The Gumball project is a ball dispenser, different from the regular ones due to its size: they are 4.5m (14ft 9in) tall. With proportionally sized balls, prizes range from teddy bears to mobile phones. Of course, everything being bigger in this project, the price also varies from the traditional $1. Each ball has a cost of $5 and only contactless payments are accepted. However, it is possible that, with luck, you get a freebie: the machine allows a Twitter hashtag contest that can automatically dispense a ball at no cost.

The machine has several screens for interaction and advertising. With each ball drawn, information about the prize won is shown. This is possible because every ball is identified by an RFID tag that allows the machine to read the dispensed product, present it on screen and perform stock management operations.

The entire digital infrastructure was built by Wiinga including the stock and advertisement management platform, machine communication and the entire Twitter contest mechanics.

Technical drawings and design was made by our partners at Digital Media Vending. Exceptionally, the construction of the machines was left to the customer since they had the capacity to manufacture them internally.

Communication between users, machines and administration is managed by Wiinga’s online platform, which combines the flexibility of a web application with machine interaction allowing remote management of the store with real-time information and statistics.

From the managerial point of view, the manager is able to:

• manage advertising showing in machines’ screens
• check real-time sales data
• perform stock management

From the management point-of-view, and since all transactions are recorder and made available to the platform, a huge set of metrics are available, among which we can highlight:

• Sales
• profits and expenses
• comparison between sales and other indicators such as time or weather