3

A Keurig For EVERYTHING

The moment Keurig announced their "DRM for coffee" (fancy machines that only work with the company's own coffee pods), all of Silicon Valley desperately scrambled to come up with one for every other drink ... even if it meant making existing products hilariously worse in the process. The most famous example is the saga of Juicero, the $120 million company that expected you to pay $400 for an "industrial-strength" juice squeezer because they didn't think anyone would try to squeeze the packets with their hands.

Hands typically cost $0. The company is no longer with us.

Meanwhile, Teforia, the "Keurig for tea," raised millions to market an "internet-connected tea infuser," which used "machine learning" and "advanced algorithms" to produce the perfect cup of tea. It originally cost $400, then $649, then $1,000, and then went out of business in late 2017, because it turns out people can make a good enough cup of tea without taking out a bank loan.

But the best/worst example has to be Kuvee, the $179 WiFi-enabled wine bottle. Instead of using a corkscrew like some sort of savage, you would slot "proprietary wine cartridges" into your Kuvee. A touchscreen would let you access information about the wine (normally accomplished by reading a label) and show you an estimate of how much was left (normally accomplished by looking at the bottle). As a bonus, battery life was awful, and you had to awkwardly remove and insert various cartridges if your guests wanted white and red wine. It was in no way an improvement over not paying $179 to only buy wine from one company.

KuveeAt least you can drink away the pain of paying money for one of these.

Like Juicero and Teforia, Kuvee soon went kaput. But don't worry, we're sure the "Keurig for horchata" will be along shortly to fill the gap.

2

New And Exciting Ways To Pay For Water

Reefill was launched after its founder somehow came to the conclusion that "living in Manhattan, there's no place to get a drink of water." His solution was for the customer to pay a $2 monthly subscription to fill a water bottle from a network of "smartphone-activated water fountains" in coffee shops. We're talking about tap water here. Which most of these shops already give away for free. It's the perfect service for when you suddenly need to lose $2 for tax reasons, and no other scenarios.

Reefill"Excuse me, the money-losing device is dropping some sort of liquid? I think it broke."

Reefill's machines do have a button that lets you get tap water for free, while needing a subscription for "chilled and filtered." Thing is, the "chilled" part doesn't always work, and New Yorkers already pay for their water to be filtered via, you know, taxes. Reefill also claimed its real target was bottled water, which is for sure a wasteful product that future generations will point to when explaining why they hate us. But ... people are already free to carry a bottle and fill it up in coffee shops. Nobody's like, "Man, if only this was more expensive. Then I'd do it more often."

Then there's the trend for untreated and unfiltered "raw water," which is currently flying off the shelves around Silicon Valley, presumably accompanied by an increase in toilet paper sales. Entrepreneurs include Mukhande Singh (real name Christopher Sanborn), who buys spring water for 2.5 cents a jug and sells it for $38.49. His "Live Water" supposedly expires after a month, but is free of "mind control drugs." So keep that in mind -- that is, if the powerful psychics at Aquafina let you.

Live Spring WaterLooks refreshing, but we can't shake the nagging sense that we learned why you aren't supposed to drink unfiltered water at some point ...

1

Everyone's Getting Into Blockchain (And Nobody Knows What It Means)

"Blockchain" is a magic word that makes Silicon Valley investors throw money at you. Dozens of failing startups have saved themselves by pivoting to blockchain. Like Kik, the pervert-infested instant messaging train wreck that was close to going out of business before they announced a blockchain move. That nabbed them $100 million in new funding, even though "the child sexting app has its own cryptocurrency now" might not be a guaranteed success story.

The dumbest part? The definition of a blockchain is so fuzzy that nobody seems to agree on what it is, or how it works, or what practical use they could possibly get out of it. The first blockchains were (to oversimplify it for those skimming this in the subway) strings of information that everyone could see, and were updated for everyone with every transaction. So if you paid your friendly dark web dealer for a duffel bag full of meth and AK-47s, they didn't have to trust that you sent the money; you could both check the blockchain. Nice and easy!

CB Insights(Alice is now dead, and Bob is doing 45 years in Chino.)

But many famous "blockchains" don't fit that definition. MasterCard's highly publicized blockchain can only be viewed by invitation, so that's out. The World Food Program loudly touted their adoption of groundbreaking blockchain technology, even though it only had one user (the WFP itself), making it indistinguishable from a regular backed-up database.

And investors keep falling for it. "Uber for buses" company Skedaddle raked in millions after announcing a blockchain project to "completely eliminate tipping" in some unclear way. Wearable tech company Loomia also sucked up new investment after promising to give each user a blockchain profile, as did P2P marketplace Listia ... even though neither project seems to have any advantages over their existing payment tech. It's really only a matter of time before that one surviving Blockbuster store unveils a blockchain-based lending system and instantly becomes worth more than Nestle.

On the upside, we just said "blockchain" like a hundred times, so we'll be drowning in VC money by the time you read this. So long, suckers.

Support your favorite Cracked writers with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out The New Tech Startup That Is Disrupting Phones (And The Sharing Economy):

Follow us on Facebook. It's free.