Will Robots Take Over Starbucks?

Hot Tips - The Best Free Business Tool You (Probably) Don't Know About.

Austin-based Briggo has automated the process of making a barista-brewed cup of coffee. At press time, a prototype in operation at the University of Texas, Austin, was due to be upgraded with the official commercial model. The company raised $3.2 million last year and plans to push test kiosks at hospitals, airports and corporate campuses.

Company founder Charles Studor hired champion barista Patrick Pierce to serve as the model for his "robotic barista." Behind the walls of a kiosk, a robotic mechanism grinds coffee to order, using a real tamper and stable water temperature to make precise shots of espresso, as well as a steam wand that mimics the precise angle used by Pierce. The machine can handle a high level of customization and can make multiple drinks at once. "This is the most complex coffee machine on the planet," Studor says. "It replicates what champion baristas do every time they try to make their best shot."

Consumers get 24/7 access to gourmet coffee drinks. Briggo gets a piece of the colossal $32 billion coffee market, as estimated by the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

[Via - Entrepreneur.Com]

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Hot Startups - Swipp.Com Review

Site of the day - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

http://swipp.com

You probably remember how free social intranet provider Bitrix24.com has become the fastest growing social enterprise tool in 2012. But it's 2013 now. Aside from being “social,” Facebook, Google+ and just about every company in the social arena have something in common – to become the social layer beneath every service on the Internet and provide real-time social data that’s measurable, can be referenced and helpful to marketers and data analysts spanning a broad range of industries. Facebook’s recent release of Graph Search and everything else Google has been doing since Google+ was released in 2011 are adding up to this mounting evidence.

Launched on January 23, 2013 in 45 countries and 5 languages, Swipp is a brand-new social media analytics and sharing platform whose main objective is to find out how the general population feels about a given topic real-time. User sentiment is analyzed, and coupled with structured data that is readily available via sites like Wikipedia, app developers should be able to come up with more intuitive applications that can better predict users’ needs.

Despite the fact that companies providing consumer sentiment analytics have sprung up from here, there and everywhere, a lot of social data is unstructured, which means that making comparisons – let alone, drawing conclusions – from such data is easier said than done. Swipp’s answer is to recreate the way things are shared via social media to generate more consistent and functional data.

Technically speaking, you, the social media user, are still allowed to post random thoughts about random things – unstructured data, essentially. Swipp, then, would have you tag your post to signify that it’s under a subject that exists in its humungous library of structured web data. After which, to explicitly address the sentiment analysis side of things, it also would make you rate how you feel about your post using a scale of 1 to 10. And once the data is entered, Swipp lets you know how other people from different parts of the world feel about the same subject.

While Swipp may be able to give its users extra and relevant data, it doesn’t have the follower base Facebook has for Graph Search nor the user data Google has for every meaningful thing it has in store for Google+. Swipp is coming from nowhere and may need to beat insurmountable odds to become a major player in the social space.

Then again, as per Swipp co-founder and CEO, Don Thorson: Every big idea looks impossible up until the exact moment it looks inevitable. Whether he’s right or wrong is left to be seen.

[Via - PickyDomains.com]

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Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder

Hot Tips - The Best Free Business Tool You (Probably) Don't Know About.

http://www.duplicate-finder.com/

Are duplicate photos eating up your hard disk space? Are they giving you a hard time organizing your photo filing system?

To give your hard disk drive some extra wiggle room while ensuring you have a clean and organized photo collection, Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder might be the tool you're looking for. Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is a software that's absolutely free and can locate and remove duplicate photographs, even similar images, from your photo folders in your computer.

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder requires no registration. It is adware-free, spyware-proof, no malware or other unwanted software.

After downloading the program into your computer, simply drag your photo folders into the folder where Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is saved. The application should be able to compare pictures with enhanced colors and/or pictures that have been resized. It can support major image file types: PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF. Once located, you're free to do as you please with your duplicate photos.

