Smarter Vending

Ever since several trips to Japan and their wonderfully complete universal vending capabilities. I have researched the use of vending machines and their integration with data streams.  Which can be used to indicate demand and supply requirements. Even communicate back to headquarters.  Here is a recent outline, incomplete, but an interesting overview of interesting vending ideas.  The hugging machine is interesting.  On the right is the Coke Freestyle machine, a great example of late stage product differentiation, now fairly common in the US.  I see there is a good technical description here.