1 can of coke contains 160% of your recommended daily intake of sugar. Lobbyists have worked hard to keep that information off the label, but it's true. Vessyl is an amazing feat of technology, but their messaging is confusing -- if they really want people to drink healthier, they should just encourage them to drink more water and less sugary drinks.
> they should just encourage them to drink more water and less sugary drinks.
This is a US based company. The USA is a country where water is close to being unheard of as a drink. Kids in school mostly drink milk (genuine WTF moment for me as a European kid who moved to the US), most restaurants either have soda fountains or try to upsell you on other drinks, soccer moms bring Gatorade/Powerade to their kids, etc.. I've been to restaurants where the waiter seems genuinely pissed when you ask for pitchers of water for the table and nothing else.
I guess you can't make much money from water (unless you convince the average American that the water from their tap is dirty and full of germs, in which case you can sell them placebo filters that you have to renew every other month), and that doesn't fly in the country where dollar is king.
I recently stopped drinking diet soda because of its possible health concerns and switched to brewed tea. One day I'll be completely free of caffeine also, I'm weaning myself off by simply drinking more water. I really wish I had never started drinking caffeinated sugary drinks.
What would actually be useful is something that does the same for food, although I have no idea how that'd work (perhaps a probe of some kind). It's trivial to calculate nutritional information for beverages as a human, but for those of us who track such things, I have yet to see a really good system for solid foods that doesn't rely on human guessing about portion sizes and matching to existing known entities from a database of foods.
Computer vision researchers are starting to work on the food calorie counting problem. See this video demo from SRI International: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH2c_F6YB-A
Why is it trivial to calculate nutritional inoformation for beverages? In the United States, on average, 21% of our calories are consumed from beverages [1]. I know some people that just drink water, so that means there are others who are consuming probably greater than 1/4 of their calories from beverages. There is clearly a problem, in the USA, of people consuming too many calories from beverages, and it is not trivial. I think this is a good step, but there are a few ways it may be missing the mark (like why not a set of mugs that I can change the user settings of based on who in my family or friends grabbed the cup out of the cupboard.)
Yeah, thought that too. Some approximation on calories and macronutrients would be really great.
This would definitely serve the huge market of folks who track their daily intake:
- People who (have to) do it for medical reasons
- People that want to loose weight and need to get a better understanding of what exactly they are eating every day (often times it is not enough or the ratio of macronutrients is out of place)
- Nearly every bodybuilder and fitness-addict
Reminiscent of the Amazon Fire Phone promo video. Woman holds up phone to a book cover and says "Fire Phone can instantly identify this book, tell me the title and where to buy it." Information previously unknown...
I've never heard of the Vessyl before, but it sure looks like something that'll be gathering dust in people's cupboards.
It might be a valiant engineering effort, but the concept strikes me as a poor way to digitally tap into peoples' diet information.
The real solution is ultimately going to be at the point of purchase. Sales already happen in the digital space, so that's the logical point to start building a database of food intake. If you had a digital grocery bill, that information could be used by your digital fridge (or just a simple phone app) to track what's been purchased and consumed by each member of the family.
Taking that idea a step further, the marketing / monetization of being able to sell that usage data back to advertisers, or creating a "diet API" that knows peoples' habits after they leave the grocery store would be a gold mine. In that light, the Vessyl just seems insanely shortsighted. It's a shame that Colbert had to be the one to tell them.
Honestly, who uses the same cup every time they pour a drink?
This is pretty much what we're trying to do with Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com/). For the people that follow our meal plans, we're basically a lead gen for every single thing that person eats, and we're working on making it easier to integrate the generated meal plans with your existing habits. Combine this with automated grocery delivery, and we already know all of the foods in your fridge so you don't even need a smart fridge (though it would still help for eating things outside of the plans and tracking them).
Honestly, who uses the same cup every time they pour a drink?
Well, I do. I buy 2-liter bottles of soda because they're cheap, but they're unwieldy for consumption. At work I just have one cup, so that's what I use. I feel like lots of people already have a personal coffee mug or something. And more people would if they bought one of these.
Grocery stores already know what you purchase through tracking with the the club/value cards they promote. The information is sold to marketers, etc. and even in some cases used by the police and insurance companies.
