The company was still exploring business models, but knew that collecting and combining data about what, when and where their users were eating could offer invaluable insights to anyone from consumer packaged goods companies (CPG) to mom-and-pop restaurants, CEO Justin Massa told me in an interview last year.

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The company saw growth both in its U.S. and Asian units, and its consumer products group (CPG) which houses its K-cup sales.

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The big global firms certainly have invested in departments focused on brand-building and consumer engagement via the primary social channels (mostly prodded by their forward-thinking, marketing and measurement-driven clients at CPG companies).

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Facing many CPG brands is a movement where consumers are taking more control--there are four diet soda brands in the top 10--and pushing back on conceived notions on what "permission" they should give to brands.

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The import behind that statement is that customers can get on with the business of running a shoe business or a CPG company or a bank and begin withdrawing from the costly, maddening, and ultimately low-value world of evaluating, testing, purchasing, integrating, deploying, monitoring, patching, and babysitting vast swaths of infrastructure and applications and networks and storage.

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Only time will tell how successful its new real-time, big data product will be in capturing the sales and marketing dollars of CPG companies and restaurants from its competitors.

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