[SwellJoe]

It reminds me of the episodes of Silicon Valley where the new CEO pushed really hard for a physical box and a licensing deal to deploy the box. There's one quote in the article that makes me think the actual tech here is the "organic fruit delivered to your home" (though I'm not sure how that's revolutionary or even novel, either), and the squeezer is a dongle they stuck on there, I guess to make it more obviously a luxury product? I'm not really sure.

To me, it just reeks of a classic Internet of Shit kind of model, where tech is imposed on a product not because it makes the product better, but because it makes the product more expensive and exclusive.

I mean, Keurig has had a ridiculously successful run doing the same basic thing: Stick a low cost commodity product into a pricey DRM-protected package and sell expensive devices to extract the commodity product from said packaging. Coffee makers have never been hard to use, and yet, somehow Keurig sells billions of K-cups. So...maybe these folks figured they'd reproduce that model, and maybe their investors believed they could do so.

[mpeg]

Except in HBO's Silicon Valley, the box (or more broadly the appliance model) was probably the right choice.

A compression product like that would be a much easier sell to enterprise if it's on-premise than as a cloud service.

[baybal2]

Who in his right mind buys original kcups? I was buying Chinese ones since i first bought keurig set back in 2011