Kevin, from the brilliant minds at Philter Communications, created a gumball machine known as the Tweet-a-Tweat. This clever device encourages social media interaction. People who visit your office need to send a Tweet to @tweetatweat to get a tasty gumball. The idea is to stimulate your brand by offering a real-world interaction. The combination of social media+internet of things forms a powerful link and the “web of things” vision emerges. We love working with our partners to enable strong(er) relationships with customers, coworkers, and visitors; and ultimately seeing new ideas take shape.

The technology behind Tweet-a-Tweat is Arduino + ThingSpeak — this is another powerful combination. The Gumball Machine is from Beaver Vending and has an Arduino inside listening to the TweetControl App from ThingSpeak. TweetControl listens to the Twitter stream for keywords that trigger HTTP requests in real-time. The heavy lifting happens in the cloud so that the embedded Arduino only has to focus on moving servos and being ready for web requests.

For more information, visit Tweet-a-Tweat and check out the live video feed of Philter’s Twitter powered gumball machine being operated live.

[via Tweet-a-Tweat]