Business - Written Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Tim Bevins - 0 Comments

Tracking Snacks in the Cloud

Okay, this is not really about tracking snacks in the cloud. It’s about tracking snack sales in vending machines in the cloud.

Forbes magazine interviewed Mandeep Arora and Anant Agarwal, the founders of Cantaloupe Systems, Inc., a Berkeley, CA, based company whose product, seed, enables wireless transfer of sales data, machine operation, and inventory to vending company operators.

CEO Arora and CMO Agarwal, who met as undergraduates at UCLA, say when they first started looking for ways to improve the operations of vending machine companies, they found the best systems cost around $1,000 per machine. “We got lucky. Cloud computing and cellular networks were being stressed when we were in school [in the early part of this decade].” Continue…