The tea-making robot seems to come with overoptimistic numbers.
The sandwich-making robot is a good idea, but it will need a complete redesign to make it cleanable. All stainless and Teflon, no food trap points, machine-washable, steam-cleanable. Whether it's cost effective is another issue. That idea has been tried many times. Here's AMFare, from American Machine and Foundry, in 1964.[1] That system worked quite well, but needed a constantly busy fast food outlet to justify the expense.
Then there's the version for the 1%[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE [2] http://factor-tech.com/robotics/17437-robot-chef-that-can-co...
I met a startup in Hong Kong, CafeX, who were working on a coffee-making robot, and my first reaction was that they were using cutting-edge technology to solve a trivial problem. I do like good coffee though, so I thought through the business case.
It seemed to fit into an awkward gap between "cheap coffee vending machine" and "cafe kiosk with trained barista". People grabbing a convenient coffee in places like gas stations and convenience stores, care about price over quality and will be fine with a cheap machine. People who like quality coffee will usually prefer a trained barista if one is available, unless they want to try the novelty of a robot.
The two niches I can see are:
1) Inside fancy office buildings, where the drones don't want to walk outside to get good coffee. (The robot is also good for impressing visitors).
2) Places without decent cafes around, i.e. shopping malls, theme parks, airports, where the robot might be as good or better than Starfucks burned-for-consistency beans.
That's not why Starbucks is so labor-intensive.
Starbucks developed a good automated coffee-making machine, but decided not to deploy it. Instead, they built a lower-profile manual machine which allows their employees to maintain eye contact with the customer. The whole point of Starbucks, the thing that justifies their high prices, is the ego boost the customer gets from making the barista perform. Starbucks is about sucking up. All their employees know this; it's in their training. Starbucks is a fast food operation with the sucking-up level of a sit-down restaurant.
Read what their CEO has to say on the subject.[1]
[1] http://www.kplu.org/post/robot-baristas-heres-starbucks-ceo-...
I seem to recall (and I can't remember where I saw it) that Heston Blumenthal uses a very expensive automated coffee machine to remove the variance inherent in human baristas.
ROSS "is a digital legal expert" that managed not to attribute its landing page's photo legally.
The photo is from here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stuttgart_Bibliothek...
And according to the licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), attribution credit as well as link to the cc license should be provided.
I think the idea is very cool by the way -- just trying to help!
I believe that's the attribution. As it says in the license section below:
"attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor"
So you can't really say if its not attributed properly.
http://www.startuptimelines.org/collections/ycombinator_summ...
The companies I have personally found most surprising have been Wheely's Cafe, Nebia, L., Luna, and Scentbird [1] ... great to see YC supporting such unique kinds of companies.
http://www.davidxgoliath.com/five-crazy-startups-from-the-cu...
A lot more health, bio, and food related startups in this batch.
Tea and sandwich making robots makes me think that one day YC will open its own automated coffeeshop or restaurant. Theoretically lower operating costs, making the business much higher margin. Call9 and Circle Medical look very interesting in the medical space.
And of course, gotta cheer for onboardiq. Their users really love them. They're bringing on clients so quickly and are some of the hardest and smartest workers I've met.
I feel like that level of data about my body would really help motivate me to eat better and exercise more.
Examples:
Data on why saving earlier for retirement is a good idea.
Data on why on being overweight is not good for you.
Data on why smoking looks to increase your risk of cancer.
In these instances people didn't know how 'bad' there situation was and took action.
There's a big shift moving "risk" to the provider. As a result there's a big focus on not only metrics, but also "care management". I used to work for a company that did metrics, and would look for high cost patients that had "opportunities" for cost savings. Their cases would be transferred to a care management team who would then on a case by case basis investigate ways to help the patient.
From what I've heard a lot of times, the patient would become more expensive because they skipped simple follow up visits due to an issue just getting to the office.
This might be a really easy way to get a patient the followup they need.
Also the shower-head looks neat, but not at $300. and why the hell are they even thinking about an electronic version?
The water saving aspect is great though. Could there be a similar application with washing dishes?
REALLY?
I think this could work. There could be a decent aftermarket sales opportunity, too. The ability to sell 'prettier' planters/etc.
Xfers — PayPal for Southeast Asia
Seems like a direct conflict?
The big difference: PayPal is for the computer, Venmo is for the smartphone.
