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M2M connected vending machines are expanding the meaning of a point-of-sale transaction with customers. First, M2M connected vending machines know a whole lot more about their customer than ever before. From knowing what custom soda blend each customer prefers, to Redbox's M2M enabled kiosks and iPhone app that let you find a particular movie, vending machines are evolving far beyond the Snickers bar dangling from the 5th-story coil. Japan is on the leading edge of widespread smart vending machine deployment, with more than 4 million in 2010 and an incubator for smart vending machines of the future.

Further, M2M is changing the very nature of the vending machine transaction. E-payment is already widespread in Japan, and can be made both in the form of plastic eMoney cards or a smart phone app. But, in order for this technology to take off elsewhere, security will have to be rock solid and network policy issues will have to be addressed to process both secure data and the vast amounts of unsecure data these M2M connected machines will produce about customer behavior and preference. NEC is at the forefront of trying to solve this problem.  

"Since eMoney has a direct relationship with real money, it is inexcusable for such data to be lost or stolen," NEC notes in a recent whitepaper focused on ePayment and M2M vending machines. "By contrast, for environmental data, the ability to efficiently process enormous amounts of data takes precedence over authenticity. In order to apply the M2M platform to vending machines, it will be necessary to iron out issues such as these."