Juicero, Maker of the Infamous $400 Juicer, Is Shutting Down (fortune.com) 200
Beth Kowitt, reporting for Fortune: Juicero has run out of juice. The San Francisco-based maker of counter-top cold-press juicers said today that it is shutting down operations and suspending the sale of its presses and produce packs immediately. The announcement on the company's website comes after the startup said in July that it was undergoing a "strategic shift" to more quickly lower the cost of its $399 juicers and $5-7 juice packs filled with raw fruits and vegetables. As part of the shift, the company said then that it would lay off about a quarter of its staff. At the time, Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn wrote in a letter to employees obtained by Fortune that the current prices were "not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire." But Juicero realized it couldn't bring down the cost of its products as a standalone company. It was too small to achieve the required economies of scale on its own. The company will now focus on finding a buyer, it wrote in Friday's blog post. From an article in April: After the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands.
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Re:it was a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it was a scam per se, the people running the company are just idiots. Selling bags of pre-crushed fruit and vegetable juice is great if they can do it efficiently and cheaply, there was no reason to tack on some $400 machine to remove the juice from the bag. Or, make the machine a $20 add-on to buying the juice if you really want a machine to do it for you, it really doesn't need to be a complex machine and there's certainly no reason to restrict it to only work with a single brand of bag, that makes it less useful. They shot themselves in the foot by making the machine their primary product instead of the juice. It's just short-sightedness, they didn't even realize what their product was.
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It's just short-sightedness, they didn't even realize what their product was.
Presumably they knew how to make the machine that they made, but didn't know how to cost-effectively package shredded fruit. You really have to be able to make money on both ends if you're not tying the razor to the blades.
Re:it was a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, the machine they made was a case study in how not to design a consumer machine. It was seriously over-engineered and therefore overpriced all by itself.
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Honestly, the machine they made was a case study in how not to design a consumer machine. It was seriously over-engineered and therefore overpriced all by itself.
Make something too cheap, and people are convinced it's not worth buying. Make something expensive and too crappy, and you really are a scammer. But maybe there are particulars you're not communicating here.
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I wasn't saying (and I don't believe) that they're scammers*. I think that they designed a product for a market that only existed in their imaginations.
* The part the could be considered scammy was the internet connectivity, which I believe only existed in order to be able to get funding from SV. Nobody would have given them big investment money if what they made was a juicer. An Internet-connected device, however, that's a different story, so they made it internet connected even though doing so added liter
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You're begging for an Apple joke, you know that, right?
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The key is to add metal weights. Many products do this to give the "heft of quality" for pennies of metal.
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Metal? No. Cast concrete in the base.
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It's an iPhone.
The machine was a shiny toy, designed to be desirable and get people to buy into their overpriced ecosystem. They sold it at a loss, hoping to make money on the juice bag subscriptions. Break even was probably around a year.
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Because it costed around $1000.
I wish I was kidding, but every part was overdesigned. There's WiFi in it, it has a camera (for the juice pack DRM), a stupidly powerful motor to apply tons of pressure over a large area (which is why it's easier to squeeze with your hands, less area for the pressure), the molds are ginormous for the plastic outside and inside, the parts are custom and almost NEVER off the shelf at all, etc.
In short, no limit was set on what they wanted to do and it was crazily overengineered
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Presumably they knew how to make the machine that they made, but didn't know how to cost-effectively package shredded fruit.
No, the best guess is that they outsourced the design of the machine to an engineering company, and did a poor job of that. It seems unlikely the machine cost less than what they were selling it for and most likely much more.
The machine has a crazy design.
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Re:it was a scam (Score:5, Interesting)
I imagine that they thought they could be the juice version of Keurig.
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The thing is k-cups are about 60 cents per serving. That is cheaper than popping down the coffee shop. Yes it's expensive compared to bulk coffee but k-cups let you conveniently keep a variety of hot drinks available.
Juicero on the other hand seemed to start at about $6 per serving. That is just way too high.
