Digital gumball machine is disappointingly short on gum

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

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I’m skeptical of NFC (near field communication) technology. We’ve been hearing about the “promises” of this tech for years and frankly, aside from the superb Android Beam, most of it has turned out to be useless. But on the other hand, it gives twee tech hipsters something to play with, and this is kinda cute.

The idea behind this “gumball machine” is that you dump in a fifty cent piece and in return it shoots something onto your phone. It could be anything: a short story, a movie trailer, a song, the machine is set to hand things out at random.

As I said, Android Beam is one of the few, in fact the only, useful application I’ve seen for NFC technology because it lets you just send a file or a message directly and quickly between two devices with no awkward workaround. The dream is that people use their phones to replace their wallets but I think this is way more interesting. And in the end, a lot more likely to be popular: who wants to stick their phone under a waiter’s nose?

Razorfish Digital Gum Machine [Gizmag]