Coffee and battle

By Harry Smals on 4 March 2010

The BeMoved coffee-machine is a great idea! This apparatus does not only dispense coffee but also supplies you with information from internet, it helps you to know your colleagues better and it makes it possible to lose calories instead of gaining them. Imagine: a cup of coffee with minus 5 calories! It is an advanced coffee-machine, with a touch-screen and a camera. The result is quite similar to a multi-touch table, but you can’t put your cup on top of it, it serves your coffee. The next step could be that you drink your coffee with your colleagues in India and Brazil; plus share photo’s and synchronize agenda’s etc. 

And why should the TankU not be incorporated with it? TankU is a dispenser of small digital files, comparable with a gumball machine, only this one puts a song, a video, a flyer, or a newspaper on your phone by means of Bluetooth. The morning ritual then could be as follows. You meet your colleagues at the coffee-machine – just as happens nowadays, but than your colleagues can also be from any other buildings around the world – you make your first appointments, show the photo’s you made this weekend and you share some nice new songs. Then you take your next coffee, download a business-file or newspaper on your mobile, walk to your office, copy the file to your computer or eReader and start reading it with your coffee. Maybe you will clip relevant parts from the file and put it on the BeMoved.

Then what would happen is that the coffee-machine becomes a relevant instrument for internal communication. Now it is no more than a place where many colleagues come, which makes it an informal meeting-place – similar to the copy-machine. The new generation of interactive coffee-machines can add so much more experience and information. They would become hotspots.

This would make Douwe Egberts/ Sara Lee a major player in (internal) communication. Not only would DE/ SL enhance richer and more relevant communication between colleagues, no matter where they work. Also DE/ SL would become an important gatekeeper for relevant news: they would decide what news will be presented on the coffee-machine. Weather? Stock Exchange? Or tsunami in Chilli? Victims in Haïti? Speech of president Ahmadinejad?  WWF’s Climate Change campaign?

The coffee-machine could become a start page, similar to the desktop of your computer. What icons are on your desktop? Why are they there? What effort did it take for Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe etc. to gain a spot? This is a constant battle, a battle for your screen and a battle for your mind. Perhaps the coffee-machine will become the new battle-ground for our attention. If this battle starts, it will only be a matter of time before it will be exported to the copy-machine. Which party will become dominant?

These battles are part of a greater war for public space. Can women wear a headscarf, or a mini-skirt, for example, and what does it mean if they do? The computer-screen first colonised our offices, then the studie-rooms at home, and Apple introduced the first iMac in order to colonise the living room. Now the difference between TV and computer is diminishing and in the meanwhile we see similar functionality on smart-phones and the satnav in your car. You can bring your mobile office anywhere. Working becomes more fun, you can even work on the beach – but you can never really go on holiday, because office is everywhere. Office space colonises public space. Parties dominant in office space become dominant in public space.

Interesting times for journalists and other people working in the news-industry! The bare fact that we define this as an industry, not as an institute that guards free opinion-formation, tells something. Which parties will be dominant in public space? Who will be gatekeepers? Who influences what we think about?

tagged with: public space, gatekeeper, journalism, innovation

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