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I didn't say that they could have been the juice version of Keurig, just that they thought they could be.
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Coffee has to be heated. Keurig has a market because it adds convenience compared to other filter makers.
Juice, on the other hand, can be kept chilled in the fridge. There's no extra convenience over just pouring yourself a glass, and actually a heck of a lot more inconvenience.
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Not at all. If they were the juice version of the Keurig then they would be in this mess. There's nothing over priced about Keurig machines and the machines aren't the primary product. These idiots ran their company in the opposite way.
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Selling bags of pre-crushed fruit and vegetable juice is great if they can do it efficiently and cheaply, there was no reason to tack on some $400 machine to remove the juice from the bag.
Doesn't bottled juice already solve this problem? One of the people involved with Juicero was even from Bolthouse Farms.
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Or engineer the packs so they cannot reasonably be squeezed by hand.
Nothing is easier than eating more veggies. You just eat more veggies. But I think we've reached -- or at least are approaching -- a tipping point where food in its unpackaged state is no longer perceived by many people as food.
Re:it was a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't squeeze blood from a stone, and you can't squeeze juice from a lemon that has already been completely squeezed dry.
Force does of course come into the equation ... to a point. Once all the fruit's cells have been squished and drained of all fluid, no amount of force will yield any more. And that happens way, way before you apply 2 tons of force.
Besides, raw squeezing power isn't the best way to harvest juice from a fruit. The best way actually depends highly on the fruit. Some you have to squeeze, some you have to shred and squeeze the shreds, with others again it's best to shock-freeze them and then "beat" them... simply applying pressure isn't exactly the best way to get juice from (most) fruits.
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You might be surprised at the number of additional juices with interesting chemical properties that can be squeezed from a lemon with additional force.
You can't squeeze blood from a stone, but rocks are like sponges and you can squeeze a lot of water out of them.
I have a fancy juicer and I mostly use it for vegetables. Removing the insoluble fiber from vegetables is useful. But whole fruits are way better than juices.
What I'd really like to see is a study that compared filtered "apple juice" to traditional
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I think if it was a scam, he wouldn't have spent so much money on engineering and product - I think this is real, honest-to-gods stupid coming out to play with other people's money.
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Re: it was a scam (Score:3)
Force is a tricky measurements. I can lift 2 Teslas worth of weight with my bare hands too, give me either a lever or make the area I apply force to small enough (although it would probably go through my hand at that point).
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I had a chance to visit this company and their brand new manufacturing facility in Commerce (These startups love to invite everyone). They had brand new top of the line equipment to make products (Reiser/Vemags, Mettler, etc) Most of them don't even know anything in manufacturing or how to get their lines to work. They could have made and sold various different products out of this facility (Really, they have the equipment to do so). They could have easily did something else in food manufacturing if they so
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I didn't know I needed that video in my life, but I did. It's redneck zen.
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If you check his older videos you'll realize he gets more Canuckistani by the year.
It is the Canadian version of being Oirish.
He's basically a Canadian minstrel show at this point.
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It is a cpu and stepper motor, but an insanely awesomely built one! If you watch the video you posted you will see, there are massive solid steel worm drives, gears, and bearings (many custom for this piece). The press plate is a giant 1"+ thick solid piece of CNC machined aluminum, it honestly looks like you could crush small car pieces with this thing, the marketing of how powerful it is seems like it could be true. The tear down guy obviously knows his stuff, and is very impressed with it, he said it
Re: it was a scam (Score:2)
In other words it was massively over engineered by a first grade engineer.
If you only need 20g/cm2 to squeeze the juice but you build something that applies 4T/cm2 you're just wasting energy.
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It looks like you need around 10kg/cm2 to squeeze juice.
The idiocy of the machine is that it achieves this kind of pressure by squeezing the whole pack at once, which indeed requires 4 tons of force. A smarter design would squeeze the pack bit by bit and achieve high pressure by applying moderate force on a small area.