I've been using a 1 liter nalgene for about 8 years now for almost all my drinking. Which is only water anyway. I'd love for an automated way to track the water consumption instead of measuring by hand.
> who uses the same cup every time they pour a drink?
That is my biggest (but not only) issue with this. And if both my wife and I have one, that each syncs to our own phone, now we need to keep up with which cup is whose? Too complicated.
[Edit: I was not being sarcastic. Having two identical cups in the same house would make it difficult to make sure we are using the right cup each time. We already run into that problem occasionally with our Up bands.]
Glad to see he was a good sport about it -- that's exactly the right way to respond to a story like this, even if you really want to blow your stack and punch the wall a few times.
Which isn't to say you shouldn't blow your stack and punch the wall, just that you should only do it in private :-D
Colbert raises a great point about the practicality of it though; why would you take the time to pour a beverage into the Vessyl just to get the same readings you could have obtained from the initial container?
I don't feel like calculating how much I poured into a cup every time, or manually journaling every time I get a drink. But it would be nice to know how much soda I've had in a day.
The only reason I can think of is the listed nutritional value isn't always accurate. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't understand how this cup can be any more accurate than the label.
Honestly if I wanted to count calories and monitor my nutrition, I would rather speak to my phone what I'm currently eating and have it tally everything up. And I would gladly pay $10 for an app like that over $200 for a cup, so until someone can bring this technology down to $20-$30, I don't care.
A hardware startup is hard enough without this kind of mocking, but mocking the new smart objects does make for some compelling humor. Google Glass for example was mocked pretty extensively recently too. This take wasn't fair, since this product saves you the time of having to type in your calories for each drink into your phone by figuring out what you are drinking, but it was funny.
What is the everyday benefit of this for the regular person? Humans have been drinking things for a long time without knowing the exact stats of their beverages. What is this product trying to optimize?
The silliness is easy to recognize in this context, but I roll my eyes just as much when I see some site or app with "beautiful" or "elegant" in its tagline.
Vessyl's reluctance to answer questions about the sensor they are using is a big red flag for me. I'm guessing it's some kind of photospectrometer? It's hard enough to build consumer gadgets even when using off-the-shelf sensors...
The other issue is that knowing how much liquid you drink is not as interesting as knowing how dehydrated you are.
99% chance it uses a bunch of LEDs and optical sensors to measure things like refractive index and volume, couple that with a built in scale (likely a small load cell) and you can classify the drink.
Note how they never say it "measures" the sugar in your drink. They say it recognizes that it is orange crush.
I'll be interested when I can mix up a batch of sugar, water, and salt and have it tell me exactly what I've put in.
Buying an expensive gizmo to track every liquid you consume, and limiting all your drinking to just that one gizmo, seems like an awfully roundabout way of improving your health. Simply drink more water instead.
Detecting rohypnol, or similar scenarios where you are "truth testing" the ingredients. Pretty sure rohypnol detecting glasses (or drink umbrellas, etc.) exist, but I am not Googling that.
This already exists. I saw a live (text) feed of a toilet that would post statistical information about the contents — get this — in real time.
Apparently it could also determine if you have STDs, and which ones.
[EDIT] here's the site: http://quantifiedtoilets.com/#feed
Apparently it also tracks blood alcohol content and doubles as a pregnancy test. The former sounds convenient for a toilet in a bar: it will tell you if you're legally able to drive before you leave the bar.
[+] [-] guiomie|11 years ago|reply
See this link for Canada: http://www.thecomedynetwork.ca/Shows/TheColbertReport?vid=39...
It is the full episode with annoying ads at the beginning...
[+] [-] gatehouse|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshfraser|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuiA|11 years ago|reply
This is a US based company. The USA is a country where water is close to being unheard of as a drink. Kids in school mostly drink milk (genuine WTF moment for me as a European kid who moved to the US), most restaurants either have soda fountains or try to upsell you on other drinks, soccer moms bring Gatorade/Powerade to their kids, etc.. I've been to restaurants where the waiter seems genuinely pissed when you ask for pitchers of water for the table and nothing else.
I guess you can't make much money from water (unless you convince the average American that the water from their tap is dirty and full of germs, in which case you can sell them placebo filters that you have to renew every other month), and that doesn't fly in the country where dollar is king.
