Patent Application
20100030354
This invention pertains generally to customized consumable beverage containers.
Silk screening and labeling of containers are both well known in the art. Silk screening is traditionally done by forming a series of screens. Each screen has a surface were by certain areas of the screen are sealed and others are open such that the picture or text intended to be transferred onto a medium is open. Further, each screen will have different patterns of sealed and open areas for different colors. The screen is placed on top of the medium and ink is applied to the screen. By applying pressure to the ink, the ink is forced through the open areas of the screen and onto the medium. The screen is replaced for subsequent colors. Colors are generally applied in order from lightest to darkest.
Also, directly labeling glass containers through the use of silk screening or labeling a paper label and then attaching the label to a container are both common in the art.
The prior art requires a large quantity of bottles be purchased when a custom label is to be applied or custom container developed. Because of the large quantity required, a custom container is prohibitively expensive to the vast majority of consumers and small businesses. Further, the large quantity requirement does not allow customization of containers for individuals, individual events, celebrations, gifts, party favors, product or service launches, souvenirs, etc. Consequently, the custom container market remains out of reach for the vast majority of consumers who would like to enhance their special event and provide their guests a reminder of the event.
The prior art does not disclose applying a screened image, logo, or custom design directly to a plastic container in any color. The prior art only discloses applying a custom label to a sleeve which is then attached to the bottle. This adds additional cost, development time, steps, and waste to the development process.
The prior art's design process is time consuming, complicated, frustrating, and prone to error. The prior art requires either professional design consultants or considerable expertise to develop a fully customized and professional container. If professional design consultants are required, the overall cost of the custom container increases substantially. When coupled with smaller quantity orders (ex. under 250), the per container cost of professional design consultants sky rockets. The considerable expertise required without professional design consultants increases the complexity and time associated with designing a custom container. The general consumer is left with three options: overcome a steep learning curve; have a less then professional final container; or hire professional help.
The prior art does not disclose a complete process whereby a person can design a custom container including: container shape, size, material type, and color; cap shape, size, material type, and color; a customized label; contents; and/or customized packaging and shipping, all through a user friendly interface allowing a consumer, with little or no design experience, to design either a partially or completely custom container.
There is a need for a process that allows a user to easily design a complete custom container including: container size, color, shape, type, and ornamental design; cap size, shape, color, type, and ornamental design; label; contents; decorations or embellishments packaging; and shipping particularly when the user is not a sophisticated consumer or needs smaller quantities of custom containers. For example, a complete custom container for events including: weddings, engagements, birthdays, reunions, product launches, service launches, openings, party favors, births, souvenirs; nightclubs, bars, salons, spas, golf courses, airlines, movie premiers, stadiums, amusement parks; advertising, promotional materials, etc.
The disclosed subject matter includes a design process which accepts a user's unique design parameters, which may include container parameters, label parameters, fill parameters, decoration or embellishment parameters, packaging parameters, and/or shipping parameters and creates the container according to the user's unique design parameters all through a user interface that requires little to no design experience.
These and other aspects of the disclosed subject matter, as well as additional novel features, will be apparent from the description provided herein. The intent of this summary is not to be a comprehensive description of the claimed subject matter, but rather to provide a short overview of some of the subject matter's functionality. Other systems, methods, features and advantages here provided will become apparent to one with skill in the art upon examination of the following FIGUREs and detailed description. It is intended that all such additional systems, methods, features and advantages that are included within this description, be within the scope of the accompanying claims.
The novel features believed characteristic of the invention are set forth in the claims. The invention itself, however, as well as a preferred mode of use, further objectives, and advantages thereof, will best be understood by reference to the following detailed description of an illustrative embodiment when read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, wherein:
Although described with particular reference to containers made of plastic, the claimed subject matter can be implemented in any medium.
Those with skill in the arts will recognize that the disclosed embodiments have relevance to a wide variety of areas in addition to those specific examples described below.
All references, including publications, patent applications, and patents, cited herein are hereby incorporated by reference to the same extent as if each reference were individually and specifically indicated to be incorporated by reference and were set forth in its entirety herein.
A technical advantage of the present invention is allowing a user to design a custom label using an uploaded design, a design interface, or engage an in house designer to design the label. The design interface enables the user to either customize a pre-existing template or make a completely custom label design. Further, the label can be screened directly onto the container.
Another technical advantage of the present invention is allowing a user to easily design a completely custom container including container shape, size, color, material type, decoration or embellishment, contents, packaging, and label as well as cap type, cap material, cap color, cap decorations or embellishments, and cap label through a user interface that provides the user a step-by-step process requiring little to no previous experience.
