A South African tea-manufacturing firm BOS Ice Tea has launched a new vending machine that uses tweets.
The machine, developed by Cow Africa in collaboration with Thingking and RAAK, responds to tweets and gives out a can of Ice Tea to those who want to get one.
For the producers of the machine, it’s just a marketing ploy to spread the message through social media. But many more brands would embrace this type of marketing.
The vending machine aptly titled BEV, made its maiden appearance at the Indaba ICT conference.
In their website, RAAK a digital and social media agency in London, commented on the invention saying:
“We have built several Twitter apps over the last two years, but this is the first time we built an application that interfaces with the physical world. Was it hard? Not really.”
Last year Nokia unveiled its vending machine that uses Foursquare. And many more techies are trying to come up with inventions that connect social media to real life.
BOS Ice Tea has been calling for user to go and test the vending machine. It seems that the machine would go on a tour to various parts of the country.
You can watch the video here.
