Smart vending machines coming to the states. Touchscreens, finger print readers, and….food.

For far too long, I’ve sat through countless movies taking place in lands in the far east, amazed by their technology and captivated by their assortment of…vending machines. Yes. Those hulking boxes of consumer consumption are pretty sweet. In lands far far away that is. Here in the states, we still stair at decade-old, rickety, broken down, way past their prime units. In the year 2010 and beyond, we need something new. Fast..

Next Generation Vending and Food Service whom is based out of Massachusetts has developed just the thing for western markets to jump back into the vending machine game. Their latest creations make use of gigantic touchpanel LCD screens in replace of glass looking windows as well as finger print readers that tie your phalanges to credit card numbers. Generally speaking, misplacing your fingers doesn’t happen often, hence, you’ll never be without money. Even cooler, however, is that users can bring up all kinds of information about the food contained within including fairly deep nutritional information.

The northeast will be getting 60 of these to play with over the next couple of months, with other regions hopefully sometime soon thereafter. Suddenly, I’m excited to use a vending machine again. Am I weird?

iPhone 4.0 to include haptic feedback, RFID reader, and finger print scanner? [Rumor]

Ahhh yes. The iPhone 3GS and OS 3.0 have been out for almost a month now and already people are looking ahead to 2010 and what the next iPhone announcement will bring. Fresh up on today’s list-o-iPhone rumors centers around three main technologies: haptic feedback, RFID, and finger print scanning. The benefits of each or pretty straight forward. Haptic feedback would give a more “physical” response to onscreen actions sort of but not quite like RIM’s surepress “clicking” touchscreen which in theory was great, but in real life isn’t so hot. Implanted RFID readers would give the next iPhone the ability to phone aliens from outer space….scan other items with RFID tags…lets your minds wander. And finally, fingerprint scanning would bring a new, James Bond-esque coolness to Apple’s iPhone line. While most of the iPhone user base wouldn’t need and doesn’t needed fingerprint aided security, one could also argue that in the age where we are becoming increasingly dependent on our mobiles, such a feature couldn’t come a moment to soon. I tend to side with the latter. It’s better to be over prepared than under. Now again, these are strictly rumor and have absolutely no official confirmation of evidence behind them. Still…it’s fun to speculate isn’t it?

Source: Coated, Electric Pig, Image Source