Scanomat

A Closer Look at the iPhone-Controlled Coffee Brewer

"This beautiful coffeemaker — everything but the elegant swan neck tap is hidden under a counter — was developed by a 230-person, family-owned company in Denmark called Scanomat. Mashable spoke with Sebastian Vibe-Petersen, Scanomat’s export manager, who says the company invented the first fully automatic cappuccino machine in the early 1980s — and that the TopBrewer is Scanomat’s biggest success in its 50 year history.

The design was borne out of the mind of CEO Kim Vibe-Petersen (Sebastian’s father), with the goal of making the complicated simple — without comprising quality. Sebastian says his father “has always been a driving force in development and has taken many crazy ideas into reality,” so creating the world’s most high-tech coffee brewer wasn’t a farfetched idea. Vibe-Petersen says the concept’s mechanics had been brewing in his head for a while, doing what he calls “3D rendering” — until he woke up one morning with the idea for a the smallest milk foamer yet, which would be a necessary component of the compact TopBrewer. In two days, he says, the basic idea was prototyped and tested in Scanomat’s R&D department, where tools for such product development were readily available. It worked, and getting the product into production took two years, much of that consumed by the foamer, which is now patented as the world’s smallest milk frother and is placed at the tip of the faucet. The TopBrewer’s tap is made of 80% recycled stainless steel and can be built into any tabletop — you just need two small holes for the faucet and the drain. So Scanomat’s mastered both the user experience and the user interface. The design’s simplicity is uniquely Scandinavian, but it has global appeal — the first hundreds of TopBrewers will roll off the assembly lines in January to meet the demand. "

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/12/28/scanomat-coffee-brewer-design/