Yo, technology.

What is it all about?

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.

I am your host, Danny Fortson, the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times.

And this week, I got my car and I traveled to scenic Redwood City.

If you don't know, Silicon Valley, that was a joke.

Redwood City is fine.

I wouldn't call it scenic, but it's a nice little city out here.

But I went there to check out a very intriguing new company called Kana, which is run by chief executive Matt Mahar. And what Kana has created

is really interesting. It's a beverage printer, quote unquote. What do you mean? I hear you say.

So what Kana's done is created a machine that would sit on your kitchen

counter. It's a square, maybe a touch bigger than a large toaster oven. And it's got some very

cool science inside. So what they have figured out is that most drinks, be it coffee, juice,

beer, wine, spirits, sports drinks, tea, whatever, aren't all that different.

Mostly, they're water, obviously.

You know, in many cases, like 99% water.

But what makes them different is maybe that 1% of molecules that differentiate, you know,

green tea from cold brew coffee.

So what they have done is create a machine that has dozens of little wells

filled with all these different kind of key molecular compounds that show up in all the

kinds of drinks that you and I know.

And then obviously also has a big jug of water in there, which is the main ingredient for all this stuff for, you know, green juice or a Manhattan, whatever it may be.

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