An additional technical advantage of the present invention is allowing a user to provide parameters to differentiate the user's container from other products/containers by label, container material, color, decoration, container design, cap design, contents (artesian water, spring water, sparkling water, purified water, flavored water, juice, carbonated beverage, etc.), and/or packaging while keeping the quantity of containers required relatively low.
Yet another technical advantage of the present invention is allowing a user to design, or have a design company design, a complete container, have the container made, have decorations or embellishments added to the container, have the container filled with a liquid or semi-liquid substance, have the completed containers packaged, and have the containers delivered, all through a single user interface.
With reference to
Computing system 200 typically includes a variety of computer readable media. Computer readable media can be any available media that can be accessed by the computing system 200 and includes both volatile and nonvolatile media, and removable and non-removable media. By way of example, and not limitation, computer readable media may comprise computer storage media and communication media. Computer storage media includes volatile and nonvolatile, removable and non-removable media implemented in any method or technology for storage of information such as computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules or other data.
Computer memory includes, but is not limited to, RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash memory or other memory technology, CD-ROM, digital versatile disks (DVD) or other optical disk storage, magnetic cassettes, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices, or any other medium which can be used to store the desired information and which can be accessed by the computing system 200.
The system memory 206 includes computer storage media in the form of volatile and/or nonvolatile memory such as read only memory (ROM) 210 and random access memory (RAM) 212. A basic input/output system 214 (BIOS), containing the basic routines that help to transfer information between elements within computing system 200, such as during start-up, is typically stored in ROM 210. RAM 212 typically contains data and/or program modules that are immediately accessible to and/or presently being operated on by processing unit 204. By way of example, and not limitation, an operating system 216, application programs 220, other program modules 220 and program data 222 are shown.
Computing system 200 may also include other removable/non-removable, volatile/nonvolatile computer storage media. By way of example only, a hard disk drive 224 that reads from or writes to non-removable, nonvolatile magnetic media, a magnetic disk drive 226 that reads from or writes to a removable, nonvolatile magnetic disk 228, and an optical disk drive 230 that reads from or writes to a removable, nonvolatile optical disk 232 such as a CD ROM or other optical media could be employed to store the invention of the present embodiment. Other removable/non-removable, volatile/nonvolatile computer storage media that can be used in the exemplary operating environment include, but are not limited to, magnetic tape cassettes, flash memory cards, digital versatile disks, digital video tape, solid state RAM, solid state ROM, and the like. The hard disk drive 224 is typically connected to the system bus 236 through a non-removable memory interface such as interface 234, and magnetic disk drive 226 and optical disk drive 230 are typically connected to the system bus 236 by a removable memory interface, such as interface 238.
The drives and their associated computer storage media, discussed above, provide storage of computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules and other data for the computing system 200. For example, hard disk drive 224 is illustrated as storing operating system 268, application programs 270, other program modules 272 and program data 274. Note that these components can either be the same as or different from operating system 216, application programs 220, other program modules 220, and program data 222. Operating system 268, application programs 270, other program modules 272, and program data 274 are given different numbers hereto illustrates that, at a minimum, they are different copies.
A user may enter commands and information into the computing system 200 through input devices such as a tablet, or electronic digitizer, 240, a microphone 242, a keyboard 244, and pointing device 246, commonly referred to as a mouse, trackball, or touch pad. These and other input devices are often connected to the processing unit 204 through a user input interface 248 that is coupled to the system bus 208, but may be connected by other interface and bus structures, such as a parallel port, game port or a universal serial bus (USB).
A monitor 250 or other type of display device is also connected to the system bus 208 via an interface, such as a video interface 252. The monitor 250 may also be integrated with a touch-screen panel or the like. Note that the monitor and/or touch screen panel can be physically coupled to a housing in which the computing system 200 is incorporated, such as in a tablet-type personal computer. In addition, computers such as the computing system 200 may also include other peripheral output devices such as speakers 254 and printer 256, which may be connected through an output peripheral interface 258 or the like.
Computing system 200 may operate in a networked environment using logical connections to one or more remote computers, such as a remote computing system 260. The remote computing system 260 may be a personal computer, a server, a router, a network PC, a peer device or other common network node, and typically includes many or all of the elements described above relative to the computing system 200, although only a memory storage device 262 has been illustrated. The logical connections depicted include a local area network (LAN) 264 connecting through network interface 276 and a wide area network (WAN) 266 connecting via modem 278, but may also include other networks. Such networking environments are commonplace in offices, enterprise-wide computer networks, intranets and the Internet.
For example, in the present embodiment, the computer system 200 may comprise the source machine from which data is being migrated, and the remote computing system 260 may comprise the destination machine. Note however that source and destination machines need not be connected by a network or any other means, but instead, data may be migrated via any media capable of being written by the source platform and read by the destination platform or platforms.
