As McDonald's non-functioning ice cream machines became a national punchline, a tech startup company made a device to help get the machines working again.
You'll have no trouble buying burgers at McDonald's. But ice cream? That's another story, as correspondent David Pogue discovered at one franchise's drive-through."I'm sorry," he was told,"we actually don't have any ice cream at the moment."
O'Sullivan showed Pogue a typical error message on a unit like the McDonald's soft-serve machine:"'R BRL > 41F after SL'? Just tell me what BRL means!"Now, just because a machine is down doesn't mean it's actually broken. It might just be going through its mandatory, daily, four-hour pasteurizing sequence.
So, to help with the situation, O'Sullivan and Nelson came up with Kytch, a tiny computer that attaches to the front panel of the soft-serve machine."It decrypts very complicated messages that your typical employee may not understand," Nelson said."So this would say, 'HPR > 41 SL,' what would the Kytch message say that's more helpful than that?"
But unbeknownst to Kytch, Taylor had been developing its own, similar device, and was studying the Kytch to mimic its features. One Taylor executive emailed,"So how can we do the same thing Kytch is doing?"
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