And that's indeed what happens when you press the pack by hand. Your hand can only produce maybe 30kg of force but it is applied only on your fingertips. The result is a pressure similar to th
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The hardware is so awesome, this is great news! I'm hoping to pick some up super-cheap and build a giant robot chef out of them!
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If you have anything planned in the next 10 hours, don't start watching this Youtube video!
Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, juice is highly correlated with diabetes if done to excess.
Vegetable juices are fine, but fruit juicers can lead to substantial increases in both pre-diabetes and adult onset diabetes, if not part of a varied diet.
And having robots take away the exercise of squeezing it is just making it worse. Calories need to be burned somehow.
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Depends on which juice. Try celery juice and see what happens.
Re:Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you (Score:4, Funny)
So you think that celery is a fruit?
I think we found a Juicero investor!
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You can make juice from just about anything. There's carrot juice available in some supermarkets.
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The post you replied to was specifically calling out fruit juices and you responded with celery. Carrots aren't fruit either.
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So I can milk a cat?
You can milk anything with nipples.
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I'm suddenly reminded of a conversation I had in which a product was described as containing Chihuahua cheese, and I snarkily asked how one milks a chihuahua.
Re:Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you (Score:4, Funny)
If you think that's bad, I've heard of a product called American cheese...
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Chihuahua is a state in Mexico. Both the dog and the cheese are named after it - much like Cheddar is named after Cheddar, England and Pomeranian dogs are named after the Pomerania region of Germany.
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Wow. I bet you're fun at parties. :-D
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I'm much more interested in having fun at parties, not being fun at parties. So they tend to be with smart people who like to know things.
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So I can milk a cat?
Yes and I've got to do it every damned day.
Bloody Harkonnens...
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It also can very much depend on the person. Anybody whose body is screwing up blood glucose in the opposite direction is going to benefit from fruit juice--in fact, it's pretty much what the treatment of preference is for any form of hypoglycemia that hasn't sent you to the hospital. (Hospitals tend to take the more direct approach to raising blood glucose.)
Much to my annoyance, the usual juice recommended for this purpose is orange juice...and I absolutely loathe it.
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Because of the sucrose in oranges I bet. I assume peach juice would have similar effects assuming you can get it.
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Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you
I have another fun fact: blanket statements are stupid. Yeah, even that one.
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You mean like this?
large scale medical study of Americans and fruit or fruit juice intake diabetic risk factors [doi.org]
now stop pretending you have any idea how google or tech works - AND DO YOUR OWN SEARCHES
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And having robots take away the exercise of squeezing it is just making it worse. Calories need to be burned somehow.
Before this sentence i was with you, but if someone wants to burn calories they shouldn't rely on something that is the equivalent of a muscle spasm with respect to burning calories, they should take a (very slow, if recently inactive) jog. Taking this "every little helps" approach to burning calories doesn't help anybody, you need to fuckin break a sweat and slowly build up your endurance to
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Calories need to be burned somehow.
I challenge you to burn more than a calorie when squeezing juice. If your heart rate raises by more than 1bpm for more than 30 seconds you should see a doctor about your fitness.
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Actually, juice is highly correlated with diabetes if done to excess.
Literally everything will make you sick or kill you if done to excess. Remember the toxicologist's saying: "the dose makes the poison".
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Most fruit juice is about 10% sugar, so one large glass of juice (250ml, about 8.5 US fl.oz.) already takes you up to the WHO's daily recommendation of free sugar intake (25g, just under 1oz).
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I don't understand the point you're trying to make, unless it's that eating a piece of taffy is putting your life at risk.
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Well, the "diabetes juice" link they ran on slashdot wasn't juice it was "juice cocktail" which is just non-carbonated soda.
Another popular link by the slashdot anti-juice crowd is the one that shows that processed fructose is even worse than processed sucrose. No doubt true, but the results don't seem to hold for actual juice.
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[citation needed]
go read any of the fine medical journals online, at your public library or university library.