The central processor operating pursuant to operating system software such as IBM OS/2®, Linux®, UNIX®, Microsoft Windows®, Apple Mac OSX® and other commercially available operating systems provides functionality for the services provided by the present invention. The operating system or systems may reside at a central location or distributed locations (i.e., mirrored or standalone).
Software programs or modules instruct the operating systems to perform tasks such as, but not limited to, facilitating client requests, system maintenance, security, data storage, data backup, data mining, document/report generation and algorithms. The provided functionality may be embodied directly in hardware, in a software module executed by a processor or in any combination of the two.
Furthermore, software operations may be executed, in part or wholly, by one or more servers or a client's system, via hardware, software module or any combination of the two. A software module (program or executable) may reside in RAM memory, flash memory, ROM memory, EPROM memory, EEPROM memory, registers, hard disk, a removable disk, a CD-ROM, DVD, optical disk or any other form of storage medium known in the art. An exemplary storage medium is coupled to the processor such that the processor can read information from, and write information to, the storage medium. In the alternative, the storage medium may be integral to the processor. The processor and the storage medium may also reside in an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The bus may be an optical or conventional bus operating pursuant to various protocols that are well known in the art.
The user design interface 324 option provides the user with several options to assist in the design of the label. These options could include: using a pre-defined template 326 or custom designing a label 336. If the user elects to use a pre-defined template 326, the user would be given the option of selecting from several different pre-made templates 328. After selecting the desired template 328, the user would select and position any text on the template 330. This could include selecting font style, size, color, and/or other aspects as well as positioning the text within the template. Next, the user could select and/or position any graphics 332. This could include selecting graphics, changing the size, color, or other aspects of the graphics from pre-made choices, uploading graphics the user already has or already made, or any combination thereof. Finally, the user would proof the final design 342. If the user elected to custom design 336 the label, the user would start with a blank “canvas” and select, position, and/or upload any desired text 338. This could include selecting font style, size, color, and/or other aspects, uploading text, and/or positioning the text. Next, the user would select, position, and/or upload any desired graphics 340. This could include selecting graphics, changing the size, color, or other aspects of the graphics from pre-made choices, uploading graphics the user already has or already made, or any combination thereof. Finally, the user would proof the final design 342. The finally designed label could then be screened directly onto the “stock” container and/or the custom designed container.
The user could differentiate particular containers through different: container shape, size, color, material, decorations or embellishments, etc.; cap shape, size, color, material, decorations or embellishments, etc.; fill substance; label design; and/or packaging. For example, in a home or office delivery environment it is possible to satisfy each user's desire for specific personalized container and/or types of liquid or semi-liquid substance (artesian water, flavored water, spring water, sparkling water, juice, etc.) available for particular people, employees, or clients by altering the type of liquid or semi-liquid substance, parameters of the container (color, shape, size, material, decorations or embellishments, etc.), altering the parameters of the cap (color, shape, material, decorations or embellishments, etc.), changing the color of the liquid or semi-liquid substance, adding names or other indications on the container or label, or adding decorations or embellishments to the container or label. As an additional illustration, a user could have a red container for artesian water, blue container for sparkling water, and/or a green container for purified water. Further, the user could differentiate particular containers for home or office delivery (ex. have different colors reference different water types at home than at the office).
As a way of illustration, and not of limitation, the present invention could be used for promotions, collectibles, advertising, marketing, customer appreciation, novelties, prizes, charity events, fund raisers, etc. by non-profit companies, private and public companies, individuals, small groups, organizations, etc.
In addition to the above described embodiments, each is intended to include variants for other design options such as: adding three dimensional decorations (e.g. eyes, golf balls, hats, jewels, crystals, buttons, clips, stars, flowers, seasonal items, beads, ribbon, bows, string, etc.); stickers and/or scratchable items (instant win tickets, scratch and win tickets, etc.); blank area suitable for user writing or user sticker attachment; ink and/or decorations that change color or form based on the internal and/or external temperature; ink and/or decorations that change color or form based on the brightness, amount, or type of light (ultraviolet, infrared, black); applying coatings to adjust the visual aspects of the container (frost coating to simulate a cold bottle, pebbled coating to simulate a rough bottle, simulating condensation, coating that changes color or other characteristic based on internal and/or external temperature, coating that changes color or other characteristic based on brightness, amount, or type of light, etc.); physically modifying the container to adjust the visual and/or physical aspects (sand blasting, shallow cuts, etching, burning, sanding, etc.); and different container materials (plastics, glasses, metals, etc.).
