Now, tweet for tea

Addicted to tea AND to Twitter? Bev, the robot tea-maker, will let you combine the best of both worlds. Who said you can’t download a drink?

BOS Ice Tea today launched the world’s first Twitter-activated sampling machine at Wembley Square, Cape Town.

BEV, the whirling, bleeping, buzzing BOS Ice Tea-vending robot, made her debut appearance at the 2012 Design Indaba, where she spent her time refreshing and amusing delegates and the public. Originally triggered using tokens and rigged with speakers and cameras to show her inner workings, BEV has recently been tweaked to respond to Tweets. She now delivers a refreshing BOS Ice Tea whenever a tweet is posted with her unique hashtag.

Follow @BOS, or Like BOS on Facebook.com/bosicetea to keep up with BEV on her travels. When you find her she’ll reveal her secret hashtag and reward your curiosity with a revitalizing, free, can of BOS Ice Tea.

From today, for a week, the public is being encouraged to ‚tweet for tea‚ and be part of Twitter history with this world first. Find BEV at Wembley Square, Cape Town, next to Sinn’s restaurant, where she’ll be ‚in residence‚ until Friday 22 June 2012.

During the launch period, BOS will keep track of the Tweets and select spot prizewinners for those who make use of the hashtag.

BOS’ digital agency, Cow Africa, worked closely with UK-based social media agency, RAAK, to fully realise the Twitter integration.

How the Twitter integration works:

The BOS sampling machine connects to the Twitter Streaming API and registers the configured hashtag as a filter. All tweets containing the hashtag on the entire Twitter network is then streamed to the BOS sampling machine. It then checks every Tweet’s location settings, and compares it with it’s own location boundaries (also configurable). When a Tweet is found to be within the boundaries, a drink is dispensed, and the machine deactivates itself for a configurable number of seconds. During this time, the screen name field of the Tweet is displayed on the LED display, alternated every 5 seconds by the amount of seconds left before the machine becomes active again.

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