I'm not doing your work for you.
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go. read. the. fine. journals.
seriously, they publish review issues every year or two. I'm not your biochem prof.
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You made the claim you source the info.
If you wrote a paper for your biochem prof and in the sources section you said "google it" you would rightly get a F.
You don't want to back your words up with something, then either shut it or take the gripes about no sources.
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It's well known in the medical community. Go get a degree there.
Re: Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you (Score:5, Informative)
[citation needed]
Citation: Fruit Juice Intake Predicts Increased Adiposity Gain in Children [aappublications.org]
Citation: Reducing childhood obesity by eliminating 100% fruit juice [nih.gov]
Citation: Fruit consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes [bmj.com]
Citation: Intake of Fruit, Vegetables, and Fruit Juices and Risk of Diabetes in Women [nih.gov]
Citation: Soft drink and juice consumption and risk of physician-diagnosed incident type 2 diabetes [nih.gov]
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It's crazy how few people know this. 12 fl oz of orange juice contains slightly more carbohydrates as a can of Coke Classic:
12 fl oz Coke = 36.05
12 fl oz O.J. = 38.4
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
https://www.fatsecret.com/calo... [fatsecret.com]
I'm a Type 1 diabetic, and when I have bouts of hypoglycemia, the Dr. recommends I drink orange juice if I don't have any glucose tablets handy for this very reason.
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+1. We figured this out before having our kid, and boy am I glad we did. He has not developed a real "sweet tooth", no cavities so far, etc. Meanwhile I struggle with hard to kick sugar addiction that I have yet to properly kick.
I remember babysitting a friends kid for a stretch, picking him up from daycare and a box of juice for the ride home was a required step, and the parents thought it was a responsible thing to do (and I knew no better at the time either).
Re: Fun Fact: Juice isn't good for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd list of citations, since 3 of them are re-tellings of the same study which contradicts other past studies in some regards, 1 of them isn't even a study it is just a link about promoting a message of reduced fruit juice consumption, and the other is a study that says if you give fat kids fruit juice they get fatter, and if you give them whole fruit they lose weight. That actually just tells you that those kids are eating too many total calories and the fruit juice had a lot of calories; the rest of their diet was unchanged, after all. It tells you nothing about what happens if you eat the same amount of calories, but some of them were from fruit juice vs something else.
You make it sound like you found 5 studies, but you found 1 study and it relies on self-reporting and it says in the conclusions that participants might have reported fruit "punch" as fruit juice. Regionally in the US "fruit juice" is actually the colloquial name for it even when it is only 5% juice. It was a pretty good study, but other people recalculating the results to generate additional charts is not the same thing as having additional studies that verify the results.
$55k (Score:2)
Re: $55k (Score:4, Funny)
Umm, creimer, is that you?
I'm neither APK nor 110010001000. I'm honored to be the third most recognized name on Slashdot.
Where's your Amazon referral link?
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: How People Make Orange Juice [amzn.to]
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Taking pride in being infamous as an insufferable jackass...
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Taking pride in being infamous as an insufferable jackass.
I want to thank all my trolls, especially the one who posted dick pics of Russian schoolboys with my contact info, for making me Slashdot famous. Also for DreamHost [dreamhost.com] for putting up the extra bandwidth to handle traffic from Slashdot to my websites.
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Why would you value being "famous" on a website that is, in your own words: dying, irrelevant, and no longer worth anything?
I was wrong. It took three months for my trolls to convince me otherwise. I'm here to stay. ;)
Don't try to kid us, tubby, you're a fucking joke.
I'm laughing all the way to the bank.
What did you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It was a stupid and obvious scam to me but then so are many other very successful products. Based on performance of past results, I'm actually surprised it didn't work. Maybe they failed to use the right buzzword formula in their marketing pitch. Maybe they failed to simply grease the right palms. Now I guess we'll never know. But I can tell you one thing for sure; much better thought out, more worthy ideas have completely failed to get any investment at all, but somehow this type of usurious crap keep
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combination of the pricing model of printer toner combined with a predatory monthly app subscription and a keurig.
