Written by This is only peripherally connected with payments and I can’t decide whether it’s fun or silly. In any case it comes from Trendwatching which is the sort of website marketing types spend a lot of time surfing.
>"the Nespresso Chipcard (which stores coffee preferences for registered
individuals, and when inserted into a vending machine, communicates
with a central database to brew a personalised cup of coffee)."
One wonders about the need for a central database though, given it’s a smart card…
Is it some sort of Department of Health thing? Perhaps if you order one too many lattes, a health visitor will pop round to lecture you on the dangers of caffeine.
They used to have a similar thing at MIT’s media lab… a RFID tag on the bottom of a mug with preferences, tied in to a little system that read the tag when the mug was put under a high-end Saeco expresso machine (which happens to come with a serial port) and starts the machine up with your preferences.
Thankfully no servers involved or records kept!