Welcome to the end of the week and another edition of Happy Hour! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy your end of the week roundup of all things interesting in the land of money.
Bartendro
We’re one step closer to robot bartenders. A cocktail dispensing robot, named Bartendro, made its début on Kickstarter.
Bartendro is a precision cocktail dispensing robot! It makes tasty drinks quickly and repeatedly without the mess. It’s light and portable so that you can easily take it to events, conferences, weddings, parties, or wherever!
But does it have any practical applications outside of being a novelty item at parties? There is promise as a self-serve dispenser for customers or servers at restaurants with limited alcohol selection. Might even apply in some catering uses. Or a vending machine if you can get around liquor laws, licensing, and potential underage usage.
I’d love to see how it fares under a real world bar scenario.
The two biggest costs for any bar or restaurant is rent/mortgage and insurance. After that it’s waste and/or theft depending on how you look at it. Over pouring and spillage could fall into either group based on stupidity or greed. Bartendro would cut those costs. Add in all the bar and restaurant owners obsessed with measuring and it could be a good business. Now, if it could listen to customer’s problems…
It’ll be interesting to see how it works out. Though, making drinks isn’t as difficult as they make it seem.
Dumb Money Lessons
Fortune has a great story out this week about the rise and fall of an Apple analyst. More important it reads as an investing guide on what not to do with your money: throw diversification out the window, invest in things you don’t understand, blindly follow a guru without researching your own conclusion, go “all in”, and let your emotions be your guide are just a few. This story is worth revisiting before you make any rash investment decision.
Last Call
- How to Learn From Your Investment Mistakes – a great lesson! If you’re not learning from mistakes, you’re doing it wrong.
- The Next 20 Years For Bonds – The numbers are messy and but it doesn’t look good. Will it happen?
- Wrong Question – a good reminder for long-term investors.
- Why The Dow’s New High Is Just A Number – similar reminder for long-term investors.