of them said they welcomed the convenience, even if it often comes at a higher price.
Traveler Praises Practicality of Emergency Supplies
”I would say that it’s a good thing,” said Chris Root of Woods Hole, who passed the Staples machines while on a layover at Logan.
”Most of it looks reasonably priced and it all looks like stuff you could come up short on.”
Louise Sawyer, a Boston nonprofit consultant en route to New York, discovered the machines while wandering Terminal B looking for a candy machine.
”I came over here because I was hungry,” Sawyer said. ”They’ve got me right where they need me. It shows that the company is thinking about business travelers.”
Retailers Turn to Branded Vending as a New Sales Channel
Staples is just one of many retailers now experimenting with so-called nontraditional vending to sell products at higher prices with lower overhead, said Michael Kasavana, a hospitality business professor at Michigan State University, where Staples has two vending machines.
”We’re trying to bring new brands to the automated retail space. One way to do that is through branded vending machines,” said Joe Preston, Vision’s president.
Familiar Design, Unusual Inventory
Staples’s machines look and act just like others where you might buy candy or a bag of chips, with a few added twists — and some familiar glitches. Products — from a $60 SanDisk compact flash memory card, a $45 Targus USB optical scroller mini mouse, or a $3 box of Crayola crayons — are lined up in slots that are identified by a combination of a number and letter.
Straightforward Checkout—Mostly
Slide your cash into the appropriate slot on the machine, punch in the location of the item you want, and wait for the metal coils to rotate, dropping your merchandise down behind a door where you can reach in and pick it up.
It’s a pretty simple transaction when it works. A reporter using a credit card was able to buy the optical mouse, a $6 pack of Duracell AAA batteries, and the flash memory card with no problem.
Buying a $25 Cross brand ink pen, though, was a no-go. The machine initially rejected two credit card swipes before finally accepting the card and spitting out the pen. But as it fell, the pen’s box fell apart, with only the empty box top landing behind the pick-up door and the pen itself on a shelf beyond the reporter’s reach.
When told of the glitch, Staples spokeswoman Deborah Hohler said it was the first complaint the company has gotten about its vending machines, which have been in operation for about six months. She noted that a toll-free customer service number is posted on the front of the machines for such problems.
”Obviously, that shouldn’t have happened, but if you call that number, they’ll completely rectify the situation,” she said.
The U.K. will shortly see the introduction of music downloads away from the PC. Inspired Broadcast Networks and Entertainment UK have teamed up to get songs added to a range of different public vending machines.
This will mean that soon in addition to having buttons for a chocolate bar or soft drink, there may also be a music download button or even a separate dedicated kiosk. Pubs, bars, and clubs are also on the list where you can usually find a jukebox of some form (which could be networked for music downloading), and there are plans to allow downloads directly to a mobile phone as well.
The vending machine plans are made possible with the help of BT’s DSL broadband network, meaning the machines can be networked to a central repository and updated when required. Initially music will be downloaded using a memory card, but the ultimate aim is to make the whole process wireless using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
Trials are being conducted now, with early interest being shown by Coca-Cola. With the music vending machine market set to boom over the next three years, Inspired is investing £50 million to get this arm of its business off the ground.
The Arizona Diamondbacks have added a Twitter vending machine that will give fans a chance to win themed prizes by tweeting a specific hashtag.
The vending machine will be set up on the upper concourse of Chase Field on the days the D-backs host La Terraza events.
It will allow fans to enjoy a Latin vibe in the upper right field concourse and includes specialized décor, live music and regional food from local favorites such as El Güero Canelo.
To use the vending machine, all one has to do is walk up to it and tweet with the hashtag #DbacksManSol and wait as the machine generates a code for you to tweet. The code is specific for every person, so you can only use the machine once per game.
“We don’t want one person to stand in front of the machine and tweet 50 times,” Krause said. “That’s why the machine generates one code per user per game.”
Once you’ve tweeted, the machine will dispense a prize that could be anything from a D-backs koozie to a $20 voucher for food at Chase Field.
“Last weekend was our first weekend using it and people seemed to really enjoy it,” Krause said.
In schools across the country, milk is replacing sodas, and nowhere is it more popular than in America’s Dairyland.
Two-thirds of Wisconsin’s high schools have milk vending machines. That’s a higher percentage than anywhere else in the country, said Laura Wilford, director of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board’s state Dairy Council. The state has 365 milk vending machines in high schools, elementary schools generally don’t have vending machines.
The milk from modern machines is a far cry from the boring cartons of yesterday. Besides chocolate, there’s strawberry, cookies and cream, and vanilla cream available in colorful, opaque plastic bottles, and most of it is lowfat, Wilford said.
“Some of the machines at this time of the year offer a nonalcoholic eggnog flavor, and it is a big seller,” she said.
Nationwide, there are 7,000 to 7,500 machines dispensing milk in schools, and most of those have been installed in the past three or four years, said Julia Kadison of the Beverage Marketing Corp., an industry consultant. It’s largely an effort to push kids toward healthier food and drink.
“School lunches do not give us enough milk,” Travis Brown, 16, a junior at Delavan-Darien High School, said as he supplemented the half-pint of milk he got with his cafeteria food with a pint from a vending machine.
Matt Venema, 17, another junior at Delavan-Darien, buys milk from the vending machine because “it’s healthy and it tastes good.”
In a state that claims milk as its state beverage and the dairy cow as its domesticated animal, dairy producers quickly got behind the effort to bring milk machines to schools. The Wisconsin milk board pays $100 to schools that install milk vending machines, Wilford said.
Wilford, a nutritionist, pointed out that milk provides calcium, potassium, vitamins A and D and protein.
Research presented at a medical meeting earlier this year suggested that adolescents who had just two servings of dairy food a day seemed to have less of a weight problem than kids who ate less dairy. Some doctors also say an often overlooked problem in teens is vitamin D deficiency, which can lead to weakened bones and stunted growth.
During a recent lunch break, almost every student in the Delavan-Darien’s cafeteria was drinking milk, from the school lunch program, the vending machine or both.
For the first time in Israel! There are New machines to sell Smirnoff Ice, beer in closed, large-scale events! Automated food and beverage company Mashkar, a subsidiary of the Coca Cola group, is set to introduce alcohol vending machine that sells alcoholic beverages. It reflected Israel’s cautious approach to public booze access while tapping into the convenience trend.
The age-limit on the purchase of alcoholic drinks will be enforced, as customers will be obligated to present an identity card to service attendants who will be stationed by each machine.
Focused on ready-to-drink options like Smirnoff Ice (flavors like green apple or original), with plans for beer later. No hard liquor—kept it light for event vibes.
This new machine may save organizers of large-scale events the trouble of setting up bars and, consequently, help them reduce the number of waiters and bartenders necessary for such events.