[Via - PickyDomains.com]

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Yet Another Six Ways To Spend Your Money Online

Cliché as it might sound, Sir Francis Bacon hit the nail on the head when he coined the phrase “knowledge is power.” Indeed, with the right know-how, the right level of information, people are better able to make sound decisions, decisions based on facts, not emotions or hearsays. The same goes for spending. In today’s volatile economy, mindless spending is a sin. I don’t know about you, but I would never want to find myself ruing the day I took out my wallet and paid for something, especially if it’s ridiculously expensive, I don’t have any need for.

Now, let’s make things clear before we go any further. Spending is not bad as long as your wits are properly in place when you hand over the cash (or swipe your plastic, if you will). If it doesn’t feel right, take a step back and postpone the spending for another day after you’ve slept the idea over or turned it upside down in your head quite a bit. Yes, delay gratification if that’s what it takes to make you feel better.

Photo via budgetways.com

So with that out of the way, let’s say “aye, aye, captain” to Sir Francis Bacon and load up on information about six online businesses that even my innately frugal self may consider taking a hard look at one of these days:

1. IDPoster.com

IDPoster.com is an online service specializing in the printout and distribution of celebrity posters. The site has posters of singers, actors and actresses, athletes, models and many others. And if you want a picture of yourself turned into a poster to adorn a bare wall in your bedroom, simply upload your image to the site, specify the size and design, add to your cart and you’re done.

2. La-Z-Boy Spas/Hot Tubs

From the leader in comfortable seating for decades now, La-Z-Boy Spas/Hot Tubs takes seating comfort to the next level – this time, with water. Almost 80 years ago, cousins Edward Knabusch and Edwin Shoemaker started a furniture business. They invented a porch chair with a recline feature. Owing to their designing philosophy, “nature’s way of relaxing,” the chair was a phenomenal success, and the rest is history. No doubt, the company’s spa line is poised to garner the same success.

3. Northern Hot Tub Covers

If you choose to get yourself a hot tub, you should consider getting a hot tub cover, too. It has been shown that even a hot tub cover with the least possible heat insulation value can potentially save up to 75% on heating costs, definitely a lot better than simply leaving the hot tub’s surface exposed when it’s not being used. Northern Hot Tub Covers is a Canadian company that specializes in hot tub covers that are guaranteed to withstand even the worst of Canadian weather.

4. Ermitage Jewelers

Ever since the time of our forefathers, jewelries and hand-crafted timepieces are the accessories of choice. Ermitage Jewelers has been in the business of buying, selling and trading Switch watches and authentic jewelry for almost three decades now. Domiciled in Atlanta, Georgia, the company also has an online business that carries the same stock as the brick-and-mortar store.

5. MegaFlowers.com

Women love flowers, and I’m generalizing. There may be some that don’t, but they’re a minority compared to the overall female population. So if you’re planning on making your girl feel extra special, especially if she’s in another part of the world, consider MegaFlowers.com, an online flower shop that specializes in the delivery of fresh flowers all over the world. With their partner florists and delivery companies in every country in the world, delivery time range from 3 to 24 hours depending on location and at prices that need not be headache-inducing.

6. Education4Drivers.com

If you’re a driver or would-be driver, you should realize that having a license is not just about being able to drive around. Education4Drivers.com is an online driving database that tackles everything a driver needs to know about state laws, navigating state roads, the driver’s permit, which actually is needed to apply for a driving license, driver’s manual, parent-taught driving and tons of other materials. So for first time or refresher courses, head on to the site and get your daily dose of driving-related information.

Help Me Choose CMS

Here's a short video about how to choose CMS (content management system) from BitrixSoft. BitrixSoft is primarily known for its intranet solutions, where it's number 2 right behind Microsoft. BitrixSoft's latest project is Bitrix24 - enterprise social network that offers free crm, free file storage, free project management, and other business tools that are free to companies with 12 employees or under.