Not sure who the hell thought people would actually swallow this.
Probably some people who saw the success of the market model of inkjet printers, Netflix, and Keurig.
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Even if the machine had 30 different packets and custom drinks, it's not innovative. That's what Coca Cola Freestyle [wikipedia.org] does, and it has a lot more than 30. I'd be surprised if Coke didn't have some patents they'd be violating.
I am like SO SAD (Score:3)
*shrug* (Score:1)
And nothing of value was lost.
I mean, look at the damn thing. Clearly, this was designed to piggyback on the market that Kuerig is exploiting. The difference is, the Kuerigs (or at least the older models) don't have DRM, don't require Kuerig branded cups, and can do more than coffee. I've seen tea and cocoa K-cups, because basically, the operation is the same - run hot water over contents of K-cup.
This damn thing had a much more limited run of choices, there were no outside brands you could use with it, and
funding? (Score:3)
https://www.crunchbase.com/org... [crunchbase.com]
Burning through $150 million in funding since 2013 ($88000 per DAY including weekends), they might as well have been juicing actual money.
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If you think that is a big number for a manufacturer of both equipment and associated consumables all while struggling to expand your market then your in for a surprise of you ever go into business.
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No of course it isn't.
But if you somehow think that's the place you *should be starting at* with a brand-new idea, brand-new tech, brand-new market, and entirely unproven business model, BEFORE YOU'VE SOLD A SINGLE DEVICE? Well - I guess your investors are either ridiculously optimistic or you're one persuasive son of a bitch.
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brand-new idea
It's not.
brand-new tech
There is no tech.
entirely unproven business model
It's not. Quite the opposite actually, it's a business model that has not only proven itself but has been very lucrative in all the other markets.
brand-new market
You may notice I changed the order of my responses and that's because this one here is very relevant. This is a brand new market. However the business model is highly reliant on the first mover principles. It is also dependent on market saturation to make it economical. It's not a model you can try in some idle corner especially if some o
value != effort (Score:2)
You get people who think that because they slaved away for hours on a painting, essay, cup of coffee or artisinal x,y,z, etc means that they can charge big $$ for it.
If that were true, history
Are They Dumping Them On eBay Yet? (Score:5, Funny)
Can I buy a Juicero on eBay for $50 (shipping included) yet? There are probably things I need to crush, now I'll be set. (Yeah I know I'll have to Arduino the controller.) Yes, I see people trying to recoup their losses by offering their ill-advised purchase for $180 (and up) starting bids on eBay.
But this guy has the right idea selling a "Juicero 2.0" [ebay.com], a hand cranked roller press, which he says (no doubt truthfully) is twice as fast as a Juicero, and costs only $150.
TAM/SAM confusion (Score:2)
TAM for decent fruit/veg juice probably 90% western world.
SAM for this product considering initial outlay and consumables pricing... I doubt it's 1% of all households and businesses.
Very Expensive Hand Squeezed Juice (Score:3)
"You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands."
Which makes for a very expensive $5-$7 cup of juice.
46 oz of V-8 Original is only $2.84.
Perfect for the Museum of Failed Inventions! (Score:2)
The one in Sweden https://idle.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Or the one in Austria http://nation.com.pk/entertain... [nation.com.pk] ?
Proof - Money does not flow to the best ideas (Score:2)
I have a project that I have been working on for years now. I think it is great and has huge potential, yet be
Where will they pivot this to? (Score:2)
I wonder, what can you turn a machine that squeezes small packages? Grape press maybe for making wine? Olive press? I know, peanut butter maker.
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Medicinal pot infused oil press. CA
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One of those things has a vast amount of scientific research and evidence behind it, the others do not. Can you guess which one?
Juicero to announce JuiceCoin Initial coin offer (Score:2)
Pivot pivot pivot. never fail. Squeeze it for everything it's worth.
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