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Monsieur's Android-Powered Bartender: Get Your Drink On
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1. Bonjour, Monsieur: The Intelligent Robotic Drink Mixer

You're going to want this. I'm not sure your wallet or your liver will thank you, but if you're a frequent host, you're really going to want this.

Monsieur is a robotic bartender. It mixes drinks. It tracks when your bottles need replacing. It lets you order a drink from your smartphone (which also aids in tracking your alcohol consumption). It learns your imbibing patterns. It's social. It's available with cloud-based back-end software for commercial venues. And the home-based version of Monsieur is available on Kickstarter until November 15. There will also be a bigger, commercial version aimed at establishments that serve liquor. In fact, one of the company's biggest targets is sports arenas.

If you've wondered what to do with the space that your library of books occupied before Amazon's Kindle came along, Monsieur could be that unique showcase piece of furniture you've been wanting to fill the void. If you're the entertaining sort, throwing Duck Dynasty or Mad Men parties, or whatever else the cool kids are doing these days, then Monsieur is likely just the automated, showstopping gadget that will turn your ordinary den into a den of iniquity. 

Now at $2700 for the eight-container model (that is, eight liquids in basically a two-foot square cube), want might not equal need. I can't tell you whether you'll be spending your money wisely. That depends on you, your drinking habits, your lifestyle, and whether you went to bar tending school.

I spent part of an afternoon with Monsieur and its warmer companions, CEO Barry Givens and chairman Paul Judge, and I can only tell you that the Monsieur worked well and is tremendous fun (for some reason that I can't explain, it's even more fun the more you use it). Without long-term use, we're able to convey how the project came to be and how it works (at least the parts that Givens and Judge would reveal). Even for those of you who abstain or object (and we commend both points of view), the geek in you should at least appreciate the journey.

And, if at times I slur my words, I hope you'll understand.

The History Of Monsieur

Monsieur was Givens' baby. A classic start-up idea, an Aha! moment, a viable product for a thirsty market. There are, after all, sensored-up beer taps and mini-wine refrigerators. Givens was working a day job as a design and manufacturing engineer with John Deere right out of Georgia Tech, where he majored in mechanical engineering. By night he worked on the Monsieur prototype.

Two years ago, Givens started to team up with Eric Williams, now CTO of Monsieur. Williams has a masters in computer engineering from Georgia Tech, with a specialty in developing and building embedded technology, which he did for Panasonic's Innovation Center, focusing on in-vehicle infotainment systems. Somewhere in there is a joke about being driven to drink...

Within four months, Givens and Williams had a working prototype and they've been refining it ever since.

Judge joined back in April of this year (pretty much after all of the hard work was done). Givens was at a tech start-up launch party, and his prototype was tending bar. Judge saw it and immediately wanted to buy one. Instead, Judge invested, and came on board as the company's chairman, helping the fledgling company craft a message and define a vision, namely to do for liquor what Kuerig has done for coffee. Judge also helped imagine all of the places Monsieur could be, and considered the emerging trends and possibilities: home automation, geolocation, social technology. Monsieur would aim to bring all of this to the cocktail industry.

For Judge, Monsieur combined the luxurious experience of a great drink with the opportunity to learn more about those drinks, and to discover new ones. Judge tells me that most restaurants see an increase in sales when they provide customers with a cocktail list, and Monsieur houses a seemingly infinite one.

Judge goes to great lengths to explain the origins of the Monsieur name, which signifies an honorific title, a sense of luxury, like calling for a waiter in a French restaurant. Or maybe it just sounds like something you'd say at a Gatsby party.

The company came out of stealth mode at TechCrunch Disrupt, about a month ago, and then its Kickstarter campaign began. The campaign is just for pre-ordering the home version, and Monsieur already surpassed its fundraising goal.

2. How Monsieur Works: The Hardware View

Monsieur is running on Android, which powers a controller that, in turn, controls a thermoelectric cooler, temperature sensors, cup sensors, and lighting (essentially, everything mechanical). Peristaltic pumps blast out the various liquids within a milliliter of accuracy. 

Givens says that the vacuum pumps don't naturally allow for carbonation, but the company patented a technique to make this possible. Monsieur's thermoelectric coolers are similar to those used in small wine refrigerators, rather than the full compressor systems contained in a typical refrigerator, making the robot more environmentally friendly (Ed.: Though, as anyone with a wine collection will tell you, thermoelectric units may impose other tradeoffs...).

Monsieur includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and ZigBee-capable hardware for interaction with an automated home, because heaven forbid your garage door can't alert Monsieur that you're just seconds from that Pink Squirrel (hey, it actually tastes really good). In fact, the idea is to keep the options open for various drink-making triggers, whether that's an event within an app, or eventually allowing users to write situational rules like celebrating a touchdown at a Super Bowl party. I went ahead and put in a request for audio detection of screaming children; after one scream, I want a Cosmo.

There's also a rechargeable battery for remote locations, such as the underground parties in New York that we just saw on Law and Order: SVU.

The display in the prototype is a Nexus 10 tablet, but Givens says the company will build its own 10-inch LCD screen for the final production units. There will also be options for 13- and 22-inch screens.

Though it's referred to as a robot (and we had some pretty high hopes for a bartender on wheels), the Monsieur is really just a box. The prototype is made of wood, and the company will also make a stainless steel model, a high-end polycarbonate model, and a clear acrylic version where you can see all of the lighting and pumps. The Monsieur will be produced in a factory, but hand-assembled, Judge tells me. While we're not looking at the Moto X line-up of color choices, Judge says that are plans for variety, suiting everyone from the local frat house to the snooty book club.