[+] [-] ianstallings|11 years ago|reply
Then there's this in diet soda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-Methylimidazole
I recently stopped drinking diet soda because of its possible health concerns and switched to brewed tea. One day I'll be completely free of caffeine also, I'm weaning myself off by simply drinking more water. I really wish I had never started drinking caffeinated sugary drinks.
[+] [-] Mandatum|11 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.fatsecret.com.au/calories-nutrition/coca-cola/coc...
[+] [-] joesmo|11 years ago|reply
What would actually be useful is something that does the same for food, although I have no idea how that'd work (perhaps a probe of some kind). It's trivial to calculate nutritional information for beverages as a human, but for those of us who track such things, I have yet to see a really good system for solid foods that doesn't rely on human guessing about portion sizes and matching to existing known entities from a database of foods.
[+] [-] chriskanan|11 years ago|reply
Related information: http://www.psfk.com/2014/04/siri-creator-builds-platform-tha...
http://gigaom.com/2014/04/03/dont-eat-that-sri-built-a-calor...
[+] [-] justinpaulson|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/nutrans/policy/beverage/us-b...
[+] [-] cseelus|11 years ago|reply
This would definitely serve the huge market of folks who track their daily intake:
[+] [-] iffycan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GBKS|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebular|11 years ago|reply
It might be a valiant engineering effort, but the concept strikes me as a poor way to digitally tap into peoples' diet information.
The real solution is ultimately going to be at the point of purchase. Sales already happen in the digital space, so that's the logical point to start building a database of food intake. If you had a digital grocery bill, that information could be used by your digital fridge (or just a simple phone app) to track what's been purchased and consumed by each member of the family.
Taking that idea a step further, the marketing / monetization of being able to sell that usage data back to advertisers, or creating a "diet API" that knows peoples' habits after they leave the grocery store would be a gold mine. In that light, the Vessyl just seems insanely shortsighted. It's a shame that Colbert had to be the one to tell them.
Honestly, who uses the same cup every time they pour a drink?
[+] [-] papa_bear|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
Well, I do. I buy 2-liter bottles of soda because they're cheap, but they're unwieldy for consumption. At work I just have one cup, so that's what I use. I feel like lots of people already have a personal coffee mug or something. And more people would if they bought one of these.
[+] [-] tdicola|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScotterC|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|11 years ago|reply
That is my biggest (but not only) issue with this. And if both my wife and I have one, that each syncs to our own phone, now we need to keep up with which cup is whose? Too complicated.
[Edit: I was not being sarcastic. Having two identical cups in the same house would make it difficult to make sure we are using the right cup each time. We already run into that problem occasionally with our Up bands.]
[+] [-] jonhmchan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|11 years ago|reply
Which isn't to say you shouldn't blow your stack and punch the wall, just that you should only do it in private :-D
[+] [-] jakar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NickWarner775|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JAFTEM|11 years ago|reply
Honestly if I wanted to count calories and monitor my nutrition, I would rather speak to my phone what I'm currently eating and have it tally everything up. And I would gladly pay $10 for an app like that over $200 for a cup, so until someone can bring this technology down to $20-$30, I don't care.
[+] [-] ithought|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bellerocky|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon808|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|11 years ago|reply
This is a really good thing for them.
[+] [-] kingnight|11 years ago|reply
That's a quite a price to accomplish just that...
7 years bit was really great.
[+] [-] jcromartie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LandoCalrissian|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gk1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ejain|11 years ago|reply
The other issue is that knowing how much liquid you drink is not as interesting as knowing how dehydrated you are.
[+] [-] bravo22|11 years ago|reply
Note how they never say it "measures" the sugar in your drink. They say it recognizes that it is orange crush.
I'll be interested when I can mix up a batch of sugar, water, and salt and have it tell me exactly what I've put in.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aroch|11 years ago|reply
Just because you don't see the usefulness in the product doesn't mean someone else doesn't
[+] [-] gk1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headbiznatch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkestner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethana|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j2kun|11 years ago|reply
Apparently it could also determine if you have STDs, and which ones.
[EDIT] here's the site: http://quantifiedtoilets.com/#feed Apparently it also tracks blood alcohol content and doubles as a pregnancy test. The former sounds convenient for a toilet in a bar: it will tell you if you're legally able to drive before you leave the bar.