The Monsieur comes in four-, eight-, and 16-container versions. The big one is really for commercial use, measuring about 50% wider than the eight-container version (22" wide x 18" deep x 21" high) that was making my Bahama Mamas. The four-container version (12"x12"x18") sells for $1500, and it's sort of the rum and coke model. Not as much fun, but it'll get the job done if you like your cocktails simple.

Givens says that Monsieur doesn't have the specialized container needed to preserve wine. Yet.

3. How Monsieur Works: The Software View

The Monsieur is a modern-day machine, able to constantly make use of Web-based information, not just mechanically pour drinks like some made-for-TV robot. For instance, the consumer version comes with 12 different theme packages, like Cigars, Sports, Tiki Bar, Girls Night Out (as if). The team has yet to create the "my wife left me" theme.

The software tells you what ingredients you need and what positions to put them in to make use of the corresponding theme. Givens says Monsieur even has relationships with various retailers, like BevMo, where you can set up an account and have the ingredients delivered to your home.

The Monsieur display describes each drink, with a picture, and provides the beverage's history. The software team built an algorithm that lets you set the strength of the drink, from light to BOSS, moving in 10% increments. Of course, you can make virgin drinks as well.

Purportedly, the software learns your tastes, the drinks you like, and the time of day you drink. It makes recommendations. There's a filter screen that lets you scroll through ingredients and taste desires (vodka, rum; tart, citrus) to find a drink that matches. You can also let the system simply surprise you, say if you're vision is too blurred to make a coherent choice on your own.

A mobile app (iPhone or Android) lets you order from your phone. This is something that you might want to do, say, on the ride home from work or at a party. Doing so puts your order in a queue, and you can pick up your drink when you're damn well ready for it. The mobile app includes all of the features of the Monsieur system, with full cocktail lists, descriptions, recommendations, and filters.

But Monsieur also has a drinking responsibility feature. Here, you choose your gender and your weight, and as you order drinks it tracks your consumption, including the alcohol level of your drinks, and lets you know your likely blood-alcohol level. From there, it provides direct links to Uber, or to taxis. I suggested putting a breathalyzer right on Monsieur, but Givens and Judge just laughed nervously.

You can also share the fact that you're drinking something on a social network, right from the app, and establishments that use Monsieur can even structure the social share around their business ("Downing Sex At The Beach @TomsBar")

4. Monsieur's Commercial Opportunities

The commercial version of Monsieur may have more appeal than the at-home version. The founders are in discussions with various arenas, where people rent suites and servers tend to bottle inventory and monitor payment. The story is similar in clubs, where VIP sections come with bottle service. Judge and Givens say they think those are perfect environments for Monsieur, given that bottle levels can be monitored remotely, and charges can be racked up and accounted for automatically.

Givens and Judge think that the most obvious payment method will be a simple credit card swipe, but in-app purchasing is also an option, as are NFC bracelets, like you might get at a formal party (or at least one you're not crashing). The plan is to work with point-of-sale systems on a one-off basis. Givens says there are just too many to start making those choices now.

Judge is a long-time enterprise security hotshot, having been CTO at CipherTrust (which became part of Secure Computing and is now part of Intel/McAfee), Purewire (which was acquired by anti-spam behemoth Barracuda, where he still serves as chief research officer), and Pindrop (a phone security company backed by Andreesen Horowitz, where he is still executive chairman), to go along with his PhD from Georgia Tech. So he's a bit more squeamish when it comes to initiatives like Google Wallet, Apple Passport, or Square Cash.

For more immediate security, you can turn on a passcode to protect the display, and there's a lock on the door of the cabinet. Hopefully, that's all of the physical protection you need to consider to keep those teenage brats out of your precious liquor. 

Givens reminds me that the average user is a little, um, tipsy, and possibly also in a dimly-lit environment, so Monsieur needs to maintain a high degree of usability.

On the commercial side, Monsieur includes a back-end management system that provides all of the magic that lets an establishment see how, say, a bottle service table is doing, but also to just generally manage inventory. Perhaps more interestingly, Monsieur is an amalgamation of data for a given business: what's selling, what isn't, how certain drinks and liquors have done historically, and so forth. Some establishments that are considering Monsieur see potential in being able to adjust drink menus based on this information, Judge says. And not just on drink types, or liquor types, but also at a brand level, or in the case of distributed businesses, regionally.

Of course, collecting all of this information gives Monsieur plenty of data that might be interesting to those liquor brands and to distributors, as well, opening up more potential business angles if the company manages to gain customers.

Home-based machines can also provide information. In fact, Monsieur does track this data, although Givens says you can opt out.

Moreover, Monsieur is constantly building out its repository of drink possibilities. The company taps into all of the big drink databases and recipes, building out menus and working through all of the possibilities, ascertaining what liquids are needed in the eight containers in order to make those drinks. Once all the math is done, the manual, human part kicks in: tasting to see if the outcome is accurate. It's a hard job, but somebody has to do it.

The commercial version includes a $995 set up fee for the business, and then costs $295 per month for the management software running in the cloud.

We will leave the question about whether Monsieur is going to make drinking too easy for another day. Surely the commercial version is just a promising way to automate many of the manual tasks that go into serving and accounting for liquor sales. On the home front, the founders have built in some responsibility capabilities, and there's probably more they could do around alcohol education. Beyond that, things would be too creepy. If you manage to empty Monsieur on a weekly basis, it could just be that you live on a party block, and you like to entertain. Or maybe you really are an alcoholic. Cheekiness aside, it's a serious issue that Monsieur will have to grapple with.

For now, though, it's exciting when technology can help automate another part of life. So let's all raise our strawberry daiquiris to Monsieur, shall we?